Barefoot in Babylon

by Bob Spitz

  “ROOLS FOR TOOLS,” began one entry in the bulletin. “All right you tools, step over to the tool shed and see the Tool Man. Calling all flashlites for a check off.” Another provided an undecipherable instruction for daily crew assignments. “The large benched circle in the field of last night’s circle bong will be the work recruiting center. Please hang there if you are free. We will provide joys and toys.” Romney had dubbed himself Captain of the White Lake Please Department, the Pro-Curer, and vowed: “There isn’t a stone left unturned that I can’t turn over again. Turn those stones, men! Rock on!”

  Their playful buffoonery made it difficult for anyone to take umbrage with the Hog Farm’s glaring incompetence as laborers. “They were fun to have around,” Jay Drevers admitted, “but they were a royal pain in the ass, too.” Drevers’s biggest headache was keeping them away from the heavy equipment his men used to build the stage. “They played on that machinery the way little babies cavort on tricycles, riding around on giant forklifts until they ran out of gas. Then, instead of telling anyone, they’d simply abandon the machine in the middle of the field and take off. Once, after I’d screamed bloody murder about bringing back what they took, they filled all the gasoline vehicles with diesel fuel and filled the diesel engines with gas. That did it. I gave the crew orders to throw hammers at the Hog Farmers anytime we caught one of them stealing into the construction trailer. By the end of the second week in August, we wouldn’t let them within fifty feet of our stage area.”

  From the beginning, complaints about the Hog Farm rained down upon production executives with growing fervor. “They’ve all got dysentery, man,” a stagehand declared, visibly sickened by their abject neglect of sanitary conditions. “We’re not going near those fuckers until they clean up their act.” Romney was asked to restrict his followers to the use of specially marked portable toilets so as not to endanger the staff’s health, but after a while, the appeals were ignored.

  Under Goldstein’s direction, the campgrounds, located on a moss-covered incline several hundred yards behind and to the left of the stage, had gotten off to a fairly good start. A contingent of Hog Farm members, in one of their more productive moods, drove a backhoe into the area and carved a huge drainage ditch into a level plot of the land, which they lined with rocks, filled with water from one of Chris Langhart’s wells, and transformed into an inchoate bath-and-shower facility. Tepees were erected on either end of the campgrounds like goalposts; tents with floors were set up in between them and graded for drawing off rain seepage.

  On the basis of a poll of ticket outlets, the promoters had learned that, of the 65,000 tickets already sold, about 85 percent were for the entire weekend’s festivities. That meant they had to be prepared for a minimum of 55,000 campers vying for space, more probably 100,000. Several Hog Farmers cleared little nestlike compartments in the woods where they estimated another 2,000 people could set up a tent. More land, however, would be needed to provide lodging for the troops, and word was sent to Joel Rosenman, advising him to start buying up surrounding property as fast as he could.

  Another group built knotty-pine frames for what were to become the Free Kitchen, a puppet theatre, a Free Stage, and a fourth medical facility—Big Pink (so named for the ghastly prominent blot it made on the green horizon)—which would provide shelter for those on bad trips.

  The readying of the Free Kitchen was supervised by Bonnie Jean Romney who, each afternoon, assembled the Hog Farm women on the lawn in front of the dome to discuss menus and provisions. The entire kitchen, they decided, would be made up of five individual serving booths. Four units were designed so that there was sufficient counter space on three sides of the stand and an oak cutting shelf in the middle where the cold dishes and vegetables would be prepared. The open, back ends could then be usefully barricaded with bulging burlap sacks of wheat, corn, rolled oats, nuts, and other popular dry goods, allowing enough room for helpers to squeeze by on their way to the garbage compactors hidden in the woods. The fifth booth was twice the size of the others in order to make room for the five single-burner stoves, five pressure cookers, two sinks, and bank of hot water tanks used for boiling vegetables and a variety of blended beverages.

  There was an organized effort by the Hog Farmers to serve only macrobiotic food at the festival—seaweed, dandelion, kelp, watercress, and unpolished brown rice (“enough to wipe out the entire healthy U.S. Olympic Team,” according to a New York dietician), but it proved to be too great an undertaking for even the heady Hog Farm. That was quickly forsaken in favor of a well-balanced, nutritious selection of organic foods capable of being mass produced on a shoestring.

  Gallons of unsweetened yogurt, thousands of eggs, and several hundred pounds of powdered milk were ordered from the local farmers, as was a great percentage of the fruit and vegetables. Stan Goldstein handed the Hog Farm an envelope containing $6,500 in cash, and two of their scavengers went on a four-day shopping spree of lower Manhattan’s wholesale staple outlets.

  They brought back a pickup truck loaded with a cross-section of supplies varied enough to confound even the most diversified restaurateurs. Twenty-five pounds of coconuts, 100 pounds of blanched peanuts, 150 pounds of sunflower seeds, ten 100-pound sacks of rolled oats, 100 pounds of wheat germ, 100 pounds of turbinado sugar, fifty 100-pound bags of bulgar wheat, seventy-five 25-pound boxes of currants, 30,000 paper plates, 2,300 pairs of chopsticks, 28,000 plastic spoons, an unusual assortment of serving utensils and condiment dispensers, and, not the least bit out of place in such a culinary conundrum, 200 onyx Buddhas. “Now I understand why they’re called the Hog Farm,” jibed one of the younger boys as he unpacked the groceries. “Who, in their right mind, is gonna touch any of this shit?”

