Barefoot in Babylon

by Bob Spitz

  Luckily, Tri-Co had access to radio-equipped vehicles that, for ten cents a mile, would compose the Mobile Security Patrol. In addition to walkie-talkies, each car would be manned by a festival staff member who’d work in tandem with a representative from the club. The ground force would be outfitted with two-channel crystal handkie-talkies connected to the Communications Command Center trailer. Puff suggested they use sixty-four such radios, which Woodstock Ventures would have to purchase from one of three member retailers for $120 per unit.

  Tri-Co agreed to take care of all of the preparations so that when they arrived for work, they’d be ready to go. They requested that Mel Lawrence have a trailer prepared prior to Friday, August 8, so they’d be able to commence with the installation and testing of equipment on the ninth. The rest would depend on the crowd.

  Like Pomeroy, Ganoung, and Fabbri, Peter Goodrich spent the second week in July hopping from one corporate boardroom to another trying to convince a fast-food concern to handle concessions at the festival. The legalities behind Woodstock Ventures operating a public kitchen by themselves proved too complicated indeed, so Goodrich had been dispatched to discuss some form of limited partnership with the leading Manhattan-based vendors. He had a relatively easy time making appointments with executives from Restaurant Associates, the Harry M. Stevens Company (who fed hundreds of thousands of sports enthusiasts weekly at places like Madison Square Garden, and Shea and Yankee stadiums), Chock Full ’o Nuts, and Nathan’s Famous. His plan was to listen to their sales talk, perhaps sample a menu of their wares, and award the account to the company willing to part with the greatest share of the profits. The prerequisite was that a company be able to provide a diverse bill of fare that was simple to prepare, and inexpensive. Goodrich wasn’t looking for anything fancy, just a hearty combination of the usual concert grub: hamburgers, Cokes, possibly corn on the cob, potato chips—it didn’t have to be nutritious, just filling. The size of the crowd demanded that they be able to produce a quick turnover so no one spent two out of the three days in line waiting to get a drink. That didn’t seem like a difficult request. Goodrich expected the vendors would jump at the chance to get in on lucrative action like that.

  He was therefore stunned by the indifference with which his proposal was greeted. Here he thought he was dangling a multimillion-dollar plum in front of their eyes—the opportunity to feed a captive audience for three days without the slightest hint of competition. And, yet, the reply that most commonly followed his explanation of the festival was: “We’d rather not be bothered.” Of the four food powers he approached, only Nathan’s indicated passing interest in handling the refreshment stands, and that was only if the promoters agreed to certain requirements beforehand. Their most emphatic stipulation was that Woodstock Ventures provide them with the services of three hundred auxiliary firemen to feed the estimated one hundred thousand people a day. If that could be arranged, they’d be willing to turn the negotiations over to their lawyers who would prepare the necessary papers.

  Goodrich forlornly explained the situation to Michael Lang and urged him to grab Nathan’s offer before they changed their mind. It had nothing to do with profits, he noted, and there is some doubt that Goodrich even got around to discussing finances with the hot dog wholesalers. His advise was based strictly on availability. Nathan’s was the only game in town, it was as simple as that.

  Michael found Goodrich’s evaluation a little hard to believe. He, nonetheless, told him to go ahead with the deal. Six weeks didn’t leave them with a helluva lot of time to shop around. Besides, there was a peculiar charm to having Nathan’s cater the festival’s concessions. The company had more or less been associated with local New York amusement parks since anyone could remember, a bright, happy yellow logo plastered on every boardwalk and beachfront sign. And Woodstock represented the future of teen-age entertainment. The more Lang thought about it, the more Nathan’s was perfect for the festival’s image. Simple food—the people’s food: hot dogs and orange drink. It was made in heaven.

  The cosmic illusion, however, went right on past the people in Wallkill. When Goodrich approached the Middletown Fire Department to enlist their help, he was politely, but firmly, turned down. The firemen unanimously voted against the offer, objecting to the long hours they were expected to work (from 6:30 P.M. to 4:30 A.M.) and to the wages offered (a measly $1.75 an hour—they could earn more sitting around the firehouse playing cards). Nathan’s, in turn, cancelled the deal.

