The Road to Woodstock

by Michael Lang

  Simon and Garfunkel would have been great for Saturday’s lineup, but after touring earlier in the year, they’d had enough of each other and didn’t want to perform that summer. The Doors were also at the top of our list, but since Jim Morrison’s arrest in Miami in March, he’d become really paranoid. He told his booking agent he didn’t want to play Woodstock for fear of being assassinated onstage.

  There were still slots yet to fill for Saturday. We had some great Bay Area bands lined up: In addition to Creedence Clearwater Revival, Canned Heat, and Jefferson Airplane, Bill Graham had confirmed the Grateful Dead ($7,500). I’d booked Janis Joplin ($15,000) through Albert Grossman, who also gave us the Band ($15,000). Albert liked the policy of “favored nations,” as long as his nations were the ones favored.

  The Band was to be part of the festival since the beginning. Music from Big Pink had broadened the musical landscape and made a deep impact on me. I had gotten to know Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, and I was hoping Dylan might show up with them. He had not toured since 1966, and I didn’t want to push it with him. Bob felt put upon by so many people in the counterculture laying claim to him. I didn’t want to add to that burden—so I didn’t make an offer.

  Of course, I would have wanted the Beatles too, but they would have overpowered the bill, and anyway, they had stopped touring and were about to break up. John Lennon was a big influence on me, and I reached out to him through Chris O’Dell, who worked at Apple, the Beatles’ new management company/label. Chris was working with me to make it happen, but in May immigration officials denied Lennon entrance into the United States because of drug charges the previous year. The Nixon administration wanted to keep him out because of his antiwar work, his bed-ins with Yoko, and other protests.

  I was a huge Stones fan, but as with the Beatles, they would dominate the festival and change the focus of our message. Woodstock was not intended to be about any one band or group of bands. It was about the people—and the ideas and music interwoven through their lives.

  Blood, Sweat and Tears was booked for Sunday night. They were a hot group with a killer horn section that harkened back to the big bands of the forties ($15,000). I also made an offer for Iron Butterfly, known best for their “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” jam and drum solo ($10,000).

  For what I thought would be the midnight close of Sunday night, it had to be Hendrix. Jimi had played my Miami festival for $5,000. Now, a year later, Hendrix had become the highest-paid rock musician in the world. He’d just earned $150,000 at Madison Square Garden. My favored-nations policy for booking the bigger acts had a cap of $15,000. This was not going to fly with Jimi’s manager, Michael Jeffrey. Michael lived in Woodstock, and Jimi was renting a house in nearby West Shokan. So far I’d gotten Jeffrey down to $50,000—but that was still more than I could pay. I knew from Jimi that he wanted to play; he’d occasionally drop by and jam unannounced at Steve Paul’s Scene and other clubs. So I went to see his agent Ron Terry. With a very deep tan and wearing white patent-leather shoes, Ron seemed like he could not wait to get back to the beach. I explained to him our favored-nations cap of $15,000, but he wouldn’t go for it—he’d been instructed by Michael Jeffrey to make a deal, but for more. (Michael, it turned out, was fixated on Jimi being the highest-paid performer at the festival.)

  There was another problem with the Hendrix booking. Jeffrey and Terry required headline billing for Jimi, which meant he would be listed first on all radio and print ads, with his name bigger than any other act, and that he had to close the show. This headliner system had been sacred ground in the industry up until then, but for Woodstock I developed a different approach. I had decided that all artists would be treated equally—on ads and posters, they would be listed alphabetically and would share the same typeface. This was important, I thought, because of the large number of big-name acts, as well as the tone it would set in general.

  I really wanted Jimi, but I could not breach the favored-nations clause or change the billing policy. So I offered Terry a solution: $30,000 to play two sets. Jimi would open the festival with an acoustic set and close with his band. (Little did I know that the Experience would play their last gig together at the Denver Pop Festival on June 28.) We could draw up two contracts for $15,000 per set. Terry wasn’t sure if this would work, so I asked him to get Jeffrey on the phone. Michael and I talked, and after I threw in $2,000 for expenses, he agreed.