  It would later be said that no mass of humanity in history had ever been so well fed and well cared for as were those who practiced survival on Max Yasgur’s farm. That claim, in essence, was undeniably true, in spite of the rumors of a dire food shortage or rampant injuries which, for years to come, echoed throughout sensational media accounts of the festival. However hypocritical the Hog Farmers appeared to their critics, however selfish their intentions or inexcusable their duplicity, they came prepared for the holocaust.

  • • •

  For the most part, the hippies, in the best interests of brotherhood, left their Hog Farm co-workers to themselves. As soon as work was finished for the day, the groups parted company, consciously washing their hands of one another until morning when their mutual goal made avoidance impossible.

  Little was known about the individuals who belonged to the commune. They valued their anonymity, hiding behind aliases like Baba, Goose, Calico, Red Dog, and Gandalf, and it was generally assumed, although incorrectly, that they were empty headed and illiterate. Stan Goldstein, who grew to know them intimately and became a trusted friend, found that many of them were fugitives from universities and corporations. Two had been practicing attorneys who had become disillusioned with the law’s due process and opted for anarchy, another had been a government physicist who saw no future for the modern world and dropped out. They had tasted success, found its price tag too high, and took off in search of inner peace. Others were refugees from the Movement’s ruins; when the various student organizations fell apart, they ran up against an emotional void that needed to be filled and found what they needed buried deep within the Hog Farm’s protective custody. Much like any other cult through the ages, they provided their members with a sense of belonging and, in an abstract way, a sense of order. The rest of the family gave purpose to their fuzzy existences. They depended on one another for survival, and, as one Hog Farmer jokingly admitted, for their sanity.

  To the ordinary hippie at work on the festival, whose lifestyle was a watered-down version of the commune’s, the childish conduct of the Hog Farm was of only marginal interest. They were easily ignored, and what little damage they did could be corrected without causing anyone too much inconvenie
nce. They would be gone in a few weeks, anyway. For now, the work was progressing well on schedule. It looked to most of the staff that there would, indeed, be a Woodstock festival, morale was high, and August 15 was approaching much too rapidly for them to be distracted by anything else.

  5

  The one determining factor over which they had no control, and which could conceivably foil the festival’s groundwork, was the weather. Everyone depended on the customary midsummer climate, the temperate breezes, dazzling skies, natural fragrances, the fresh, clear exhilaration of working outdoors, to carry them through August on a bed of roses. There was that unfaltering, blind confidence about the weather that one came to expect from the hippies. It rained eighteen out of the twenty-two days before the festival. Not simply intermittent showers, but steady, driving downpours that lasted five and ten hours at a time before taking the briefest of intermissions.

  The newspapers and weathermen called the precipitation “a curious irregularity in the atmosphere,” but there were few who wished it would end. Farmers cheered as their crops flourished. The parched metropolitan areas were rescued from earlier drought as reservoirs were replenished. Fire companies relaxed for the first time in months, no longer fearful of brushfires streaking through the baked mountain forests. Fishermen extolled. It was a good time for prosperity. Only in White Lake, or, more accurately, in the half-readied segment of Max Yasgur’s farm, did anyone languish in the rainy weather.

  Each morning, as the sky prophesied another inclement spell, several hundred hopefuls waded through the flooded gullies in front of the production trailers, praying they’d be selected for one of that day’s crew assignments. Clusters of itinerant workers were interviewed between nine and ten o’clock by either Chris Langhart, Chip Monck, or Steve Cohen, to determine the extent of their skills, and then redirected to other areas around the site that were in various stages of development.

  “Any of you guys ever welded before?” A few hands always responded to the challenge, even if they had never laid eyes on a welding gun before. “How about power? Do you know anything about electricity? Have any of you ever worked on heavy construction crews? Do we have any plumbers in this gang?” Those who were ultimately chosen were issued ponchos, a felt hat, and gloves, and led off in the morning mist to where they were lectured on the type of labor to be done and left to work.

  The rest of the staff went about their tasks as best they could, considering the weather.

  There was, to begin with, a need for administrative organization that would keep everything running at optimum strength. Not much had been done to bring the unrefined land up to date in terms of technology. One of the most difficult installations, in this respect, was the engaging of telephone lines in and around the production area. Someone had contacted the phone company as soon as their lease was signed and requested ten lines be put in backstage, six for each of the trailers, six in the security office, and one hundred pay phones scattered around the concession area. The person who took the order was dumbfounded and not only refused to believe there was a customer in need of that many lines in Max’s farmyard but doubted the festival’s ability to pay for that kind of service. An offer of cash and a sizeable retainer to insure payment of accounts was politely put off and the company said that they would call back within a few days.

  They never did.

