The Road to Woodstock

by Michael Lang

  “Hold it right there!” I shouted as I put my hands up. “This is still our money and nobody is taking anything anywhere until I get some music on. I’ll be back and we’ll work this out.” While they were absorbing this new information, I grabbed the cash and rushed to find John Lee. He took the stage and played that remarkable set, and I returned to the box office to work out a compromise.

  STAN GOLDSTEIN: Michael cooled that scene down. It was close to the O.K. Corral. On that day when everything was falling apart, Michael simply shone, and that was the beginning of my respect for Michael in those kinds of difficult circumstances. He kept his head. He continued to function. He did the best he could, which was often quite spectacular. When everyone around him in his organization was failing, Michael dealt with situations as they arose and as they had to be addressed, whereas everyone else was running, hiding, disappearing, panicking, and so forth.

  Though there was a respite during John Lee’s set, the rain never really let up. The last act of the day, the (very) Crazy World of Arthur Brown, finally got to go on. They more than lived up to their name, and at the end of their big psychedelic hit “Fire,” Arthur kicked the organ off the stage. I later found out that, in the wee hours of the morning, he set out for Fort Lauderdale on foot. After the concert, several of the bands went back to their hotel to party at the bar.

  NOEL REDDING: The Miami Pop Festival gig we did was excellent, and when the second day’s show was rained out, Jimi and I headed to the hotel for a jam and general craziness with Arthur Brown, [club owner and artist manager] Steve Paul, the Mothers of Invention, and Blue Cheer.

  EDDIE KRAMER: “Rainy Day, Dream Away” was written [by Jimi] in Miami, I’ll never forget. It was in the back of a car. We were pulling away from Gulfstream Park…It was a torrential rainstorm, and then he started to write it right there.

  Our headaches continued after the show, since Joint Productions owed a lot of people money that we didn’t have. Stan probably knew we weren’t going to be able to pay Criteria what we owed, but he continued to work his ass off.

  STAN GOLDSTEIN: We had set up all of the catering in one of the trucks, which was also the truck in which I had placed my personal tools. When the Hendrix people decided he couldn’t play because of the rains, they threw all of Jimi’s equipment into that truck and took off—disappeared. I had no idea that that had happened. After the show, I began looking for the truck with my tools, because I needed them to disassemble all the equipment, and it had simply disappeared. We didn’t find it until a couple of days later—at the Miami International Airport, sealed up. I opened the back door of the truck, and there was this horrific stench. The truck had sat in the sun containing all the deli platters that we’d purchased to feed everyone—coleslaw, potato salad, corned beef and pastrami. That was all there was in the truck. My tools vanished with Jimi.

  In the wake of the festival, we had to deal with numerous unpaid bills. We never got to take possession of the festival recordings and footage. They were held by the parties who made them until we could pay for them—which we couldn’t. They gradually disappeared over the years. Part of the Mothers of Invention set turned up on their 1969 album, Uncle Meat. Zappa helped the Blues Image get a record deal, and they hit with “Ride Captain Ride.” Lead guitarist Mike Pinera went on to join Iron Butterfly, and percussionist Joe Lala became a top L.A. session guy, playing with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and others. The Jimi Hendrix Experience flew to New York, where they recorded the gorgeous “Rainy Day, Dream Away” for Electric Lady-land, released later in the year. As for us, our attorney advised us to declare bankruptcy. We met at Criteria with Mack, Stan, and other creditors and gave them the bad news.

  STAN GOLDSTEIN: Michael showed up and there was unhappiness, disgruntlement on the creditors’ part. Michael said that they were going to do the very, very best they could to honor all the debts and obligations and pointed out that the recordings might have some value. He was cool, and so that was yet another moment at which a relationship was forged between Michael and me, because I was, by default, the lead player for the debtors’ group. And Michael was the lead player for the promoters’ group. After the Miami Pop Festival, Michael promoted some additional concerts. One of them was at Miami Marine Stadium, for which Criteria provided sound. But I wouldn’t turn the sound on until I got money.