  I had my heart set on having Roy Rogers end the festival with his theme song “Happy Trails.” We had all grown up watching Roy, Dale Evans, and Trigger on Saturday mornings and I thought this would be the perfect good night to three days of peace and music. But their manager Art Rush turned me down.

  To help finance the bookings and our ever-increasing budget, we needed to get ticket sales under way. We hired Keith O’Connor, who’d worked at the Fillmore box office, to run ticketing for John and Joel. He set up a network of ticket outlets at boutiques and head shops, as well as a mail-order operation from the Woodstock Ventures offices uptown. We sold our very first advance tickets for $6 each. Then we repriced them for $7 for one day, $13 for two days, and $18 for three; we had coded tickets printed that would be difficult to counterfeit. Several young women were hired to start filling the orders. In the first two weeks, we’d sell $169,338 worth of tickets.

  When Artie left Capitol in May, he moved full-time into the offices with John and Joel. He brought with him his secretary Gisella Bitros. John became smitten with the lovely “Gizzy,” and before long, thanks to her influence, he began to change—growing his hair, wearing love beads, and getting into acid rock.

  Though John was loosening up, Joel would remain very reserved. Their relationship with Artie continued to disintegrate, creating more pressure for me. They would call me to report that Artie would disappear for days at a time, and John and Joel increasingly questioned his role in our enterprise and whether he should remain an equal partner.

  Word continued to spread about the festival. Early on, Artie and I met with a big-time publicity firm run by Michael Goldstein, whose clients included Jimi Hendrix, but I didn’t like his old-school strategies and attitude. A trio of young publicists there understood much better where we were coming from. I asked Jane Friedman, Pat Costello, and Rod Jacobson if they could personally handle our publicity, and they became so impassioned with the idea that they decided to leave Goldstein Associates and start their own company, which they named the Wartoke Concern.

  JANE FRIEDMAN: We desperately wanted to do the festival, not only because it was a PR account, but we were really involved in the antiwar movement in those days. There was so much going on politically and sociologically in the world, and we realized Woodstock was going to be special. If you were into the whole politic of the era, it was the most exciting account to have at the time. Michael and Artie really built it that way—and that’s how we built the festival in our campaign. We were desperately looking for a project on which to hang our hope for change, and this festival stood for a new way of thinking and living.

  We put an awful lot of work and energy into making it happen. We had a three-month contract, and we spent every single day in the office, from about ten in the morning till three in the morning, and we sent out about three thousand pieces of mail nearly every single day of those months. We had developed an incredible list of underground press. In those days, there was very little daily coverage of pop music, very few music magazines. We kept pummeling them and sending out the same kind of information day after day, always with something new but the same old stuff included, so that it would start to resonate. And we covered radio too, all over the world.

  Our first press releases stated that there would be two days of concerts—a ploy to gain additional coverage in publications when we later announced an added third day of the festival. (At the end of the year, thanks to Woodstock, Wartoke would be cited in a trade publication as being the most effective publicity company in the country.)

  JANE FRIEDMAN: People started to call from a
ll over the country, and back then, talking to someone even eight hundred miles away about a New York event just wasn’t in the cards. Who cared, if it wasn’t in your own neighborhood? Suddenly we had people from across the nation wanting to come: college newspaper editors, student body presidents, student activities organizers, daily newspaper columnists, music writers, people interested in rock and roll, underground newspaper writers and editors, politically involved people. Woodstock was a political event in the sense of its very existence, as a demonstration of the countercultural lifestyle.

