by Michael Lang
I hated the design, but there were other reasons I wanted a separate office. The advertising, ticketing, and business operations would be located uptown, and I needed to work without interference. Because of the nature of John and Joel’s complete unfamiliarity with the milieu, let alone the technical side of putting together a show or anything to do with production, I couldn’t see a way to bring them into the specifics of my plan. I didn’t think they’d get it or go along with it. From the start, I thought we would each focus on our individual roles. I would produce, Artie would promote, and they would deal with finance and ticketing. If I took time to explain my work to John and Joel, the festival would never happen. So I opened a separate office for production on Sixth Avenue, in the Village. That’s where we would put it all together.
Stan Goldstein had an uncanny ability to come up with just the right person for many of the positions we needed to fill. One of the most indispensable was Joyce Mitchell, who became the administrator of the downtown production office. A striking brunette, she was in her thirties and had hung out with the Beats and writers like Terry Southern and James Baldwin. She’d been the media coordinator for Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and before that, she’d produced programming for armed forces radio shows hosted by Merv Griffin and Eddy Arnold. She’d moved to New York in 1957, after graduating from the University of Miami and then living in Paris.
JOYCE MITCHELL: I met with Michael and Stan somewhere near Lincoln Center for hamburgers. This curly-haired kid said to me, “What would you do about toilet facilities if you had a hundred thousand people in a field?” And I said something to the effect of, “Well, I’d have two backhoes—one for digging and the second for covering the other trench.” And either he or Stanley said, “Well, that’s a better answer than we got from the U.S. Army—you’re hired.” And I said, “What for? To dig latrines?” That’s how it all began. I don’t think I walked away from that meeting knowing what I was getting into. Michael did tell me that they wanted to throw the biggest rock and roll party ever.
The first thing they wanted me to do was to set up the production office. All of the various production managers—Mel Lawrence, Chip Monck, John Morris—were arguing about who got what space. John wanted more space. But the ones who needed the space were Mel and Chip because they were doing broad design work. Mel created this big three-dimensional mock-up of the Wallkill site. I worked right outside of Michael’s office. Things started pretty professionally.
Very smart, Michael had all the department heads meet together regularly. Michael’s method of management was that we should all totally understand what others were doing—so that we could shift into each other’s place if we had to. Michael’s managerial ability really impressed me. We did an awful lot of wrangling, we made up budgets, we were really playing it by ear. Michael just said, “Find me the money.” Fortunately, I had taken a college class in accounting, at my father’s insistence, so I was able to create budgets and keep production reports running. It was all so fast and furious.
Through Chris Langhart, we found Jim Mitchell, who’d been a theater professor at NYU. He became our purchasing agent and helped take some of the work off Joyce’s plate. Jim set up accounts with various companies to obtain equipment and supplies. Slowly losing his sight, he was not in the best of health but was a hard worker nonetheless.
Our production office was very proletarian, just two floors in a brownstone, filled with desks and filing cabinets. Chip scavenged all the furniture, building some of it himself, and set up the office in less than forty-eight hours. We hired a receptionist who was a free spirit, but everyone else was grinding out the work. People could smoke pot whenever they felt like it, and we were having a good time, but nobody was goofing off. It was not a party. We had work to do and not a lot of time to do it and we had a budget, but it was sort of created from smoke. We didn’t have any money to waste. Joyce dealt with John and Joel’s bookkeeper uptown, a formidable redhead named Renee Levine.
JOHN ROBERTS: [Renee] became an indispensable part of our organization. To the staff in general, she was a mother figure. To Michael and Artie, she was the barricade that stood between them and reimbursements for their bizarre expense vouchers. To Joel and me, she became a loyal and trusted friend, the keeper of the checkbook, the ear-splitting voice of sanity, and the shrewd Jewish kvetch who always knew a bum when she saw one—and she saw plenty…She stood up to lawyers, accountants, agents, rock stars, and even armed policemen. All of them, like us, got a lot more than they bargained for.
Artie worked in the uptown office with John and Joel, and the relationship soon became strained. Artie was expressive with his ideas, some realistic, some not. John and Joel were focused on making money, and they wanted to see practical matters handled efficiently. Artie was starting to get a little too high and at times would lose focus, and they were becoming exasperated with him. Artie, on the other hand, would complain about John and Joel being too square and not appreciating his contributions. I’d tell him not to worry about it—“just keep them on track so I don’t have to deal with this.” Increasingly, they called me to complain about Artie being irrational or high or just not present, and I’d say, “Okay, I’ll talk to him.” But I couldn’t constantly run uptown to deal with their conflicts. Had I been older, maybe I could have figured out a way to bridge the growing gap between them. But I didn’t have the time or the belief that, given the personalities, it could be done. I was working twenty hours a day and just didn’t have the answers to these questions.
I was spending so much time in New York, I’d rented rooms at the Chelsea Hotel, where Mel and I—and whoever else needed a bed—would crash. Meanwhile, Stan had relocated to Wallkill in April to troubleshoot any problems there before we set up our base of operations.
