by Michael Lang
ABBIE HOFFMAN: With half of the $10,000, we bought a printing press, which ultimately was a lifesaver. I’m sure it saved several lives. We handed out survival-type information, as well as political information. The money also went for a truck rental, for paper supplies, and a certain vitamin that we used for bad acid trips. We got one or two hundred free tickets. Many of them we gave to WBAI FM, to help raise money for the station, and we gave them away to people on the street who couldn’t afford to go.
There was a revolutionary community that felt the music had grown out of its bowels and that it was in conflict with mainstream society—with the police, who were working for mainstream society; with the war in Vietnam; with racism being practiced by society. It would seem quite natural, if we’re going to have this kind of event, to try in some way to inject some kind of political content into it. It’s not that we were against the festival—we wanted the festival to be seen within the context of what I later termed “the Woodstock Nation,” to be seen in a context not removed from the politics.
Our meeting at Yippie headquarters happened to fall on the same day, June 19, that we ran a “Public Notice and Statement of Intent” in the Middletown Times Herald-Record:
Certain persons in this area have started rumors with the express intent of creating such an emotion-laden atmosphere that reason and common sense cannot prevail…They are attempting for some unknown reason to make it impossible for officials to do anything other than present a solid block of opposition to our presentation, regardless of what their investigations & consultations reveal…It is our intention to remain in your community…
—Woodstock Ventures
What had started as a skirmish of mistrust and confusion in Wallkill had turned into an all-out war. Our half-page ad was our attempt at defending ourselves against attacks coming from the Concerned Citizens Committee (CCC) and the moves made by town officials to stop the festival with a new ordinance prohibiting crowds of five thousand and more from gathering. We’d been served with a pair of summonses to appear in state supreme court on July 7 to face actions filed by the owners of property adjoining the Mills property, who claimed our festival would be a public nuisance and should be banned.
The Times Herald-Record later reported that, according to the town attorney, a preliminary injunction stopping our festival might be issued in three weeks. CCC spokesman Frank Jennings told the paper that his group had gathered two hundred signatures on a petition to stop the festival because “citizens fear for the health, welfare, and moral well-being of the community and festival visitors as well.”
Mel, Chris, Stan, Wes, and their crews were working around the clock to finalize our plans for sanitation, sewage disposal, water distribution, medical personnel, traffic routes, parking, food preparation, and security to present in detail to the Wallkill officials. These plans would determine whether or not we’d met the criteria necessary for a permit enabling a large assembly of people. Officials threatened: no permit, no festival.
In the Wallkill community, we were trying to convince the opposition that we knew what we were doing and that we could bring something positive to the county. Mel asked the Hallandale, Florida, chief of police, George Emmerich, to issue a statement about how well run the Miami Pop Festival had been: “It was orderly and the problems were minimal considering the number of people involved,” Emmerich reported. “The crowd was polite and well behaved. The producer complied with any requests made for security precautions.”
To improve community relations, we hired Mel’s then-girlfriend Rona Elliot to help with local PR. Rona, though only twenty-two, already had experience doing promotion and publicity in radio (which is how she met Mel) and for a couple of festivals. She made friendly overtures to newspapers, local radio and TV stations, and various organizations like the Kiwanis, where she gave a talk on how the festival would benefit the community. She even helped to organize a community square dance. We enlisted a soft-rock band out of Boston, Quill, to perform gratis in the area. Because they played rather benign rock and roll, we thought they would make a good impression on the locals.
LEE MACKLER BLUMER: I organized a “goodwill” tour for Quill. We went to the Warwick School for Boys, a juvenile delinquency home, to some prisons, and to a mental hospital. But it didn’t really help to elevate our stature in the community. They only wanted to know that we were a danger. They didn’t want to know any of the good we were doing. Don [Ganoung] would put on his priest garb and try to convince them that we weren’t going to put acid in the water, but I don’t think he changed many minds.