  Wartoke’s approach included making me the main “face” of Woodstock. Though I was pretty shy about the limelight and felt uncomfortable being the voice of the festival, Artie encouraged me to take on this role and he shared in it to an extent. I’ve always been reluctant to talk about plans. My thinking is, let me do it and it will speak for itself. For a period of time, John and Joel were absent from festival publicity. Apparently, some at Wartoke thought their image as capitalists would derail our credibility with the counterculture—an element critical to our success. Artie also felt their image as straight businessmen would run counter to our underground credibility. Excluded from some press releases and interview opportunities during the period when we were solidifying our relations with the underground, Joel became outraged and confronted us about it. This took me by surprise. At the time, I did not imagine that personal publicity would be important to him. The whole thing blew over, and in mid-August, Joel and John probably wished they’d never insisted on being included in the press.

  One of the last bands booked was Santana—and that turned out to be one of the most positive events in an increasingly difficult month. After making peace with Bill Graham at Ratner’s in early June, he returned threatening to cancel the Dead’s appearance if I didn’t book the Bay Area bands he’d started managing, It’s a Beautiful Day and Santana. Neither had released records and I hadn’t heard their music. I wasn’t about to book anyone without hearing the music first. “Send me tapes,” I requested. He did and I liked them both, but Santana really knocked me out: Carlos Santana’s distinctive Latin-rock guitar style, Gregg Rolie’s soulful vocals and B-3, and a fantastic rhythm section. It reminded me of the music Tito Puente had played at my parents’ nightclub all those years ago, but with a heavy rock and roll edge.

  “Tell Bill I’ll take Santana,” I told John Morris. “They can open Saturday’s show. They sound amazing.” Bill let us have the group for $1,500—the best bargain of the festival and one of its highlights.

  With an incredible array of talent already booked and the best team in the business in place, I was momentarily on top of the world. Yet, by mid-June, despite two meetings at the Wallkill Town Hall with the locals and our best efforts to keep positive channels of communication open, things in Wallkill were boiling over. And just when it looked like things couldn’t get any worse, new conflicts were rapidly developing in New York.

  six

  DOWNTOWN

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about your festival! We’ll bring this motherfucking festival down around your motherfucking ears unless you meet our demands!” Abbie Hoffman is yelling in Joel’s face. At Yippie headquarters, the stark room on the second floor of the squat brick building reverberates with the sound of Abbie’s voice. When Joel tries to negotiate with him, Abbie lets him have it. Joel blanches and I feel his fear.

  If I didn’t know him, I might have been afraid too. But I know Abbie—and a bit about his theatrics. Right now he’s playing Jesse James. Instead of robbing a train, he wants a piece of our festival. I need to be Billy the Kid.

  For weeks, we’d been hearing shots from the underground. While working in the Village office late one night, I was listening to WBAIFM, the “people’s station.” DJ/commentator Bob Fass, a great friend of the Left, started trashing Woodstock:

  “Word on the street says this festival is a rip-off! These promoters don’t care about the people. They just want to make a buck. The music is for the people. It should be free!”

  Angry, I dialed the station number and got Fass on the phone. Fass had emceed some of the Soundouts, so I was surprised by his attitude.

  “Listen, do you think we’re here working at three in the morning because we don’t care about people?” I challenged him. “Do you think something this big can be put together without money? How would you pay for stages and doctors and bands and water and toilets and food and power and the million other things it’s taking to make this happen? And do it in a way that gives better than it gets?

  “I’m talking about fair exchange!” I went on. “I firmly believe if we’re looking for more than that, the movement is not going anywhere!

  “This festival could be the opportunity for people to really come together,” I continued, “to be ourselves on our own. For once we are in a position to do it right and do it righteous. You’re not doing anybody any favors by trashing us, because if you succeed, it will mean the festival doesn’t happen. And once again, all we’ll be left with is a lot of talk!”

  He was pretty cool with my rant, and when we hung up after nearly an hour, I hoped I’d left him with some things to think about.

  The next day, Abbie Hoffman dropped by our Village office. He wanted to talk about Woodstock. He’d heard about the festival at a Yippie meeting in Ann Arbor.

