by Michael Lang
The Road to Woodstock
Michael Lang with Holly George-Warren
For my wife Tamara and my children, LariAnn, Shala,
Molly, Harry, and Laszlo, who fill my life with love.
And for my parents, Harry and Sylvia.
From a certain point onward there
is no longer any turning back.
That is the point that must be reached.
—KAFKA
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue
One Brooklyn
Two The Grove
Three Woodstock, New York
Four Wallkill
Five New York City
Six Downtown
Seven Yasgur’s Farm
Photographic Insert I
Eight Bethel
Nine August 13–14, 1969
Three Days of Peace and Music
Ten August 15, 1969
Photographic Insert II
Eleven August 16, 1969
Twelve August 17, 1969
Photographic Insert III
Thirteen The Aftermath
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Where Are They Now?
The Music: Woodstock’s Complete Set Lists
Sources
Searchable Terms
About the Authors
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
It’s 10 A.M., Monday, August 18, 1969: Jimi Hendrix is playing to a crowd of forty thousand. Another half million or so have left during the night. Many had to be at work; others had to return to worried families who’d heard conflicting reports about the chaos at Woodstock. As I watch from the stage, I see more and more people wandering away. Jimi notices too, and says, “You can leave if you want to. We’re just jamming, that’s all. You can leave, or you can clap.” He looks up at the streaks of sun pouring through the clouds—some of the first rays we’ve seen in a while. “The sky church is still here, as you can see,” he murmurs.
Those of us gathered around the perimeter of the stage are trans-fixed by Jimi and his band of gypsies. They’ve been up all night, or maybe longer—like many of us, who haven’t slept more than a few hours in days. Jimi, dirt under his fingernails, still looking regal in his white fringed leather shirt. Teenaged percussionist Gerry Velez, dripping in sweat, thrashing the congas in a frenzy. Juma Sultan, shaking maracas and pounding out percussion with mallets, a dervish in purple. Jimi’s old army buddies: guitarist Larry Lee, wearing a green fringed scarf as a headdress that covers his eyes, and Billy Cox, Jimi’s steadfast anchor on bass, his head swathed in a multicolored turban. And the phenomenal Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, in nearly constant motion.
Jimi apologizes for stopping to tune between songs: “Only cowboys stay in tune,” he says with a laugh. One minute Jimi’s joking with the audience, calling out to a “girl in yellow underpants” whom he tangled with the night before; next he’s directing the band with a glance, an expression, a wave of the hand; then he’s lost in the riff—his guitar taking him to places unknown. Back again, focusing on the small but enthusiastic crowd, Jimi addresses us with empathy and appreciation: “Y’all’ve got a lot of patience—three days’ worth! You have proven to the world what can happen with a little bit of love and understanding and sounds!”
We are about to be “experienced” in something that will be unique in our lifetime: from “Voodoo Child” he veers into the melody of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Billy Cox and Larry Lee stand erect, as if at attention. As Jimi builds the song, adding feedback and distortion, I am carried away just as is everyone around me. I realize the national anthem will never be the same. Jimi has plugged into our collective experience: all the emotional turmoil and confusion we have felt as young Americans growing up in the sixties pours from the sound towers. His song takes us to the battlefield, where we feel the rockets and bombs exploding around us; to demonstrations and marches, confronting police and angry citizens. It’s a powerful rebuke of the war, of racial and social inequity, and a wake-up call to fix the things that are broken in our society.
Listening to Jimi takes me back to a tiny nightclub in Manhattan’s East Village where, as a sixteen-year-old Brooklyn kid, I watched John Coltrane play his horn. He took me on a trip, and like Hendrix, he was a revelation.
This whole journey—the festival and the road to it—has been marked by moments like these. What feels like a lifetime of near misses, small victories powered by an engine of committed and tireless individuals, serious optimism, and amazing ideas culminated in three days unlike any the world has seen before. I flash on Joan Baez standing in the rain, pregnant, just enjoying the moment; Jerry Garcia, hanging out at the free stage, sharing a joint with kids he’s never met before; the lightning that split the skies at night; the Hog Farm passing out cups of granola to the folks entrenched at the foot of the stage, unwilling to leave their spots; Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonizing at 3:30 A.M. on “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” the song that floored me months earlier and led me to book the then-unknown band; Pete Townshend knocking Abbie Hoffman in the head with his guitar; Sly Stone and his Family leading the entire congregation in an amazing call and response that left everyone higher.
Looking out at what’s left of the audience, I see a lot of tired faces, the hard-core fans and those who just don’t want to leave, ever.
I cross the stage and go over the footbridge to our trailer compound. I want a few minutes alone before dealing with the aftermath of this incredible weekend. I’ve slept a total of about six hours over the last four days and I’m starting to feel it.