We also tried to prove our sincerity to the underground community. To that end, Wartoke organized a public meeting at the Village Gate in New York to bring together various factions for a discussion. Wartoke’s invitation read: YOU ARE URGED TO PARTICIPATE IN A SEMINAR TO DEVELOP AND SET GROUND RULES FOR OUTDOOR PEACE AND MUSIC PROGRAMS.
JANE FRIEDMAN: We decided that we should do something to give people ownership of the festival, because there had been a threat from various political factions of an insurgency at the festival, like, if we didn’t do this, they would cause riots. We invited college kids from all over to come to our seminar and make a decision: Should this be three days of peace and music where we can take a well-earned vacation from spending the year working for the revolution—is it okay to drop the politics and have a good time? Or should we turn it into a political event?
Artie and I wanted Woodstock to be a cultural event, not devoid of politics but a chance for the culture to stand on its own and simply be about itself. If Woodstock worked, that would be the strongest political statement possible.
On June 26, to a packed house at the Village Gate, an activist named Jim Fouratt served as moderator. Extremely articulate, Jim led the discussion in the direction of peace and love. Wes Pomeroy and I both gave talks about how we could prevent conflicts with police—another violent riot had just gone down at a festival in Northridge, California. We wanted to explain in a public forum how ours would be different from those where problems had arisen. I’d already planned to go to other festivals to see how they handled crowds—and learn from what they might do, both right and wrong.
“We plan to create a community among all the people who attend the festival,” Wes told them. “What happens then will be the responsibility of the audience as much as the promoters. If you give people enough to do, and give them what they pay for, there won’t be any trouble.”
“Publicity for the festival will be geared to letting kids who come know the kind of facilities and the kind of community we are creating,” I said. “The idea is to get the audience almost as involved as the performers. If the crowd participates in the festival, people will want to respect the rights of others.”
I also wanted to let the audience know that this wasn’t all about money. As far as money goes, we all do what we can to get by. But if you can get by and also do some good, that’s where it’s at. I was single, had simple material needs at the time, and was living my dream. But I knew that John should make a return for the investment and his and Joel’s hard work, and that Artie and I deserved something for all our work.
After about four hours of discussion, the two hundred or so people at the seminar voted that Woodstock should remain as we envisioned it: three days of peace and music. Politics, while represented in booths and in distributed literature in an area called Movement City, would not be part of the onstage proceedings.
Being hammered from the right and the left, I clearly saw the road we had to travel: It was the place where art and commerce could coexist, where opposing ideas could coexist, where our humanity would come first and our differences would just add color. Elements of the festival were deeply grounded in the underground movement but without the overt politics—the focus would remain peace and music.
Around the same time, Stan had contacted a group with experience setting up and running the campgrounds and free kitchens. The Hog Farm was—and still is—an entertainment/ac
tivist commune that formed in Los Angeles in 1965. By 1969, they were living in New Mexico when not presenting their free “Hog Farm and Friends” road show. (They got their name babysitting a pig farm in Sunland, California.) One of the founders, Hugh Romney, had been a Beat poet in the fifties and, backed by jazz players, used to give readings in the Village. He opened shows for John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and in the early sixties was poetry director of the Gaslight. His wit and subversive one-liners impressed Lenny Bruce, who became his manager for a while.
The Hog Farm included Hugh’s wife, Bonnie Jean (the subject of Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country”), and several members of the Merry Pranksters, who cooked up the Acid Tests with Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead in the Bay Area. The Pranksters’ psychedelic bus further inspired the Hog Farm’s own bus, Road Hog. Stan first contacted the Hog Farm back in April when they were marooned in New York following an incident in Pennsylvania. They’d been driving through in their bus and were pulled over by the cops. One Hog Farmer had been busted when the cops found a pipe with cannabis ash in it in his sleeping bag. The others were doing odd jobs in New York to raise money to pay his bail. Stan met with them in a loft on Houston Street that belonged to Calico (aka Elizabeth Zandermee), a friend of the Hog Farm and the Grateful Dead. Stan told them about the festival and that we’d like them to participate. They seemed dubious but agreed to meet me.
