Barefoot in Babylon

by Bob Spitz

  The crew’s morale, in fact, needed the least boosting of all. After they moved from Rosenberg’s into a motel called the Red Top, a few miles away from the site, a unique, communal social structure unfolded which instilled in them the kind of noble temptation necessary to view every predicament with high hopes and self-assurance. Everything to them was “beautiful” and “far out”; if they were being “fucked over by the Establishment” as the newspapers claimed, it was because certain “uptight individuals hadn’t yet learned how to express feelings of love and brotherhood.” They were the Family of Man, the last, best hope for peace and the forebears of civilized society.

  The Woodstock family in Wallkill now numbered over seventy hippies and was growing by tens and twenties every day. Most of the late arrivals had heard about the “fabulous festival in the country” from friends or in underground newspapers and were tempted by the cultural dictate of Total Involvement. Hans Toch, the noted psychologist, in a Nation article entitled “The Last Word on Hippies,” attributed their “unfettered freedom and unconditional reward” to their being spoiled. “It insures that the world view from the crib will last undisturbed through sobering experiences that usually overlay infancy with the veneers of civilization.” But the hordes of roving children who wandered into the field offices weren’t looking to be pampered or reimbursed for their time. They volunteered to work, to help out, to run errands—anything that, in some small way, would further the great festival and increase the hippie’s providence.

  Many of them had come from as far off as Texas and New Mexico in search of “a place to fit in,” and they were welcomed aboard with open arms. Some were draft resisters on the move who knew they wouldn’t be betrayed, others were runaways or dropouts. Mostly, however, they were happy and young, between the ages of fifteen and twenty, with wholesome, angelic faces and serene dispositions. After they answered a few routine questions about why they wanted to join the festival team, one of the executive staff members would take down some general information about them for payroll purposes—name, address, social security number (Roberts and Rosenman’s accountants had insisted upon that), age, emergency reference—and introduce them around until they felt at home. After a reasonable grace period not usually lasting more than a day or two—during which time they hung around the Red Top, got high with the other kids, exchanged stories about travel and trauma (the latter most certainly about their run-ins with law enforcement officials)—they were asked to join one of the field crews and get to work. No one took advantage of the festival’s cordiality; everyone participated in the physical labor according to his ability and, for the most part, without complaint.

  As much as they had attempted to abolish traditional role playing in the crew’s quarters, family members were assigned specific domestic tasks for which they were directly responsible. They all had their “old lady” or “old man” to whom they “swore” allegiance. There were strictly enforced territorial rights in the motel established by various couples to assure them of privacy in their relationships. Within a week after they had moved in, the Red Top resembled the epitome of organized, denominational society, hippie-style.

  Those who chose not to work on one of the field crews were asked to cook, do the shopping, run errands, or keep the area clean. Michael made sure that all out-of-pocket expenses were assumed by Woodstock Ventures and gave Mel Lawrence, Penny Stallings, Lee Mackler, or one of the other executives enough cash each week to keep a well-stocked pantry. Whatever money was left over was spent on provisions or put to some other use like clothing or dope. If one of the kids needed new blue jeans or a T-shirt, all he had to do was to inform the designated supply agent on his way into town and enough petty cash would be put aside for it. Windbreakers, blankets, sleeping bags, “everything up to and including Tampax was supplied by the expense fund.”

  A routine unfolded from the daily chores. Each morning, a designated person would get up at sunrise and wake the staff cook. Once breakfast preparations were under way, they would knock on each bedroom or car door, making sure that everyone got out of the sack with enough time left to eat breakfast and hitch a ride out to the site. Fraternization between most crew members was standard fare and subject to change on an almost daily basis (unless small children or one on the way dictated otherwise, and even then, propriety was often overlooked). It was always a game for the wake-up brigade to guess who had spent the night with whom as casual sex was neither frowned upon nor refused (although during the poison ivy epidemic relations were somewhat diminished by incompatible rashes). Breakfast, cooked by two teen-age girls, consisted of eggs prepared a different way each morning, every dry cereal on the market, hot oatmeal, an array of fruit juices, coffee, and tea. Milk and fruit were staples at every meal as they were readily accessible from one of the many dairy and produce farms in the area.