  The food situation was mounting into a serious problem for the promoters. They realized that without a professional concessionaire in their employ, they’d never be granted a permit from the town board, the health inspector, or any other agency empowered to wield the ax. The companies that remained in the Yellow Pages who claimed they could “cater any affair” had dwindled into a handful of second-rate appetizer brokers with a fleet of pickup trucks and three cheerful assistants.

  Goodrich became panicked. His former sophisticated, wily manner turned sour and abrupt. His schemes became vengeful instead of manipulative and humorous. A great many of his phone calls to inquire about a fast-food chain’s potential ended in shouting. He had to come up with a company in a matter of days, before they applied for the permit, and that did not look possible.

  Lang put an end to his friend’s despair. Pulling Goodrich aside in the downtown production office one afternoon, he suggested to Peter that he forget about trying to hire a professional for the job and work on another angle. “Put somebody in business,” he said. Michael’s proposition was to find a few people with a flair for organization, to pass them off as experts and work them into the overall scheme as concessionaires. After all, how hard could it possibly be to buy supplies, cook the food, slap it onto a plate and ring up sales? There must be hundreds of capable people willing to give it a try.

  It is difficult to determine whether or not a plan to skim a percentage of the profits off the top of such an arrangement was discussed; however, there is evidence that Goodrich certainly gave it a try. For the moment, though, it appeared as though their problems were over. The town board could be held at bay long enough for him to work out some kind of package deal; if he had to, Michael would allege a tentative agreement with one of the national food corporations, which he could later say fell through. But the important thing was for Goodrich to find a syndicate to front the refreshment interests, and the Miami art hustler had just the right gang in mind.

  • • •

  By July 9, it looked to John Roberts as though their position in Wallkill was rapidly deteriorating. The night before, Pomeroy and Ganoung had met with the town fire advisory board in the Silver Lake Firehouse to discuss the festival’s fire protection needs. That meeting, like the others before it, was interrupted by protesters whose insults carried a sinister undercurrent of vigilantism. Nor was its administrative outcome any more promising. Instead of evaluating the festival’s requirements and coming to an informal arrangement, the advisory board decided not to act on the promoters’ fire plans until it was asked to do so by the town board under the new local law. Roberts understood the implications of such a decision: the advisory board would not commit themselves without a permit, and a permit would not be given them without first having fire protection services.

  That same morning, Joel opened a letter addressed to the Woodstock Music Company from the Town of Shawangunk in upstate New York. Margaret Y. Tremper, the deputy town clerk, had written to bring to their attention an oversight on their part in publicizing the festival’s location.

  “Gentlemen,” she began, “I wish to inform you that the incorrect address used by you in your advertising for the Aquarian Exposition has caused considerable confusion and created a nuisance in our community. The address given on your brochure is Wallkill, New York, which is a small town in Ulster County not remotely connected with the place in Orange County where your exposition is to be held.” Mrs. Tremper was concerned that thousa
nds of hippies would arrive on their doorstep on the morning of August 15 searching for the festival. She “strongly suggested” that the promoters correct their advertising to avoid “further confusion to all concerned.”

  Joel checked an atlas. Running a magnifying glass across the northern region of New York State, he came upon what he knew he would find all along: Wallkill, New York, population 1,215, smack in the middle of Ulster County. It was a good twenty-five miles from their own site. It took only a short telephone call to discover that they had been incorrectly using Wallkill, New York, as an address for the festival. It was Wallkill, all right, but it had to be clearly represented on posters and in ads as Town of Wallkill, Orange County, otherwise it was improperly labeled.