  ABBIE HOFFMAN: I said [to Michael], “This culture belongs to the people in the streets—we’re trying to build a counterculture. I’m putting together a coalition of Lower East Side groups and we want a meeting.” We came up with about eight or ten groups—the Yippies; the Medical Committee on Human Rights; the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers; antiwar people; the East Side Service Organization, which took care of bad trips and runaways on the Lower East Side. Michael agreed to meet with us.

  ROZ PAYNE, ACTIVIST FILMMAKER: I was with a film group called Newsreel and hung out with the Yippies. They were so much fun compared to the other movement people. Abbie and I just went into Michael’s office one day and said to him, “All right, this is a stickup, we’ve come to get what’s ours!” We were really cocky in those days. Michael was so cute and had this pretty hair. He wasn’t a threat or anything—he was very friendly. He said, “Okay!” I think Abbie thought that we’ll get in there and we’ll do our thing, but at the same time, these guys aren’t our enemies. Michael was smiling, he was nice, he just agreed to everything.

  TICIA BERNUTH AGRI: Michael had the ability to allow everything, to not resist it and even give it a little space, which would defuse the situation.

  I couldn’t reach John, so I called Joel and gave him a brief overview of the Abbie Show. It was hard to convey its nuances to Joel because there was no common frame of reference. I did what I could and set up a meeting for Joel and me to sit down with Abbie at Yippie headquarters. With all the pressure and negativity coming from Wallkill, I was buoyed by the thought that at least we were finally going to get some support from our brothers and sisters in the underground.

  The Lower East Side community of activists, radicals, and politicos thought we were trying to rip off the counterculture—at least that’s the position they chose to take. They seemed to worry that their ideals were being co-opted by corporate America in the guise of Woodstock Ventures. All along I tried to make it clear that we were part of the counterculture. That I was trying to marry our common principles with just enough commerce to actually manifest something of the better world we envisioned, that Woodstock was of and for the people, that it was okay for someone willing to bankroll this thing of ours to make a fair profit.

  At our meeting, we discovered that the solution for now, ironically, was money. Abbie was asking for a twenty-grand donation to the cause.

  “You’re taking from the culture, so you should give back to the culture!” he argued.

  “What about our cause?” I asked. “What exactly is it you think we should pay for?”

  “Listen,” he answered, “you’re gonna get all these city kids up there i
n the country with their smoke and their acid and no services and no survival abilities. We want to come up there and put out a daily survival sheet and distribute our leaflets—information on the political and social movements we’re involved in. And we wanna take care of our people. All you guys are interested in is making money.”

  His words seemed aimed for the benefit of the other movement people in the room, the thrown-together “coalition” for which he was the spokesman. Abbie and I had already had at least one conversation about our preparations. But his words made sense to me. “Joel and I need a minute to discuss this,” I told the gathering, and we headed to the hall.

  Joel asked me if they could really cause problems and I said yes. He asked me if there was some other way out of this that wouldn’t cost us money and I said no: “But if they’ll really do what they say they will—and I believe they will—it would be a big help to us on the ground and also add to the credibility of our message.”

  Joel was not happy. He didn’t like these people, he didn’t like their politics, and he didn’t like being extorted. But this was a street thing and the rules were different, and I believed we could turn the situation into something positive for all of us.

  We went back inside and I said, “I’ll tell you what—if your concern is really about helping people cope, we’ll give you enough money to put out your survival guide, for your printing press, and space to set up your tables. You’ve told us that you don’t think we’re doing enough to prepare, so you can help us help the kids when they arrive.”

  Abbie seemed to like this idea and asked for a few moments to converse with his posse. Afterward, Abbie—no stranger to negotiation—asked what we were willing to offer. We proposed $5,000 but settled at $10,000. Though Joel was still reluctant to fork over $10,000, I took the deal back to John to get his approval to release the cash.