by Michael Lang
As at Miami Pop, I planned to film and record the festival, only this time Artie and I had a bigger vision for the film. We had been trying to sell the movie rights, but so far, no luck. D. A. Pennebaker had filmed the Monterey Pop Festival, but the movie had been a flop, so studios saw concert pictures as loss leaders. Early on, Artie and I had talked about the importance of capturing the building and preparation of the site. I had become friendly with Alan Douglas, whose multimedia company was active in music, film, and photography. He agreed to help fund some of the early filming and offered to raise the money to make the picture. In addition to documenting the setup, we discussed sending film crews to California, Texas, and Ohio to travel to New York with groups of people, documenting their experiences en route to the festival and beyond. Unfortunately, with the move to White Lake, time just got away from us and we couldn’t pull off the far-flung filming.
ALAN DOUGLAS: I kept pushing him—“Michael, we’ve got to get started”—so it was about two weeks before the festival was to begin and there was no film deal yet. Although we were basically a recording company, we were making books and films and other things and there were what we called “underground filmmakers” around my office and I had a film-editing suite downstairs. So I said, “We’d better send some guys up there and start shooting,” because at that point, they were building the stages and they were preparing the fields, and I thought that if, in fact, they were going to do a film, that would be an important part of it all. I had two hippie filmmakers from London working with me, Malcolm Hart and Michael Margetts, and a well-known New York filmmaker, Marty Topp, so we equipped everybody. I gave them the film and rented cameras and sent them up to Woodstock a couple of weeks before, and the first two weeks of preparation that you see in the film was shot by our people.
Michael and Malcolm were juiced and jumped in with both feet. They rented a car from Avis, removed the top of the trunk, and Michael would shoot from there while Malcolm drove. It seemed as if they were always shooting, day and night. They even got a shot of Wes Pomeroy’s daughter Ginny riding horseback with a Hog Farmer.
When Joel arrived in Bethel the week of the festival, he was a bit nonplussed and unsure where to put his energy. We were still dealing with permit issues, and the box-office operations needed attention. I was hoping he would focus on those areas, but Joel seemed more interested in trying to figure out what I was doing. He was particularly upset by the film crew Alan Douglas had sent. It seems he saw this as self-aggrandizement on my part, and he repeatedly denigrated the wisdom of spending any time or resources on making a movie. Joel, of course, would later become the beneficiary of our efforts, when the film became Woodstock Ventures’ greatest asset.
I really liked the documentary work of the Maysles brothers—David and Al—and we met several times with them and their producer Porter Bibb. David and Al checked out the site and seemed interested in making the film independently but were having trouble finding the financing. They recommended Wadleigh-Maurice Productions to shoot the performances. About my age, Michael Wadleigh was a Columbia University medical school dropout who’d become a filmmaker. He had won an award for his documentary No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger. Producer Bob Maurice was a tenacious guy determined to make the film. With a handheld camera, Wadleigh had recently filmed some exciting live-music performances of Aretha Franklin and James Brown, and was eager to do more. Wadleigh-Maurice Productions had been working with an experimental new split-screen editing machine that could result in three different images onscreen at once. They thought it was the way to go to capture the excitement of a live performance. Their associate producer Dale Bell began gathering 16mm film stock and putting together a team with enough cameras to shoot three days and nights of performances.
DALE BELL: The Saturday before the festival began, our little group of six people in a couple of cars went to White Lake and met Michael Lang for the first time. If I had any wisdom at all, it was to say, “Let’s shoot it, let’s hold on to the negative, and let’s wait for people to come to us, because once we have possession of the negative and we have recorded it, we are in control.” That was part of the philosophy that Bob and Michael and I were developing. So we went up there and left a camera and sound and a producer behind. It was like, “You’re the placeholders and you just shoot whatever walks and talks.”
I wanted to hire someone to photograph the event, and Chip recommended Henry Diltz. Based in L.A., Henry had just shot the cover of the debut album by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Before becoming a rock photographer, he’d been in a folk group in Hawaii. It turned out that he had known Mel there, and he fit in with everybody right away.
HENRY DILTZ: I enjoyed going down every day to where they were building the stage. It was like a huge battleship—it looked over this green field and the blue sky and it was really like an ocean. These hippie girls who ran the kitchen would bring lunch out to the site where guys were all building this thing. Michael Lang had some kind of an old motorcycle that he’d come riding on through the alfalfa fields with his leather vest on and his curly hair. He looked sort of like a cherub. Chip and Michael and Mel were like brigadier generals. People were issuing orders and getting stuff done and things were carried out in a very crisp and efficient—but very friendly—way.
PENNY STALLINGS: Michael was inventing it as he went along. He was so intuitive about the way he operated that it all worked. You had all of these guys almost afraid of Michael—which was really fun for those of us working for them. To see them sort of befuddled, not knowing how to deal with him. That was quite fun to observe. Michael was the quiet, mysterious presence deferred to by the guys who were older and who were the “real deal” in terms of having some experience doing concerts and promotion and working at the Fillmore. Many of us younger staffers saw Woodstock as a very political event—we were going to show the world who we were, how big we were. But Mel and John and Chip didn’t necessarily look at it that way. They were just working, not smoking pot, not amused by the whole hippie ethos, didn’t live with us, didn’t hang out with us—they weren’t buying into it. Michael, their boss, did.