  Their logical reaction to the letter was to call Miles Lourie and discuss its legal implications in light of the advertising having already gone out. Could they be held responsible for any inconvenience in Ulster County’s Wallkill should some disgruntled hippies express their indignation at not being in the right place by lobbing a few pop bottles through an authentic Wallkill window? Would they have to make good on unused tickets should some of their prospective audience wander farther upstate than they should have? These were all questions that had to be answered before they corrected the inaccuracy; as an attorney himself, Joel knew that, often in a legal action, the most damage was done to one side’s position by its impulsive endeavor to admit blame. The seat of the problem, however, was their reluctance to give Lourie a call. John Roberts was of the opinion that Miles “had become a pain in the ass” during the past few weeks. By calling him, Roberts felt they would only be leaving themselves wide open for one of the lawyer’s self-aggrandizing lectures. They liked Miles and wanted to avoid another bitter confrontation with him at all costs and hoped that the problem would solve itself.

  It did. The next afternoon, a messenger arrived at their door with an envelope containing Miles Lourie’s resignation as counsel for Woodstock Ventures. It was a courteous, dignified letter to the four partners, explaining in rather vague terms his sense of being slighted by their recent appointment of Paul Marshall as additional counsel for the festival. The final straw had been Marshall’s assignment to represent Woodstock Ventures at the temporary injunction in Newburgh on Friday—an action Lourie clearly interpreted as a lack of faith in his ability. “Paul has requested that I continue to work with him on this and, subject to your approval, I will be reviewing whatever papers he prepares to defend the motion and to give whatever advice I can,” he wrote. In fact, the two attorneys had met in a coffee shop across from Marshall’s office a few days previous to Lourie’s formal withdrawal, to iron out professional differences over who was officially representing Woodstock Ventures. “Don’t be a schmuck,” Marshall claims to have told his colleague, “there’s a fortune to be made in legal fees from this festival—plenty for the both of us without squabbling.” But, for Miles Lourie, it was also a matter of pride. He had put the principals together, offered them his office as their own headquarters before the corporation had been established, and sweated with them over each preliminary decision in giving the festival substance. He had an emotional stake in their enterprise that, he felt, should not be compromised. Making his position clear to his former clients, he spelled out his future involvement in no uncertain terms. “Inasmuch as I was not consulted concerning this [injunction] until the last moment and inasmuch as it is my opinion that a lawsuit should be handled by one attorney primarily, I don’t think I should do any more than I have indicated above.”

  Miles Lourie had become Woodstock Ventures’ first casualty. In the five months since the company’s synergistic beginnings, several of its visionaries had come to near-blows and survived the test of brotherhood. Words had been exchanged, philosophies had been assaulted, goals had been reexamined, and associations had been damned. No one, however, had suffered more than a mindful slap on the wrist until Lourie departed. And while no one was willing to admit it, his leaving had a pronounced effect on their spiritual objective for it had broken the unbreakable bond of unity and served as a warning that all was not peace and love in hippieland.

  6

  “Goodrich has found us some food cats.” Michael Lang was his old jubilant self as he waited on the other end of the line for John Roberts’s reaction.

  “Well, great. That’s really good news, Michael. Who are they?”

  Lang said that he wasn’t sure, he didn’t know them personally. Goodrich, however, had assured him only yesterday that “they’re heavy.”

  Heavy—oh shit, that was always a sure sign of trouble. Roberts prayed that they were not the three men he and Goodrich had spoken about some weeks back. During a moment of seemingly honest revelation (a moment that Roberts felt represented the only truthful exchange in their short relationship), Goodrich had told him, “I have these three guys that I know we can use in a pinch. I’d prefer not to do that if we don’t have to, but if we can’t get ahold of Restaurant Associates or Stevens or one of the others to come in with us, we can go with this group.”

  “This is bullshit,” Roberts had remarked. “Here it is the end of June, and we have no food concessionaires. It’s just insane. I can’t risk waiting much longer. How are these guys?”

  Goodrich was uncommonly candid. “They’re fine—I just can’t stand them personally.”

  Roberts had defensively put that discussion out of his mind, so convinced was he that it was only a matter of time before vendors would be beating down their door in an attempt to land the account. Now, having experienced a dozen or more rejections from the major food concerns, he had a sneaking premonition that the worst had happened, that they had hit rock bottom and he was about to be introduced to Goodrich’s three stooges.