STAN GOLDSTEIN: I was the advance man into Wallkill, so I was the first person to actually go up there and move in. I began to introduce myself and us to the local folks. I went to the newspaper, the Middletown Times Herald-Record, met the editor Al Romm and his staff, and told them about our plans. Up till that time, there had been no public notice. I went to see Jack Schlosser, the supervisor of the Wallkill township, and we had what seemed at the time to be a cordial meeting. I visited with the mayor of Middletown, who was not so cordial, but it was okay. And then I began to connect with local businesspeople.
In April and into May, Stan made the rounds in Wallkill, quietly setting up accounts with utility companies and investigating local businesses and contractors. As long as we were under the radar, all was well in Wallkill. But, by late May, once word hit the local papers, anti-Woodstock forces began to coalesce.
STAN GOLDSTEIN: There were incipient rumblings; there were all these questions about what our intentions were, and it seemed the best way to deal with that was to make myself available at a town hall meeting [in the first week of June]—to answer questions.
Preparing to relocate to the Wallkill site, Mel hired an assistant. He contacted an old friend from Bensonhurst, Barry Secunda, who managed the East Village nightclub the Electric Circus. Barry recommended his girlfriend, Penny Stallings, a Texan who’d just moved to New York after graduating from Southern Methodist University.
PENNY STALLINGS: I was very much adrift. I had a college education and nothing to do with it. I was totally at a loss in New York. I was a pure Texas girl with lots of makeup on and extra-blond hair—very not natural—and at the office I landed right in the middle of hippie town. Except for Mel, who was very preppy and a businessman, everybody else was funky and long-haired, and the women wore no makeup. They looked great, and I wanted to do that, but I couldn’t. Life in the office was fabulous—just hilarious. I was always laughing at the ongoing craziness—a total circus all the time.
Stan was like Allen Ginsberg. He was verbose and really smart. He had Michael’s ear. Joyce vetted everything before any interaction with Michael. You had to go through her, and quite often she decided that it was not necessary for you to talk to h
im after all. She was the protective person who ran interference for Michael. She was in the “grown-up” group. She looked completely opposite from me. She wore no makeup and had that great bohemian fuzzy hair, salt and pepper. She was a very good-looking woman, and that added to her power.
I called Chip “Manners the Butler,” a character on a TV commercial at the time, because he was so very British without being British. He was funny, gorgeous, and very cool. He and John Morris were really nice and awfully indulgent with me, because I knew less than nothing about what we were doing.
The first week in June, Mel took Penny and a small staff to Wallkill to start preparing the site, which needed extensive work to restore the land from industrial damage. On the property, we discovered old farm machinery and talked about how to deal with that. Mel’s idea was to create characters out of them, which I thought was great. When Mel worked on the Miami festival, he had hired Bill Ward, a sculptor and art professor at the university there, to engage his students to create artworks at the Gulfstream Race Track. We wanted something like that for the Wallkill site, and Bill agreed to bring a crew to New York.
Mel and I mapped out everything. We wanted the place to be conducive to people feeling comfortable, safe, and close to nature. Based on crowd flow, we started locating the placement of the various elements: the stage, the camping area, the toilets, the kitchens, the concessions. Mel began with the landscaping and site development; we saved the stage construction, piping, and plumbing for last; I had a feeling that we should avoid putting down anything permanent, just in case we ran into insurmountable problems there. Confident that Mel and I were clear on the plan, I left him to do his part—the same went for Chip and the other senior department heads. Once I knew they understood exactly what I expected, I didn’t try to tell them how to do their jobs. Mel and his team stayed in Wallkill, while I drove back and forth to the city, where Chip, John Morris, and Joyce still worked out of our production office in the Village.
MEL LAWRENCE: We set up an office in a big red barn on the site with Stan, Penny, the purchasing agent Jim Mitchell, and some others, and started solving the logistical problems. People would hear there was going to be a festival, and show up and say, “I’m a carpenter,” “I’m a gardener,” and I’d say, “Okay, you’re hired!”
The Miami crew arrived during early June too and started brainstorming ideas. There was poison ivy and oak all over the Mills property, and spraying herbicide took up a lot of man-hours. We put everybody up at a Catskills resort that Mel remembered going to as a kid.
PENNY STALLINGS: We all stayed at a kosher bungalow colony in Bull-ville called Rosenberg’s. Rosenberg’s was suspended in time, in the 1950s. It was a place where you ate three meals and sat around in between, and the people looked it too—they were quite large. The food was overcooked brisket and potatoes, and the only thing any of us could eat was the apple pie, which was out of this world. We had our meals at the same time as the other guests, and it was hilarious.
Bill Ward came from Florida with his wife, Jean, who could weld. I learned “the macho” from her—she’d grown up with brothers in Pennsylvania, so she had all these talents that no other woman I’d ever known had. Bill and Jean drove around looking for ancient farm equipment to make organic grown-from-the-ground art.