  As soon as everyone left for the site, the two cooks, Carol and Linda, washed the utensils and went shopping. Their trek to the supermarket about a mile and a half down the road rarely went unattended by the local police force. Halfway there, the girls would invariably be pulled over to the side of the road, where they would be ordered out of the car, told to put their hands on top of their heads, and frisked—including Linda, who was six months pregnant. Their car was habitually ransacked by state troopers who ripped out the back seat cushions and tore wiring from underneath the dashboard in an attempt to find a hidden cache of drugs. Nothing was ever found, nor was an arrest recorded in the police blotter concerning the festival staff over the two-month period, but it was the sheriff’s own little way of warning the crew against making a wrong or suspicious move in his territory.

  Between noon and one o’clock each day, work stopped for lunch. Carol and Linda prepared several hundred tuna fish and egg-salad sandwiches in the late mornings and brought them to the site, whereupon assistants would take them out to the various crews. Dinners consisted of hearty dishes—roast beef, stews, turkey, with plenty of mashed potatoes and rice to supplement the strenuous work they did during the days. Occasionally, the diet varied with the crew’s mood. A wave of experimental vegetarianism washed away any romantic illusion the staff had about not eating meat. Another faction of workers flirted with the notion that they were the living incarnation of western desperadoes. “We want grits!” they demanded quite abruptly, sitting down to dinner in full cowboy regalia. Carol, the cook for that evening’s meal, started to laugh. Before her very eyes sat a contingent of middle-class suburban kids whose childhood fantasies of being Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy had finally gotten the better of them. The next day, she served them heaping platters of a mush substance they had never seen before. “This stuff tastes like shit!” one of them complained, propping his spurred boots on the table. “What is it?” Why, it was grits, she replied. Isn’t that the cowboy’s favorite dish? “We’re not gonna eat that shit. Bring us some real food.” The deal she made with them, of course, was that they take off their silly Halloween costumes and become hippies again before she brought them real food.

  After dinner most of the kids went into town or stayed around the motel playing shuffleboard and watching television. Many of the local Middletown teen-agers—those who had quietly begun dropping acid or smoking dope in their bedrooms—would spend their evenings at the Red Top begging the festival staff to tell them what was really going on in “the outside world.” They treated crew members like gods and goddesses and promised to talk their parents into keeping the festival in their home town. Each night after dinner, the staff would retire to a local dealer’s bus where they got high and made love. No one could have asked for more; no one thought there was more to life than that.

  The festival women spent their afternoons at the Red Top doing laundry and tending to an endless procession of cuts and bruises that disabled their men. Each morning Mel Lawrence sketched out what he wanted done that day and sent the crews into the field nodding aimlessly while he disappeared into the barn. Before long
, one boy mowed off his toe, and another lost a finger trying to operate an unwieldy chain saw. Someone in need of medical attention (it occurred to such an extent that a system of immediate treatment had to be devised) would be tossed into the back seat of a rented station wagon and transported to the lobby of the Red Top where one of the girls, notified by phone of the emergency, would sew him up with as much surgical expertise as the patient had demonstrated with the heavy machinery. Before anyone knew that an accident had occurred, the kid would be back on the job.