  “The thing is,” Michael went on, “we gotta close the deal with them fast—like tomorrow. They need bread, and they’ve gotta get started.” He had taken the liberty of arranging a meeting at Paul Marshall’s office on the morning of July 10. Peter Goodrich would meet him there to make the proper introductions. As Joel was tied up with festival advertising and publicity, Roberts reluctantly agreed to attend alone.

  At precisely 10:30 the next morning, Roberts found himself being squired into Marshall’s dark, mahogany office, a room so regally furnished that John thought it befitted a distinguished Supreme Court justice. Besides their newly appointed lawyer and Peter Goodrich (who looked apprehensive), four other men were settled into various armchairs positioned around the room. They were fleetingly introduced to him as Charles Baxter, Jeffrey Joerger, and Lee Howard—the partners of a new corporation called Food For Love—and Stephen Weingrad, their attorney.

  Roberts’s head was still spinning from the swift and scrambled presentation of these men. The whole thing had happened so quickly that he had missed the imparting of their credentials. All he had left to go on were appearance, and he did not like what he saw. The three men looked no more like fast-food executives than Michael and Artie, and perhaps it was that resemblance that bothered him most of all. Baxter, tall and spare, bore a strong resemblance to Ichabod Crane. He was young, somewhere in his late twenties, and Roberts would later learn that his experience had been limited to selling souvenirs at the New York World’s Fair and managing a Gimbel’s toy department. Joerger looked like a suburban roughneck. He, too, was young, although somewhat shorter than Baxter, and had long dark hair that was combed over to one side of his head. Joerger was dressed in faded jeans and a T-shirt, his usual work garb, for he had interrupted his routine, selling antiques in the Village, to attend the conference. Howard was the shortest member of the isosceles triangle, whose quill-like long hair provided a comic relief to his dumpy, short-legged physique. He owned and operated a small film rehearsal hall in the Village and was known to run with a tough crowd. Together, they looked like the characters in a Rodo-Boulanger lithograph and had about as much collective experience operating a restaurant facility as a coffee shop cash
ier. Roberts had a sinking feeling that he was up against another one of Goodrich’s schemes.

  Weingrad, their nattily dressed lawyer, barreled into the meeting with a plethora of revealing information. From what Roberts could gather, Goodrich had committed the festival’s concessions to Food For Love as many as three weeks beforehand. Joerger, acting upon what he thought to be a firm deal, worked out provisioning with a line of suppliers and was now in need of about seventy-five thousand dollars to assure him of delivery in time for the festival. Food For Love, however, had no means of financing such an arrangement. Goodrich had implied that Roberts would underwrite their fledgling operation. It smelled to both Marshall and Roberts like cronyism of the worst kind.

  It was, in fact, Charles Baxter who had first approached Goodrich about being given the food concession. He had wandered into the downtown production office in late June, got what he thought was a vote of confidence from Lang’s henchman, and set out in search of suitable partners to finance him along. Somewhere along the line, both Joerger and Howard represented to him that they could put up the money. Baxter’s previous relationship with them was professional, and even then, spotty; he’d rented furniture from Joerger’s store and had been involved in photographic “shoots” at Howard’s studio. But he desperately needed their backing. By the time he discovered their pots were as empty as his, they had formed a formal partnership, Joerger had done a great deal of comparative pricing on food, and Howard had arrived at a cloying name for their new company to ingratiate them with the hippie promoters: Food For Love. None of the partners liked the name, but they agreed on its underlying purpose. The only one left to convince was Peter Goodrich, and that was easier than they had imagined it would be. Goodrich told them right out: “I’ll make sure you get it if you take care of me.” A price was set that everyone thought was respectable for his consideration— $10,000—and Goodrich passed their names on to Lang as frontrunners in the concession competition. Considering there was no one else in line for the job, they stood to capture the purse.