BILL WARD: When we first showed up, we had all these hippie kids working with us, and we rented three or four pickup trucks and a station wagon, and we’d go into town and buy supplies like shovels, rakes, and hammers. The people were glad to see us at first, because we were spending money. But then I started running into trouble. I realized when I showed up with a truck full of funny-looking kids, they were the focus of negative attention. I didn’t look much better—I wore blue jeans, a denim jacket, and a baseball cap. Since I was the oldest one there, I was unofficially left in charge at the motel, and the Rosenbergs came to me and said, “Can’t you get these kids to wear shirts and shoes at dinner?” They were very happy to see us when we got there, because the season hadn’t started, and they were making money off of us. But when other people started to arrive, they began to get picky and wanted us out of there.
Back in New York, swamped with meetings, I needed an assistant. Through a musician friend of Stan’s, we found Ticia Bernuth (now Agri), a fascinating woman about my age who’d spent the past few years traveling around the globe.
TICIA BERNUTH AGRI: When I heard about the job, something just came over my body and I said, “It’s got to be me—get me the interview!” I had come back to New York after being in seventy-two countries and traveling all around the Middle East. In 1965, I’d had this desire for exploration and seeing the world. I lived in Italy, and from there I started traveling—Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, North Africa, all over Europe. I had a sleeping bag and lived on a dollar a day—it was very free and easy in those days. During my interview with Michael, he asked me about myself, and I started talking about being in Saudi Arabia and driving through the desert, and coming across Arabs with bejeweled sabers who took us to a guest palace. I told Michael a lot of good stories like this, and that’s probably why I got hired.
JOYCE MITCHELL: I was one of those who interviewed Ticia. When I heard her stories about the Sahara, I thought, “This is somebody who will keep Michael on time.” She was wonderful.
PENNY STALLINGS: Ticia had red hair almost down to her waist. She was tall and skinny with very long legs and a teeny little skirt. She was very good looking—the perfect glamorous hippie secretary.
TICIA BERNUTH AGRI: Everybody was really friendly—like you already knew them. I remember one of Michael’s staff, Peter Goodrich, talking about hot dogs—miles and miles of hot dogs. He said we needed enough hot dogs that if we lined them up, they’d go all across the United States.
The day Ticia came in, I was interviewing candidates for probably the most important job on our staff, head of security. She sat in while I met with a former deputy from Florida who was talking about barbed wire and attack dogs. Ticia and I gave each other a look that said, No way. It was nice to see we were in sync. After the man left, I told Ticia, “There’s another security guy flying in tomorrow from Washington—Wes Pomeroy. Why don’t you go pick him up at the airport?” I could tell when I met her that Ticia would not be intimidated by meeting and talking to anyone. I needed that ability, because I was dealing with a world that went beyond my own experiences and travels. To interact with all kinds of people, she needed to be comfortable in her own skin, smart enough to handle whatever came up, and conversant with everyone from politicians to rock stars to sanitation engineers. I thought, Let me see what she does with Wes—see if my reading of her is correct. She handled it really well and I knew she’d be a great personal liaison for me.
Wes Pomeroy was recommended to us by the Association of the Chiefs of Police. He was described to us as “not your typical law enforcement officer.” He had never been a chief of police but was well known in the field. During the Johnson administration, he served as deputy director of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), reporting directly to Attorney General Ramsey Clark. When Nixon was elected, replacing Clark with John Mitchell, Wes was asked to stay on. But Mitchell and the Nixon administration changed the LEAA’s role from being a department that taught police and administrators how to deal peacefully with civil unrest, to primarily being a supplier of weapons (shotguns, tear gas, nightsticks) for local police departments. Wes had served as the Justice Department representative in Chicago during the ’68 Democratic National Convention, where he had tried in vain to negotiate with Mayor Daley to avert the riots. He had just resigned from the Nixon administration to set up a security consulting firm. His Nixon credentials, I thought, would give us credibility with state and local police.
TICIA BERNUTH AGRI: Michael interviewed Wes and they had an immediate rapport. Wes wasn’t into doing anything but peace and love. We had come through hard times in this country and Wes was trying to heal hippies’ negative view of the police
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I asked Wes how he would handle the possibility of people arriving at Woodstock with the intention of crashing the gates. I knew that the traditional law enforcement approach of confrontation and force would bring nothing but grief and bad vibes. (And later in the summer, I’d see my theory come true at pop festivals in Newport, Atlanta, and Denver.) Other candidates I had interviewed for the job had suggested everything from double rows of barbed-wire fencing with dogs roaming in between, to armed guards every fifty feet, to walls like those at Attica. Wes, on the other hand, asked what my thinking was on the matter—a good sign.
I told him that Woodstock would be open to everyone. If you could not afford a ticket, there would be a free stage, as well as a sound system to allow you to hear the band on the main stage. There would be free camping and free kitchens. We would have fences and gates to the main concert area, but I believed that if we offered a fair admission price for all that the festival offered, most people would respect the gates and buy a ticket.