by Michael Lang
Having lost my deposit and rent on the South Miami shop, I had expended all my funds. I called my parents and told them I needed a loan, and they agreed with no questions asked. My father arranged for my uncle Sam, my mother’s brother who lived in Miami, to give me $3,500, which my father would reimburse. Sam was beside himself—he could not believe my father was doing this: “What are you, crazy? A head shop?”
This time, before opening, I applied for and received a license to operate a “gift shop.” Bob West helped Ellen and me with the store in the beginning. The shop had five rooms, where we displayed our merchandise: glass cases filled with all kinds of smoking paraphernalia, including a variety of rolling papers, Turkish hookahs, and exotic pipes. The poster market had exploded in 1966 and we plastered the walls and ceilings with black-and-white posters of pop-culture icons like the Marx Brothers, Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Lenny Bruce. In addition to Peter Max’s posters, we carried the San Francisco artists who created the fantastic handbills for the Fillmore and Family Dog shows. Beaded curtains hung in front of open doorways, and in some rooms strobe lights flickered and black lights glowed, adding a purple hue. We played records nonstop—the Beatles, the Stones, the Mothers of Invention, Dylan, the Byrds. On weekends we did great business. Friday nights were party time, and we’d stay open until midnight. The shop became the gathering place for a growing counterculture in Miami.
When the store was closed, we’d go sailing or hang out at various friends’ places, cook, listen to music, and get high. I’d bought an old VW van, which was perfect for cruising around the Grove. The safari front windows would open out, and we’d take midnight mystical excursions. We would drop acid, get really stoned, and head out to the water or the electric power plant and watch the lights.
I continued to use acid as a tool to explore. An educational experience, it expanded my awareness, and I found a very clear spiritual path. I liked taking people on trips and guiding them. I’d play certain records to create a musical journey. In the beginning, it was jazz albums; then it became the great Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
Eventually, things fell apart between Ellen and me, and she moved back to New York. After a few months, I started seeing Sonya Michael, a local artist. She was a beautiful blonde and in her late twenties. Sonya shared a painting studio with another artist and musician named Don Keider. DK, who played vibes and drums, eventually would be the link between me and my future Woodstock partner Artie Kornfeld. Sonya, DK, and I started a poster company together called Sodo (short for Sonya and Don) Posters. They created gorgeous artwork for black-light posters with names like “Speed,” “Lucy in the Sky,” “Mushroom Mountain,” and “The Trip.” They sold well and we began shipping them to other head shops around the country.
A real scene developed around the shop, and in 1967 an underground newspaper called the Libertarian Watchdog set up operations in the back of the store. It didn’t take long for the cops to come around. The police had been hassling me for a while, giving my customers tickets for the slightest things, like jaywalking. It got even worse after the shop and I were featured on a local TV news special called “Marijuana in Miami.” An exposé on youthful drug use in Dade County, it aired on June 13, 1967. They filmed at my shop, and, looking about sixteen on camera, I explained how some of our merchandise could help recreate a psychedelic experience. Some of the pot-smoking interviewees were darkly lit to protect their identities. But I felt we were spearheading a movement in the South, and I wanted to let people know about the shop and what we had to offer.
Soon the shop had a squad of motorcycle cops all its own. They would park on our corner every Friday and Saturday night, writing whatever tickets they could and, whenever possible, arresting me. This went on for several months and after a while I became pretty good friends with several of them. These were decent guys, about my age, and eventually their curiosity got the better of them and we began to talk. One of them, “Bob the Cop,” would later show up to work at Woodstock.
The local politicos became intent on putting a stop to the use of grass, and they hatched a plan for a massive bust all over Coconut Grove. Thanks to a friend who worked in the attorney general’s office, we found out about their plans well in advance, including a search-warrant list of about ninety names and addresses. My shop wasn’t on it, but it included my house on Twenty-seventh Avenue, where I’d hosted the occasional party.