  RIC O’BARRY: We tried to make it up by putting on a show with the Byrds and Steppenwolf later on at the Miami Marine Stadium. It started raining again, and it rained for forty days. I lost a fortune—all the money I had saved from the Flipper TV series. Michael packed up without a dime and went back to New York.

  All around us, the Grove was changing: Police continued to hassle hippies, rents and condos were going up, the old wooden houses were being torn down, and head shops were proliferating. Broke and a bit burned out on South Florida, I thought it was time to head back to New York. Ninety miles north of the city, Woodstock had become a magnet for musicians. I remembered its small-town, artsy vibe from when we used to visit there in the fifties. The town had a history of attracting artists and bohemians. My girlfriend Sonya and I decided to check it out for ourselves.

  three

  WOODSTOCK, NEW YORK

  Lying on a blanket under the stars and listening to loud rock and roll, I feel like I’m in paradise. A woman with long red hair belts out the blues with a voice that’s bigger than she is. “Who’s that?” I ask the guy sitting next to me.

  “Ellen McElwaine,” he says, while handing me a hefty joint. “Jimi Hendrix used to back her up at the Café Wha. She moved to Woodstock from the city with her new band, Fear Itself. She’s got the best voice in town and plays killer slide guitar.”

  Several hundred people sprawl in the grass—some have bedrolls and lean-tos set up next to VW vans. Aromatic smoke wafts through the breeze. I’ve heard about how cool the weekly Saturday Soundouts are, and now I see why everyone in Woodstock raves about them. The best-kept secret on the East Coast, the rural setting is key: a grassy meadow off a winding country road ten minutes outside town. The Soundout embodies the kind of laid-back feeling we tried to create in Miami. This is the way to hear music, I think, surrounded by rolling hills and farmlands, under a big sky.

  On the surface, Woodstock, in the late summer of ’68, hadn’t changed much since I’d visited there as a kid: a quaint village nestled in the arms of lush green and blue mountains. Sonya and I checked into the Millstream Motel—the only one in town—and started exploring. By the next day, a Realtor had found us a beautiful red converted barn on a quiet lane called Chestnut Hill Road. The same sparkling stream that meandered by the motel ran alongside our new home. The serenity was awe inspiring.

  Along Tinker Street, Woodstock’s picturesque “downtown,” stood a hardware store, art galleries, cafés, and eclectic shops. Our favorite was the Juggler, an emporium of art supplies, books, guitar strings, and records. The owners, Jim and Jean Young, had moved to the East Coast from Berkeley. About fifteen years older than me, they were open-minded music fans who took us under their wings.

  At night, a goodly number of Woodstock’s three thousand residents ventured out for a bit of music making and partying at Café Espresso, Deanie’s, the Elephant, and the Sled Hill Café. The townsfolk were a combination of “descendants of Dutch settlers and successive waves of artists, craftspeople, dancers, musicians, urban dropouts, and rebels looking for a green alternative to Greenwich Village,” as described by Dylan biographer Robert Shelton. The village had long been populated by this blend of workaday, rural folk and free-spirited bohemians. Originally farmed by the Dutch in the mid-1700s, the eastern Catskills area had been nurturing artists for more than sixty years. In 1903, a trio of utopians—wealthy Englishman Ralph White-head, writer Hervey White, and artist Bolton Brown—settled in Woodstock to pursue philosopher John Ruskin’s stance against rampant industrialization. On 1,200 acres, in the shelter of Overlook Mountain, they created the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony to pursue the ideals o
f the arts-and-crafts movement. White moved to nearby Glenford and founded the Maverick Colony, where performing arts and music were the focus. In 1912, a branch of New York City’s Art Students League set up a summer program, and some painters and sculptors stayed on in town.