  Luckily, Chris Langhart had a friend named Tom Grimm who was an executive with Ohio Bell and he was flown in to accelerate the somewhat sensitive situation. Grimm said that the phone company representative who had filed away the order probably did not fully understand the urgency or the complexity of the job; someone, namely himself, had to lay it out for them in specific terms.

  Once Grimm had identified himself as a phone company employee who had been retained by Woodstock Ventures as a special consultant, previously locked doors were flung open with an almost despicable willingness to please. Certainly Mr. Grimm could have those lines as requested, a salesman assured him, but it would take a good six weeks to two months to put them in working order. Manpower had been severely depleted, their crews were all working overtime on account of the rain, and cable was in short supply.

  No one is quite sure what Tom Grimm said or did to convince the phone company that time was of the essence. Langhart suspected Grimm contacted a friend at the Public Service Commission “to give them a little boot in the ass.” John Morris heard a story that Grimm made an unannounced inspection of the phone company’s facilities in White Lake, found “forty-eight violations of standard operating procedure,” and “urged” them to lend him a hand in getting Woodstock Ventures their phone equipment.

  No matter what really happened, the next morning, eight telephone crews showed up at the site with cable wire shipped in from as far off as Canada, and began banging up lines all the way down the road to the center of Bethel.

  By the end of the day, there was a total of fifty-three men at work on the festival’s communications network, not including the office personnel who arranged billing, cleared circuits, and assigned them sequential exchanges. Any reference to a six-week or two-month hiatus had been dismissed as bureaucratic nonsense. It had been proved that even hip capitalism could play by the Establishment’s rules, and, within seventy-two hours, phones were ringing from every end of the site to everyone’s complete satisfaction.

  A week of uninterrupted rainfall had turned the site into what one crew member likened to a “hog wallow.”

  Much of the work around the concession area slowed to a crawl. Stage and lighting crews dodged the storms in an attempt to sink the concrete footings for their respective platforms. The fence gangs had momentary success driving posts along the boundary line; pretty soon, the metal standards sagged, then gave way in the syrupy dirt and had to be recovered from underneath layers of slime before they disappeared completely. No one, it seemed, was making any headway.

  Two recently built roads—one behind the stage and another leading into the site from Hurd Road—were temporarily closed to all vehicles. Their unpaved surfaces became quicksand to anything weighing over three hundred pounds, and several times a day, Ken Van Loan’s tow trucks had to free staff cars and dune buggies from the bog.

  The meteorologists hadn’t provided much hope either. The five-day forecast read like an angler’s dream: More rain with little chance of clearing. It was a bad situation growing worse.

  Mel Lawrence spent the time in his trailer up on the hill reconfirming sanitation and garbage maintenance for the festival with three independent contractors. In Wallkill, he had negotiated a deal with the Port-O-San Corporation for 252 “standard” portable toilets, which would be serviced by a fleet of five trucks and men at a cost of $21,578. That had seemed quite sufficient to see them through the weekend. But as reports of booming ticket sales streamed in, Lawrence agonized over their health provisions and placed a matching order with Johnny-On-The-Spot, which added an unforeseen $21,630 to his skyrocketing budget. He hoped the 500 toilets would suffice, as both companies had been cleaned out of their stock and there wasn’t a company within 200 miles capable of bailing them out with more.

  By comparison, garbage collection was a steal. Lawrence had run across a man named Charles Macaluso, from New York Carting, who presented him with a sensible plan for keeping the area clean. For a mere $12,720, Macaluso proposed to install two stationary compactors (which he claimed were the largest in the state) in the woods. They would be supplemented by a mobile compactor, several maintenance vehicles, 300 recepticle stands, and 20,000 paper-can bags. New York Carting would also store and transport all solid wastes out of the immediate area. In return, Lawrence was to furnish Macaluso’s men with thirty supervisors who, at the end of each day, would organize a clean-up detail. Drawing a labor force from a contingent of non-ticket holders, admitted on good faith by Wes Pomeroy, they’d roam the site, remove and staple the one-way bags, and fling them into the jaws of the mobile compactor
that trailed behind them. When that was completed, they’d insert an empty bag in its place and the entire process would carry over to the next day.

  It was a well-conceived plan and might have worked, at that—had the crowd been amenable to clearing the amphitheatre after each day’s show ended or was manageable enough to allow a truck to get through. As it was, only a small percentage of the garbage bags were retrieved, with the lion’s share left to roast beneath the torrid sun.

  Lawrence was also disturbed over their wavering rapport with Max Yasgur. Each day, Max arrived in the production trailer with a typed inventory of his ruined land for which he wanted them to make full restitution. “I don’t want to interfere with your work, boys, but this wholesale demolition of my land has got to stop.” Mel commiserated with the farmer and agreed to lend him a crew of hippies to help take in the hay or cut the tall stalks of alfalfa that surrounded the stage. “Oh, my cows!” Max grieved. “Look what they’re doing now! What’s going to be done about this?”

  Lawrence felt that Yasgur had begun to regret his involvement with Woodstock Ventures. The further they got into production, the more frequently Max would come by the site to examine his land. He’d stand to one side of the action, hands on his hips, shaking his head in consternation as the work progressed.