At the time, I had already made plans to move into a house in the lushly tropical South Grove, where the air is heavy with the scent of jasmine. I’d rented a beautiful Spanish-style adobe house there owned by an old Southern aristocrat named Mary Whitlock. By the time of the massive sweep, I’d moved everything into my new place, except for a few items I’d left behind to “entertain” the cops the night of the planned bust: When they arrived at my Twenty-seventh Avenue address, warrant in hand, they found a record player blasting music and strobe lights flashing nonstop.
We had gotten word to others on the warrant list too, so everyone’s houses were free of contraband, and no one was around to be served with a warrant. While dozens of cop cars bivouacked in the Florida Pharmacy parking lot to head out for a night of arrests, we were all cycling along the streets of Coconut Grove. It was the Keystone Cops rather than Dragnet: As a line of police cars raced through the Grove in one direction, an equal number of long-haired cyclists would whiz past them, going the opposite way. They managed to arrest only the two or three people who didn’t get the message.
With the Head Shop South becoming the hub of the Miami underground, I focused on bringing more music to the area. Everyone wanted to see the bands whose albums we were listening to. The first be-in, featuring the Grateful Dead, had taken place in January ’67 at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and soon be-ins were occurring in New York’s Central Park too. I organized a gathering of the tribes for our own little park in the Grove. Some local bands performed, and we got a good turnout. People with acoustic guitars sat around and played; incense and smoke filled the air.
Most of the touring bands from New York and California played a large rock club in Miami called Thee Image. The biggest acts performed at Dinner Key Auditorium, located in what was originally a Pan Am seaplane hangar on the waterfront in the Grove. That venue would later ban rock bands, after Jim Morrison was arrested for allegedly exposing himself onstage during a Doors concert there in March ’69. In late 1967, I started promoting a few shows at an outdoor amphitheater on Key Biscayne. The acts included Ravi Shankar, who’d been a sensation at the Monterey Pop Festival in June. I looked for interesting places to hold concerts, including the Seminole Indian reservation in the Everglades, where you could smoke pot without being hassled by the police. I met with tribal elders to discuss the possibility. They liked the idea, but we couldn’t work out the timing.
Anyone involved in the underground—from Timothy Leary to Jerry Garcia—would stop by my shop when in Miami. One December day, Paul Krassner, the publisher of The Realist, dropped in. I’d met him in New York a couple of years before when I took his class “From Mickey Mouse to the Green Berets” at the New School for Social Research. With him was Captain America himself, Abbie Hoffman. Abbie introduced himself and we connected right away. He had a great sense of humor and was committed to spreading the counterculture and infiltrating the mainstream. He and Paul dreamed up the Yippies, or Youth International Party, while they were hanging out in the Keys. Abbie and I would cross paths again in New York, and he’d eventually play an important role at Woodstock.
ABBIE HOFFMAN: I first met Michael Lang about a year before [Woodstock]. He was running a paraphernalia shop in Coconut Grove. After a speech down there, I hung around a few more days because it was warm and I was writing Revolution for the Hell of It…He told me that he had this idea—a floating, free idea—for a festival. It seemed like a little head-shop owner from Coconut Grove might be having a reverie but wouldn’t have th
e actual vision to put together something like, well, what I think is the greatest cultural event of the century. But he did.
Another intriguing scene in Miami surrounded the Seaquarium, home to the various bottlenose dolphins that played Flipper on the weekly TV show. Their trainer, Richard O’Barry, would become a pioneer in animal rights. A sort of mystic when it came to dolphins, Ric had become aware of dolphins’ intelligence and their desire to communicate. After Cathy, one of the dolphins that played Flipper, became depressed and “committed suicide,” Ric had an epiphany. Realizing that it was inhumane to hold dolphins captive in tanks, he began a lifelong crusade to free them. Ric and Fred Neil became close friends, and Fred was convinced he could communicate with dolphins through music. Many of Fred’s friends came to Coconut Grove to hang out with Fred and the dolphins.
RIC O’BARRY: I remember watching Fred with his head under the water with bubbles coming out all around, trying to sing to the dolphins underwater. He would also play his twelve-string guitar. The dolphins would come up and tap the guitar when he played certain chords. Fred always said it was the tone that attracted them. He would bring his friends to play music for the dolphins—Joni Mitchell, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, David Crosby, and several other far-out people. People were wondering what all these longhairs were doing, tripping around the grounds.