HUGH ROMNEY: Stan Goldstein walks up to our kitchen table and looks like Allen Ginsberg on a Dick Gregory diet. He says, “How would you guys like to do this music festival in New York State?” He was one toke over the line, so we dismissed him.
A couple of days later, Stan and I met Hugh and Bonnie Jean and some of the others at the Cauldron. An unforgettable character, Hugh was missing most of his teeth and was wearing a straw cowboy hat with a big feather in it. He struck me as some sort of cosmic clown/word slinger. Today, everyone knows him as Wavy Gravy—B. B. King gave him that name at a Texas festival a short time after Woodstock.
That day at the Cauldron, over bowls of brown rice and steamed vegetables, we talked about what Woodstock was going to be and the role I envisioned for them: mainly to run the campgrounds, free stage, and free kitchens. The conversation turned to their experiences dealing with people having bad acid trips and OD’ing on drugs, and I realized how important they could be in helping us accomplish our goals. “How would you deal with a fight breaking out in the campgrounds?” I asked. When Hugh answered, “With pies in faces!” I was totally sold.
We agreed that a small group of Hog Farmers would drive the Road Hog to New York in July to help Mel and his team build a children’s playground and clear trails around the camping areas. When Hugh asked how the rest of the eighty or so Hog Farmers would get to New York, I said, “There won’t be time for you to drive, so we’ll bring you in by plane.” They were blown away by that, but I had the feeling they didn’t believe I was really serious. For their services, we came to a fee of $8,000, plus all the leftover supplies and equipment bought for the kitchens and campgrounds.
STAN GOLDSTEIN: After they returned to New Mexico, Bonnie Jean would walk from the Hog Farm’s property, some many miles, to the nearest telephone, and each time we would have a conversation regarding plans for their involvement in the festival. Then we would arrange for our next conversation, as we continued to pursue matters.
Stan and I sat down with Wes Pomeroy and discussed the role we had mapped out for the Hog Farm. He was a bit skeptical, thinking they might cause more problems than they would solve. He wanted the Hog Farm to be checked out. That made good sense to me, so I sent Stan to New Mexico on June 21. He arrived as the Hog Farm, the Pranksters, and others were having a summer solstice celebration in Aspen Meadows, outside Santa Fe.
STAN GOLDSTEIN: I made it my business to wear a white business shirt, formal slacks, and carry a briefcase. There I met with Jim Grant, a friend of Wes’s who was the head of the New Mexico Governor’s Crime Commission, who was going to come along and be the outside observer reporting back to Wes. He wrote to us in a preliminary report, “The Hog Farm can be recommended, not necessarily for its artistic merit (no judgment), but for its responsible attitudes and conduct.” But after the Solstice, he followed up with a “supplemental report”: “The entire affair appeared to be completely without organization or management…There was a certain amount of mammarial exposure…It may be that when these people do their ‘thing’ for themselves, the circumstances are completely different than when they stage a production strictly for profit.”
HUGH ROMNEY: Stan shows up with one of those classy aluminum attaché cases like the high-rolling rock and rollers tend to sport. He announces that we’ll have our own American Airlines astro jet to fly us to New York. We were blown away, and we got the cream of everybody in the commune scene to be part of our team.
STAN GOLDSTEIN: The Hog Farm seemed to have their scene pretty much together, so we didn’t see anything wrong with it. Fortunately, Jim Grant left before the bus races: Ken Kesey came down for the event and showed up with the usual accouterments—pot and friends—and he had a lot of beer with him. This was the first time most of us had ever seen screw-top beer bottles, and Kesey had dosed the beer. Psychedelic beer! In the throes of that beer, everyone decided to have a bus race through the meadow. All these buses raced across, swerving to avoid sinkholes at the very last instant, with people riding on the tops of buses and hanging on, and riding on the fenders and hoods, all psychedelicized. It was one remarkable sight.