  By the 1920s, there were bacchanalian fêtes, with eccentric celebrants wearing handmade costumes for all-night revelry. A flyer for the first annual Maverick Festival, held in August 1915, promised: “wild sports going on” and the dancer Lada, who “illumines beautiful music like poems, and makes you feel its religion…you cry, it is so exquisite to see…All this in the wild stone-quarry theater, in the moonlight, with the orchestra wailing in rapture, and the jealous torches flaring in the wind! In the afternoon, there is also a concert, with a pageant, and strange doings on the stage…There will be a village that will stand for but a day, which mad artists have hung with glorious banners and blazoned in the entrance through the woods.”

  Though folk-music collectors and classical musicians including Aaron Copland had lived in the area since the forties, the music scene really picked up after Albert Grossman arrived in the early sixties. Several of the artists he managed, including Bob Dylan, fell in love with the place. By the time I arrived, Dylan had settled outside town with his family and was lying low. More visible locally, his backup musicians, who called themselves the Band, had just released their first album, Music from Big Pink. Its namesake was a house in nearby West Saugerties, where some of the Band lived in ’67—ground zero for the soon-to-be-legendary, bootlegged Basement Tapes, recorded there with Dylan. By the summer of ’68, the Band—Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Robbie Robertson—who’d been on the road for years, had dispersed into the Woodstock community.

  GARTH HUDSON: We got to like this lifestyle, chopping wood and hitting our thumb with a hammer, fixing the tape recorder or the screen door, wandering into the woods…It was relaxed and low key. Which was something we had not enjoyed since we were children.

  At the Elephant Café, impromptu jams would break out with the likes of Paul Butterfield, a great blues vocalist and harmonica player, and Tim Hardin, a brilliant singer-songwriter. You would often see Rick Danko playing checkers at Café Espresso or Richard Manuel sipping red wine at Deanies. (All of them would be part of the festival a year later.) The Café Espresso, which had been a haunt of Dylan’s in the early sixties, was run by a kind of paternal Frenchman named Bernard Paturel.

  BERNARD PATUREL: There’s a magic here—an emanation. Lots of musicians, artists, and writers. A gifted person would feel the vibrations and get support from people like that living there. There is something in the air. You can visit someone who might have the same spirit, the same attitude.

  LEVON HELM: The people here are like the people down in the Ozark Mountains. They’re just as country in that good kind of solid citizen way as they are back home [in Arkansas]…Anyone who lives here is blessed.

  The town did seem like a shelter from the storm (as Dylan would later sing) in September ’68. As the Vietnam War escalated, America had gone haywire that year, with one horrible event after another: the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy; race riots in cities everywhere; antiwar demonstrators beaten up and jailed; students arrested for protesting on campus. In August, the cops clobbered and gassed protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Abbie Hoffman, the Yippies, the Black Panthers, and other activists known as the Chicago Eight were indicted on trumped-up charges; Abbie, by then, seemed to get busted every other week.

  In Woodstock, the Soundouts were in direct contrast to the national climate. They had a joyous, healing feel to them—a result of that bucolic setting—with little kids running around, people sharing joints and lazing around on blankets as the sun set. Since 1967, the concerts took place every summer weekend at Peter Pan Farm, a property on the winding Glasco Turnpike between Woodstock and Saugerties. It was owned by Pan Copeland, a feisty woman who ran the Corner Deli in town. Three or four artists would perform on a makeshift stage, about six inches off the ground, in what had been a cornfield. There were local acts like Ellen McElwaine and Fear Itself, Chrysalis, Cat Mother, and the Caldwell Winfeld Blues Band, and later national artists who’d moved to town, such as Van Morrison and Tim Hardin. Between sets, we were serenaded by cicadas and birds. People pitched tents or parked campers in the adjoining cow pasture. “Wouldn’t it be cool to put on a big concert where people could camp out like this and make a weekend of it?” I asked Sonya. The Soundouts reignited the idea that had first struck me in Miami. But here I began to see the pieces of something even larger coming together.