Ric and I were neighbors and became friends. Inspired by what had happened the year before at Monterey, we decided to put on Florida’s first-ever music festival. We wanted to present a diverse lineup in an outdoor setting over the course of multiple days, much like Monterey. My kitchen became our office and we formed a partnership called Joint Productions, along with a drummer named James Baron and my friend and attorney Barry Taran. In April, after the Grateful Dead played three nights at Thee Image, the club’s owner, a slightly shady character named Marshall Brevitz, called to say he wanted in on the festival too.
We looked for sites and chose Gulfstream Race Track, in neighboring Hallandale. Ringed with palm trees, it was one of South Florida’s oldest horse-racing tracks, the site of the Florida Derby, and had a mile-long dirt track and a grass infield, as well as grandstands for seating. We came to an agreement with the Gulfstream management just as racing season ended in late April. Marshall Brevitz could put up his end of the money only if we held the concert within three weeks, so we picked May 18 and 19 as the dates. He suggested I see Hector Morales, a booking agent at William Morris in New York, so I flew north to meet him.
“You want to put on a show of that size in three weeks?” Hector repeated when I explained that I wanted to sign six or seven big-name artists to perform for an audience of twenty-five thousand. “You’re nuts!” But as we talked a while longer, I convinced him to help. We managed to sign an impressive roster of talent: John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, the Mothers of Invention (led by Frank Zappa), Blue Cheer, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix had been touring the United States that spring and this would be a last-minute final show. We rounded out the bill with some local groups: a Latin-tinged pop-rock band from Tampa, the Blues Image; a Miami free-jazz combo, the Charles Austin Group; and a garage band called the Evil.
We had to scramble for sound equipment and staging. Because of the time crunch, I decided on flatbed trucks that could be rolled onto the racetrack. The idea was to create a series of three separate stages lined up so we could rotate setting up and breaking down equipment. That way, one band could quickly follow the next.
For sound, we turned to Miami’s venerable Criteria Studio, then known mainly for recording jazz and R & B artists but where the Grateful Dead had just cut a few songs. It was the major recording studio in the South at the time and would later become famous as the studio responsible for Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach. DK introduced me to Criteria’s recording engineer Stanley Goldstein—who not only helped us pull this off but would become a major player in putting together the team for Woodstock. Ric and I met with Stan at Criteria to determine what we’d need for the festival.
We lucked out in that Mack Emerman, head of Criteria, trusted us with their equipment and gave Stan the green light to work on the festival. Stan’s ability to improvise impressed me. A quick study, he was not afraid to try something new. I also met Bob Dacey, a filmmaker willing to shoot the festival on spec. With the lineup finalized just days before the festival, we didn’t have much time for promotion. We quickly created a few versions of festival posters, some featuring a portrait of Hendrix, to distribute around town. Tickets cost $5, with an afternoon and evening show slated for both Saturday and Sunday. We also rented out booths to various vendors to sell assorted psychedelia.
My father came down the day before the festival opened, and I took him out to the track and explained what we were up to. He soon got to the bottom line: “How do you think you guys will do financially?” he asked. I answered by pointing over to the betting windows. We both laughed.
May 18 was magical. About twenty-five thousand people turned out and settled on blankets in the grass or perched on the stands, facing the stages set up on the western end of the track. The music started around noon. A handful of freaks, looking like they could have been from New York or San Francisco, were scattered among the crowd, but much of the audience looked like straight college kids. The Fort Lauderdale News had a field day, running an article entitled FLOWER CHILDREN STRANGELY MANNERLY: REPORTER RUBS ELBOWS WITH WEIRDOS: “Call them hippies, flower children or whatever, this generation has much to its credit. They are gentle people, likable, polite to strangers and to each other. I spoke briefly with the most sloppily dressed, with the longest hair, and with the weirdos. All were pleasant, well mannered, gentle spoken. And all agreed they were there to hear the music they like the most and to see others of their ilk.”