Soon after Stan got back from New Mexico, I traveled to Denver to check out the three-day pop festival at Mile High Stadium, June 27 to 29. There I ran head-on into everything I wanted to avoid at Woodstock.
From the outset, there was tension between the police and a large group of dissidents called the American Liberation Front, who were in town for a big Fourth of July protest. They were agitating the kids, saying that the festival should be free. By the time I arrived on Saturday, there were several squads of police—maybe 150 men in full riot gear—placed in the stands to the left of the stage. I guess they thought a show of force would serve as a deterrent to the gate-crashers and protesters, but I had the feeling it would do just the opposite.
A few hundred people started rushing the gates, and to stop them, more squads of cops in riot gear showed up. A melee between rock-and-bottle-throwing kids and billy-club-wielding cops resulted in lots of injuries on both sides. Then, during the middle of Johnny Winter’s set, the cops started spraying tear gas to clear the area by the entrance gates. The wind came up and blew it as far as the stage, affecting everyone. Finally, the police had the promoter open the gates, and thousands flocked inside the stadium in time for Creedence Clearwater Revival’s closing set.
I thought I should get back to New York Sunday night, but I really wanted to check out Joe Cocker and the Grease Band. As it turned out, Sunday saw more violence than the day before. Thousands showed up without tickets, expecting another free concert, and were greeted by vicious police dogs, mace-spraying machines, and hundreds of cops suited up for battle. It seemed obvious to me that the confrontational approach taken by the police provoked the violence. I had a lot to think about. I decided we would not have a uniformed police presence within our event. I’d do whatever it took to prevent something like Denver happening at Woodstock.
As for the music, Joe Cocker and the Grease Band were amazing. I’d signed Cocker after Artie gave me a tape he’d gotten from Denny Cordell, Joe’s producer. He was virtually unknown then. When we first heard him, everyone assumed he was a black soul singer, but he turned out to be a skinny English guy who hopped around the stage like he had Saint Vitus’s dance. He could wail!
By the time I flew to Denver, the relationship between Joel and John and Artie had completely deteriorated. Since Artie had left Capitol, he was no longer prevented contractually from being signed into the company. I had been holding his shares and we needed to legally transfer them. I had been getting increasi
ng pressure from John and Joel not to sign him in because they thought he was getting further out of it. Almost daily they would call and report some new travesty they said Artie had committed or complain about a responsibility he was ducking. My offhanded attempts to keep the lid on both sides had not helped matters much.
“Look, we’ll make this right,” they said, “but we just can’t see bringing him into the company the way things are. We’ll split his shares among the three of us.”
As far as I was concerned, Artie’s shares were his from day one and I was certainly not in a position to take them back. I had enough on my plate, and I did not have the time or the skills to change the dynamic of their relationship. I told them that they were putting too much pressure on me, that I was going to Denver, and then signing Artie’s papers when I got back. I said, “It’s up to you guys. Work it out!” I later heard that after I left, Joel panicked, thinking I had flipped out and split for good. All I wanted was for them to take care of what they had to do, and let me take care of what I had to do. Joel went to see Artie that weekend and they started a dialogue. They resolved things enough so that our partnership remained intact.
Late June found John Morris spending an intense evening at booking agent Frank Barsalona’s apartment in Manhattan with Pete Townshend. John had asked Frank, who ran Premier Talent, to help us book the Who. The band had been performing their brilliant rock opera Tommy all spring, touring the United States and playing mostly theaters and halls. John and I agreed that the Who was what we needed for Saturday night. But Pete Townshend was dead set against doing Woodstock, even though Frank tried to convince him that it would be a huge boost for the band’s career. Apparently, the band was exhausted and wanted to return to England as soon as the tour ended.