  On a trip into the city, I reconnected with Don Keider, who’d moved up from the Grove to New York to play vibes with a band called Mandor Beekman. Don and some guys from his Miami jazz quartet—drummer Abby Rader and keyboardist Bob Lenox—hooked up with some Brooklyn rockers and changed their name to Train. DK asked me to manage the band, and though I’d not yet heard the music, I said, “Sure, I’ll check it out.” He needed the help, and I would get to learn something new.

  Train was transitioning from straight-ahead jazz to a more rock-fusion sound. I introduced them to Garland Jeffreys, a talented singer and guitarist. Garland owned a lighting company in the East Village called Intergalactic. I’d gotten to know him when I bought his strobe lights for the Head Shop South. Garland was writing some great songs and performing in the Village, and DK and the guys liked his poetic lyrics. Once Garland joined, the band’s sound started to jell.

  DON KEIDER: We were staying in this bombed-out building over by the railroad tracks on the West Side. Up over a sweatshop, it was also our rehearsal space. It was sick! I don’t know how we survived that. But I had a lot of faith in Michael that he could help us get somewhere. He’d proved his business prowess in Miami with our poster company. We’d started out with a couple posters, and then all of a sudden we were having them printed by the thousands. He distributed them all around the country. Quite a bit of money was made from those posters.

  I’d take the Trailways bus from Woodstock to Port Authority to work with Train. On one of those rides I thought: Wouldn’t it be great if there were a studio in Woodstock where artists could record in the country? Just like Miami had Criteria, which was an outreach for Atlantic Records, Woodstock needed a recording studio. More and more musicians were spending time upstate—Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin. Fred Neil moved up from Coconut Grove.

  I started looking around and found a dilapidated Victorian house and some outbuildings on a secluded wooded property just outside town. Originally, it had been the Tapooz Country Inn, a vacation spot operated by an Armenian family, with cabins, a dance hall, a swimming pool shaped like a grand piano, and a gazebo. Alexander Tapooz, a colorful character who was a rug dealer, said the thirty acres and buildings could be had for around $50,000. Down a rutted, tree-lined drive off Yerry Hill Road, the place was in serious disrepair, but I could envision converting the dance hall into a studio. With financial backing, I thought, I could build a state-of-the-art recording facility, a retreat for musicians who wanted to get away from it all while recording.

  Meanwhile, on a late October day when I was in the city with Train, Abby Rader told me about a label guy he knew. “He’s a bigshot at Capitol Records,” Abby said. “Artie Kornfeld. He’s originally from Bensonhurst, same as you.” We were standing on the sidewalk and I spotted a phone booth. “Got a dime?” I asked. I called Capitol and reached Artie’s office.

  ARTIE KORNFELD: I was vice president of A & R at Capitol. I had been a musician and a songwriter originally, working with [Gerry] Goffin and [Carole] King and [Neil] Sedaka and Leiber and Stoller at the Brill Building. Then I’d been at Mercury, where I wrote and produced some big hits for the Cowsills. I was only twenty-four when I got to Capitol. One day my secretary told me, “There’s a guy named Michael Lang to see you.” I said, “Who’s Michael Lang?” and she said, “He said, ‘Tell him I’m from the ne
ighborhood,’” so right away I knew—Bensonhurst. That’s why I said, “Okay, send him in.”

  Michael was my second hippie. I had signed Debbie Harry—later of Blondie—and her band the Wind in the Willows, so they were the first hippies I’d met. Michael and I had an immediate affinity for each other. We talked about the neighborhood—we smoked a J and it was better than anything I’d ever smoked. I sort of fell in love with Michael because intellectually we were very close—and we were both nuts. We connected on a very high level.

  When I first walked into Artie’s office, with gold records on the wall, I was expecting someone much more corporate. Instead, there’s Artie sitting cross-legged on his desk—it was a little bit of that square attempt at being cool. But he was very sweet and really welcoming. The son of a cop, he definitely had the “neighborhood” kind of personality—someone I immediately understood. We talked about people we both knew in Bensonhurst and hit it off immediately.