  The only group with any operational expertise whatsoever was the art crew. By the last week in June, they had maneuvered three tractors back and forth across the site, mowing the tall grass and plowing the underbrush free of debris, until Mills Heights looked like a neatly manicured ball field. Large clefts of the orchard were cleared for the installation of additional sculpture and an area where the playground would be constructed was tilled with backhoes and trenchers. Lawrence had hired a subordinate crew of youngsters to assist the artists with incidental grooming efforts. One morning, after a walking inspection of the site, he sent them crawling across the land to pick up rocks, twigs, rotten apples, and anything else that might interfere with the crowd’s sitting there comfortably on a blanket. During Pomeroy’s security meeting, the crowd’s comfort had been equated with its capacity to remain tranquil and orderly throughout the event, and every facet of production, right down to the contour of the land, was being taken into consideration to insure a motionless, unencumbered atmosphere. The campgrounds were segregated from the rest of the site by a single line of trees and left virtually untouched. Their sculpture awaited Stan Goldstein’s direction, and he was still tied up with petty administrative functions that had to be resolved before he could be present at the site. The area designated for concessions, too, was left unfinished as its landscape would be greatly influenced by whatever firm was eventually brought in to oversee its operation.

  The only other headway made concerned aesthetic enhancement of the grounds. Bill Ward had arrived at a decision concerning the festival’s decorations, which he hoped would reflect the artists’ understanding of the Catskill environment. He and Jean spent a lot of their spare time driving around the country roads studying the farmland architecture and, in particular, old wooden barns. Wherever they went, they noticed old tractors and other barnyard fixtures—case plows, cultivators, balers, and hayrakes—neglected and rusting in heaps behind the barns. The Wards regarded them as antiques and began making the farmers lucrative offers for the useless scrap. They purchased a number of ancient John Deere tractors, planters with unique cast iron flanges, and a variety of metal wheels on which were imprinted legends of ancient companies; these were randomly scattered around the festival site in place of the originally planned metal scuptures. If the kids tired of listening to the music, Bill Ward contended, they could always entertain themselves by climbing over the ornamental machinery or use them as bleachers.

  “We are such stuff as dreams are made of,” Shakespeare had written almost three hundred and fifty years before the first hippie ever set foot in Orange County. Psychedelic reveries had replaced some of the dreams, but everything else had pretty much remained the same. The seeds of ingenuity planted many months before had sprouted roots whose potential knew no bounds, and with a scant six weeks left until the festival finally burst forth, only the stone-cold wall of reality stood in its way.

  2

  The Hog Farm had rolled their bus out of New York City heading west back in April. Their now familiar cry of: “The United States, driver, and step on it!” as they cruised through the Lincoln Tunnel drew a curtain of uncertainty across the odds of their honoring their commitment. For all anyone knew, they were on their way to the outer reaches of civilization with just enough gas and money left to get them there. Stanley Goldstein was worried about their turning up in time to be of any use to him, and justifiably so.

  Goldstein’s presentiment had to do with his own credibility, not theirs. When he last discussed the Hog Farm’s participation with Hugh Romney, he had been purposely vague about tying them to any sort of binding agreement so as not to come on too strongly. Unfortunately, he might have underplayed his hand. In an attempt to appear only mildly concerned about the business aspect of their arrangement, he had failed to mention to them anything about time schedules, supplies, cash advances to transport them to the site, and a hundred other significant matters of interest to each party.

  The last Goldstein had heard, the itinerant commune was temporarily settled on the Tesuque (pronounced: Teh-soo-kee) Indian Reservation in Aspen Meadows, New Mexico, where they planned to celebrate the summer solstice before heading back east (or west or . . . ). Because of the inchoate living conditions there, it was virtually impossible to contact anyone on the reservation. He could send them a letter or put in a personal appearance, the latter of which required making an expeditionary drive into the wilderness hours from any major city. Nonetheless, a large portion of the festival’s success hinged on their complete participation in it, and a few days’ sacrifice would be worth the peace of mind. The most logical way of reinstating himself in their good graces, Goldstein decided, was for him to make an unannounced run out to New Mexico, and he easily convinced Lang that Woodstock Ventures should foot the bill for his trip.