My partners, John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, and Artie Kornfeld, have left for the city. I realize I have not seen and barely heard from Joel and John all weekend and wonder how things were for them. I know how things went for Artie. When he realized there was no way to keep an ocean of people from washing over the fences, that the tens of thousands coming to our little party were not going to buy tickets, Artie experienced a moment of panic. But he soon recovered, and between getting dosed with LSD, escorting artists onstage, and trying to convince them to be filmed, Artie had the time of his life.
It was the time of all our lives.
For me, Woodstock was a test of whether people of our generation really believed in one another and the world we were struggling to create. How would we do when we were in charge? Could we live as the peaceful community we envisioned? I’d hoped we could. From the beginning, I believed that if we did our job right and from the heart, prepared the ground and set the right tone, people would reveal their higher selves and create something amazing.
Woodstock came to symbolize our solidarity. That’s what meant the most to me—the connection to one another felt by all of us who worked on the festival, all those who came to it, and the millions who couldn’t be there but were touched by it. Over that August weekend, during a very tumultuous time in our country, we showed the best of ourselves, and in the process created the kind of society we all aspired to, even if only for a brief moment. The time was right, the place was right, the spirit was right, and we were right. What resulted was a celebration and confirmation of our humanity—one of the few instances in history, to my knowledge, when joy became big news.
On Max Yasgur’s six hundred acres, everyone dropped their defenses and became a huge extended family. Joining together, getting into the music and each other, being part of so many people when calamity struck—the traffic jams, the rainstorms—was a life-changing experience. None of the problems damaged our spirit. In fact, they drew us closer. We recognized one another for what we were at the core, as brothers and sisters, and we embraced one another in that knowledg
e. We shared everything, we applauded everyone, we survived together.
Jimi finishes his set, and I leave my trailer and get on my bike to ride to the top of the bowl. It’s a BSA Victor, notoriously difficult to start, but this morning it fires up on the first crank. As I ride through what has become a sea of mud, the smell of the recently deserted “city” rises up strong and fetid. When I crest the hill, I can see the crew clearing Jimi’s gear and hundreds of people beginning to clean the devastated field of debris. The stage, where the beyond-exhausted crew is coiling cords and packing equipment, stands against a background of mottled brown. A huge expanse of white canvas flies above it in the wind, like some great sail ripped from its mast. It reminds me of the ship to never-never land. It has carried all of us through the greatest adventures and safely home again. Off in the distance, the lake that has been the source of most of our drinking water is visibly lower. Farther back on the surrounding hills, streams of people are leaving the campgrounds and moving toward their journey’s end. Behind me, the concession stands are abandoned and stripped bare. Sanitation trucks and honeywagons are making their way up the now-passable roads, beginning to approach the site. The woods off to my left across Hurd Road still flash with colorful bits of cloth and paint from the markets that sprang up there.
I kill the engine and park myself in the remnants of a shredded lawn chair, surrounded by a muddied bedroll, a broken sandal, and a squashed canteen. Thinking back over the long weekend, I understand that we have all been tested, and we were not found wanting.
It was a strange, sometimes magical trip that led us here. Hundreds of people joined me on this odyssey and worked tirelessly, moving forward against what at times seemed like impossible odds.
I’m not sure where we will go from here. There will be financial problems and the fractured partnership of Woodstock Ventures needs attention—but for now, it’s enough that Woodstock has happened.
Looking down the hill, I remember the moment on Friday when Richie Havens, a beacon of strength in his orange dashiki, hit the stage. He was the first act, simply because he and his band were there and ready. As we were coming over the bridge, there was a look of amazement and then a flash of fear in his eyes as he took in the unbelievably immense crowd—what looked like miles and miles of people.
“We’re just coming home,” I said.
Woodstock was an opportunity, a moment, a home we had all been waiting for and working toward. When Richie started singing, rhythmically attacking his acoustic guitar like it was a talking drum, I knew for the first time that we were going to be okay. The show was on and we were off and running. Everything we had been through for the past ten months had led to that moment, and I was overcome with joy.
Suddenly someone pulls up behind me in a pickup truck and I snap out of my reverie. “Michael! Artie just called and they need you down at Wall Street—pronto!”
one
BROOKLYN
Sitting in the dark, smoky Five Spot club on the Bowery, in lower Manhattan, I watch John Coltrane travel out to the edge with his music. There is no net. He’s trying to see where it all goes—letting it happen to him, his sax following what’s inside him. He doesn’t worry about where the music takes him or what’s ahead. Knowing there’s danger there, yet somehow it’s going to be okay, that there’s something incredibly exciting about being out there on that edge: It’s the place to be. For me, as a sixteen-year-old kid from Brooklyn, this is a totally new concept. The idea of not having to stay within a form or follow the rules, but to improvise, work from internal inspiration, will serve as my own noninstruction instruction book.
Growing up in Bensonhurst in the late forties and fifties, I was surrounded by Jewish and Italian families. My parents, Harry and Sylvia Lang, were of Eastern European descent, and we lived modestly, like other middle-class families in the neighborhood. My father ran his own business, Lang Engineering, installing heating systems, and my mother kept the books. He was an inventor, and in his youth, my father designed a ballast system for navy submarines and a system to remove pollutants from smoke generated by coal-burning power plants. I always felt he would have led a really adventurous life if my older sister, Iris, and I hadn’t come along.