The paper’s basically positive stance was the opposite of the Miami Herald’s, which warned that hippies in the neighborhood could wreck an area’s real estate value and was quick to report on the few thefts that occurred at the festival—eight-track players and tapes stolen from cars.
Most acts performed two sets, except for Hendrix. Jimi and the band had missed their pickup at the airport, and while the Mothers of Invention played, we realized that Hendrix was overdue. In a panic, we paged the Experience’s tour manager Gerry Stickells at Miami International Airport and found out that they’d missed their pickup. So we chartered a helicopter to ferry them to the show. Soon we heard the whir of blades overhead. Jimi, Noel Redding, and Mitch Mitchell landed in spectacular fashion just beyond the stage. I don’t know who was more ecstatic—me or the crowd. Dressed in a white ruffled shirt and a black fedora, Hendrix played a blistering set. As I watched from the scaffolding that evening, everyone in the audience looked totally engrossed and amazed by what was coming off the stage. I found out later that the Experience was experiencing STP:
MITCH MITCHELL: This guy comes along to give us some extra energy, but it turned out to be some sort of hallucinogen. I looked up and saw the guy who gave us the powder in a lighting tower about twenty feet above the stage. Suddenly I was on the same level as him, looking down at this empty shell, playing the drums. Obviously, the powder wasn’t what we thought. I looked across and there’s Jimi up here with me and we kind of look at each other and nod…it was straight out of The Twilight Zone.
As with most of the performances, Jimi’s was recorded: For years, “Foxey Lady,” “Fire,” “Hear My Train a Comin’,” and “Purple Haze” have floated around on bootleg recordings. On the Internet, fans still rave about the show: “the most mysterious and fascinating JHE gig,” “the greatest set I ever saw from anyone ever.” In addition to the documentary footage, ABC had been following Hendrix around and shot some of the performance. Linda Eastman (later McCartney), a good friend of Jimi’s, took some great photographs of the Experience, and Hendrix’s sound engineer Eddie Kramer (who would later record the Woodstock performances in ’69) shot some of the fes
tival too. Decades later, the Petersen Museum in L.A. exhibited the Stratocaster Jimi played, which ended up with Frank Zappa that day. He got it, he said, after Hendrix broke its neck, doused it with lighter fluid, set it ablaze, and threw it off the stage. Frank replaced the guitar’s melted pick guard and broken neck and played it for years.
The show on Saturday ended with a fantastic fireworks display—the finale was a spectacular peace sign lighting up the sky. Things seemed too good to be true. They were. Because South Florida had been suffering through a lengthy drought, with no sign of precipitation, we decided to forgo expensive rain insurance. Unbeknownst to us, on Saturday, officials had ordered the clouds seeded over the Everglades. The result was a monsoon on Sunday—torrential downpours, hail, lightning, and fifty-mile-an-hour winds. Four inches of rain fell through the day and night, which cut attendance way down. Adding to our problems, it turned out that counterfeiting of tickets took a chunk out of our gate both days. On Sunday, we got two or three acts on early and then it just went completely to shit. Dark clouds threatened the Mothers of Invention’s set, and Zappa recommended the covered grandstand to the audience, in case it poured, but—“Of course, if sitting in the rain is your thing, well then, just groove.”
No grooving for us. We had to stop the music while waiting for a break in the downpour. Hours passed, and a guy climbed up on the empty stage and tried to incite the drenched audience to riot. Before putting John Lee Hooker onstage, I had to get $750 in cash from the box office to pay him. When I opened the door, I discovered a nasty standoff in progress. John Ek, our head of security, was threatening the Brink’s driver who’d arrived to pick up the gate proceeds. A heavy-handed character, Ek was famous for having invented the Ek Commando Knife, which he would describe at the drop of a hat. It’s a long, thin knife, very narrow at the hilt, so when you stick it into someone, you can break off the blade. Ek figured we were in financial trouble because of the rain and demanded to be paid before any cash left the premises. The Brink’s guard, whose mission was to collect the box office receipts and transport the cash box to the bank, was not about to back down. They were yelling at each other, with me in the middle; then both sides went for their guns. I was petrified, but I knew there was a possibly more dangerous situation brewing outside. I instinctively tried to change the energy in the room.