  Before he left, Goldstein discussed his impending visit with Wes Pomeroy. Together, they reexamined the purpose of having the commune take part in the festival and slowly created a distinct area of supervision for which the Hog Farm would be directly responsible. Pomeroy made a salient point of reminding Goldstein that they were not to think they were being transported halfway across the country simply to provide atmosphere for a gathering of middle-class hippies. If anything, they were being counted on to help prepare the land, establish and supply provisions for a free kitchen capable of feeding one hundred thousand kids in an emergency situation, lend their knowledge of the effect of psychedelic drugs to help administer first aid to the expected overflow of bad trips and narcotics overdoses, and help the clean-up crew restore the land to its natural condition after the festival was over. The failure of the Hog Farm to take any one of those crucial areas seriously could result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars and, possibly, lives.

  Pomeroy called a man named James Grant, the executive director of the New Mexico Governor’s Crime Commission, who agreed to meet Goldstein in Albequerque on June 21 and navigate the trip the rest of the way. Together, they would spend the weekend with the Hog Farm and file individual reports on their findings, which would then be reviewed by Wes. That way, the police chief would be afforded two observations of the Hog Farm’s potential from divergent personalities and would better know how to work them into his security plan.

  Goldstein flew to New Mexico on Friday, June 20. He met Jim Grant at the airport and began the journey that would take them high into the Pueblos and on toward Aspen Meadows.

  He had been forewarned that if he failed to evince at least a modicum of unassailable authority, be it the elucidation of their duties in Wallkill or, at best, an airtight plan for bringing them to New York, the Hog Farmers would treat him like a simpleton. They’d behave much like incorrigible inmates of an asylum for the duration of Goldstein’s visit as if to mirror the absurdity of their heretofore welcome guest. One’s self-esteem could be obliterated with a single wrong word.

  No one walked away without being undone by them in some way or another. But the supreme mistake one could make, the fatal error and, at the same time, the tip-off to their double-faced personality, was to assume they didn’t take themselves seriously. That would swiftly eliminate any chance of a relationship with them. In fact, members of the Hog Farm considered their cause the ne plus ultra, a faultless existence devoid of life’s authoritarian impurities. Nor did they much care how their actions affected those with whom they came into contact. The Hog Farmers masqueraded among their own (or anybody they could get to
accept their harebrained stories) as educators of “the psychic consciousness.” More aptly, they were a self-seeking band of opportunists more interested in filling their pockets than other people’s minds. If after having been shunned, one persisted in chasing after them, they often became hateful, nasty instigators and, if provoked, vengeful. Theirs was a game of only winning combinations. Goldstein knew about the falsehearted pledges they made to their employers, had weighed their worth to the festival, and was prepared to gamble—again.

  The Hog Farm was unprepared for Goldstein’s unannounced arrival. It was as though he was a spectre who had mysteriously emerged from out of their not-too-distant past, and he was, thus, greeted with mild shock and apprehension. Hugh Romney had attached little relevance to Goldstein’s pitch in New York. Romney was used to hearing all sorts of wonderful offers from promoters in need of assistance who never delivered on their word. One such impresario with an impressive office and even more attractive offer had pledged one hundred thousand dollars to the Hog Farm’s favorite charity (themselves) if they agreed to supervise a show he was putting together. After spending months acquiring a staff and traveling one thousand miles to get there in time, they found that the show had been cancelled and their benefactor had disappeared. When Romney had asked Lang how he intended to get the Hog Farm from New Mexico to New York, Michael had casually replied, “Well, we’ll just get ourselves a plane and pick you up there.” Riiight! Romney thought; it was just as he had suspected all along: the old soft-shoe, and from that moment on, he simply tuned them out. Goldstein was henceforth regarded by him as another in the succession of “long-haired charlatans pimping for big business.” Stan’s flying to Aspen Meadows, however, augured in them a long-suppressed expression of faith that affected members of the Hog Farm almost as sincerely as a cash deposit. This time, they assured him, they would listen to his offer more carefully.