My father always taught me to be self-reliant. That was his thing—just take care of it, no matter what. Early on, he gave me a strategy for getting out of tough situations: Take charge and keep moving; step back just enough to think clearly; and trust your instincts. That’s how he dealt with things, and this would serve me well.
From the very beginning, my parents took on side ventures, with varying degrees of success, the coolest of which was a Latin nightclub on the Upper West Side called the Spotlight Club. In the 1950s, the mambo was king and musicians from Puerto Rico and Cuba drew big crowds. The Spotlight Club was a long, dark room with a bar spanning one wall, a large dance floor in the back, and a bandstand at the end of the bar. During the day, the interior looked pretty sad, but at night it was all sparkle and glamour. Downstairs, a huge basement ran the length of the place, and there the great bandleader Tito Puente stored some of his drums. Known as El Rey, he popularized the Latin music that would become known as salsa. I was only eleven or twelve and had just started playing drums myself when I met El Rey at the Spotlight Club. Handsome, with jet black hair, he encouraged me to play and even let me pound out a few rhythms on his set. In those years, one of his most popular numbers was “Oye Como Va”—which, a decade later, would become a hit for Santana after they performed at Woodstock.
The early rock and roll that emerged when I was a kid—Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”—made a big impression on me, as did the movie Blackboard Jungle, which introduced the song. Street-corner harmonizing was popular around my neighborhood, and I played stickball with a fantastic doo-wop singer who lived down the block.
The only one in my family to play an instrument, I was twelve when I joined a rock and roll band. It meant lugging my drum kit up endless flights of steps to perform at glamorous hot spots like the Jewish Community House on Bay Parkway. But it gave me a glimpse of the thrill that comes from connecting through music. I also played drums in the school band at Sethlow Junior High. Marching and uniforms were not for me, though. The first time I paraded with the school band on St. Patrick’s Day, down Fifth Avenue, I took a quick left turn on Sixtieth Street and never looked back. That was my first and last parade.
Every summer, I’d go to camp in Sullivan County, ninety miles north of New York City, in the Catskill Mountains. I liked being out in nature, especially on horseback. My last year of camp, when I was eleven, I convinced a lazy stable hand to let me tend the horses and take campers on trail rides for him. He gave me a gorgeous paint named Bobby for the summer. Riding him bareback at a full gallop was the epitome of freedom. That summer, I also had my first-ever sexual encounter, in the barn with one of the counselors-in-training.
In the winter, our family would road-trip to Miami and in the fall head north to Canada, catching the changing of the leaves along the way. My parents loved taking Iris and me on these long drives. I shared my father’s love of driving and he started showing me the ropes when I was ten or eleven. The day I got my learner’s permit, he took me to Midtown Manhattan and made me drive home to Brooklyn through insane traffic. Soon after passing the driver’s test, I bought a motorcycle. I was a little nuts. I’d lie down on the seat, which cuts the wind resistance, then open it up on the Belt Parkway. After a couple of years, I stopped riding on the street because I knew I’d kill myself, but the rush I got from racing was like an out-of-body experience, and it was a feeling I was always trying to recapture.
Not long after I turned fourteen, my friend Irwin Schloss and I tried pot for the first time. His older brother, Marty, who’s now a radical rabbi in Israel (Marty bar-mitzvahed one of Bob Dylan’s sons in the eighties), ran the Cauldron, a funky macrobiotic restaurant in the East Village that was way ah
ead of its time. Marty influenced us quite a bit. He was into Eastern philosophy, leading a very bohemian life, and one day he gave Irwin some pot. At that point, marijuana had already become associated with jazz musicians and the Beats but was not in the public eye. Irwin and I first lit up on a fall afternoon at Sethlow Park, just outside our junior high school. I actually remember my very first joint: It was rolled on yellow papers, and after the joint was lit, the marijuana seeds inside kept popping. This was long before hydroponics and the elimination of seeds.
At first I didn’t get high. Marty had explained to Irwin how to inhale and hold it in. I don’t recall how many tries before I finally did get high, but when it happened, I laughed for what seemed like hours. It was sort of “Ah, now I get it!” Irwin and I would get high and listen to music. We’d laugh and then we’d want to eat. Experimenting with pot, and later LSD, would take me further than any motorcycle or car I ever owned.
On weekends, I started buying nickel bags of marijuana, sold in little brown envelopes. I would hang out in my room, tune in to radio station WJZ on Friday nights, and listen to Symphony Sid, who turned me on to Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Celia Cruz. Sitting next to my open window, I’d light up a joint and exhale into the alley. I loved listening to jazz while stoned. Some nights, Symphony Sid would put out the word that he was getting sleepy and issue an invitation for listeners to stop by the station if they had something to keep him awake. He was eventually fired from WJZ after a marijuana bust.