You had the dreamers who would come in—like Tom Edmunston—who would say, “We’re going to have a giant scented sphere and everyone will touch it.” And what that would be and how you would build that, no one knew. Michael liked those ideas—he wanted those ideas, wanted that input. On the other hand, how would you really do it? Well, you wouldn’t. The artists who came up from Florida—Ron Liis and Bill Ward and Buster Simpson—they actually did do art installations. They did some really wonderful and zany art there, but there were many other extremes, too, that just sort of evaporated along the way.
BILL WARD: Ron’s a born leader—he’s six four and looked like a hippie. He had a big beard and wore a vest with bells on it. He was a good artist, and had a good eye for things and took over the crew, and they built everything. Eventually, Mel got me to try to talk to Ron, who was driving him crazy. Ron would just do things his own way, whatever was expedient. Apparently at one time—I wasn’t there when this happened—he purloined the stage crew’s forklift and a fistfight ensued. Ron was inclined to just take whatever he wanted.
We had a great crew: Buster Simpson was a friend of Ron’s from the Middle West, and he came out. Buster is now a very successful sculptor in Seattle. Buster really had his head on straight, and another on the crew, Herb Summers, is a very talented artist, a good thinker, and easy to get along with—and they all pitched in. Buster and his girlfriend did those outdoor conceptual sculptures. They made an open tepee and suspended a large rock in the middle by ropes, and they built a vertical structure with baby chicks in it.
PENNY STALLINGS: At one point, Buster wanted to get a little girl in a polka-dot pinafore just to skip through the festival. That was the kind of thing they were doing—just wonderful.
Throughout the lush green bowl that opened out to the stage, the crews dug holes and placed poles with beautiful appliquéd banners Mel
had commissioned from a guy in the Bronx. Five feet long with peace symbols and other designs, the banners quickly vanished once the audience arrived.
We realized we needed a footbridge between the artists’ pavilion and the stage, so Chris designed one. That was the thing about Chris; if I could imagine it, he could build it. This one rose about twenty feet above the road and provided an awesome view as you walked across it. Chris calculated how much weight it needed to support by quizzing John Morris about Jimi Hendrix’s weight and the weight of the typical groupie and multiplying that by ten or twelve. Some of the artists from Miami painted gorgeous murals to decorate the sides of the bridge.
In those last few weeks before the festival, we were also scrambling to get our medical operation set up. Early on, we’d been seeking advice from the Medical Committee for Human Rights in New York, and Don Ganoung and Wes had been in discussions with doctors in the Wallkill area, but we had to start over in Sullivan County. Bill Ward recommended Bill Abruzzi, a doctor in nearby Wappingers Falls, whom he had met volunteering during the civil rights march from Montgomery to Selma in 1965. Completely sympathetic to our cause, he signed on and began designing a medical plan. Based on our audience estimates at the time, he recruited six doctors, thirty-six nurses, and eighteen medical assistants (for whom we covered malpractice insurance) at a cost of close to $16,000. (Eventually numerous volunteers would pitch in, totaling some twenty-five doctors and two hundred nurses.) The three local hospitals were put on alert. Don Ganoung also hired a local ham-radio group to help us with on-site communications. He notified the local employment office to solicit workers for the duration of the festival weekend: We needed seventy parking lot attendants, three hundred workers for the food concessions, and two hundred people to pick up garbage around the site each day. Mel located a company with a huge trash compactor—one of the first of its kind—to have on-site to help with cleanup.
The more money we spent, the better we were treated by the community. We were buying materials locally and hiring residents, and as that happened, it changed some of the negative attitudes in town and began to endear us to them. More and more White Lake residents got into the Woodstock spirit. They became supporters because they liked what we were doing, and they saw everybody working hard. During those last two weeks before the festival, it seemed as if thousands of people offered to help in every way.
JOHN ROBERTS: We didn’t want to repeat a lot of the same mistakes that we’d made at Wallkill. So we paid a lot of attention to the politics—who we had to know, what we had to do, who we had to convince, who we had to stay clear of; there was a lot of work done in those areas. PR became extremely important.
Don Ganoung and Rona continued to take the lead in our public relations, but were occasionally joined by Elliot Tiber. Elliot insisted on putting the Earthlight Theatre troupe at our disposal and offered the El Monaco as the site for a free preview of festival theater for the White Lake residents. Talk about a disaster. Before a crowd of old-timers, farmers, and families, the actors stripped off all their clothes as they performed a scene from Oh! Calcutta. The townsfolk went running.
Somehow a rumor got started that Peter and I planned to have a big shipment of pot at the festival, supposedly sent up from Miami. The story went that the Monday before the festival the boat carrying our supply was stopped by the Coast Guard just off the Keys. All untrue.
The countdown began on Monday, August 11, as thousands of people began to filter in. We’d announced that the campgrounds would open on Wednesday, but that did not seem to deter those who wanted in early. We were on a twenty-four-hour clock trying to finish the stage, the towers, the concessions, the roads, the parking lots, the plumbing, the drinking stations, the medical facilities, and the kitchens, and take care of the hundreds of other details still to be completed. People were arguing over manpower and equipment. There just wasn’t enough to go around.
The fence around the perimeter was only partially up, and I didn’t see any sign of ticket booths. I assumed that Joel and Keith O’Connor, who handled the box-office operation from the Woodstock Ventures office, were overseeing their delivery and placement, but somehow the ticket booths never appeared. I later learned that local garage owner Ken Van Loan had attempted to tow two dozen or so to the site at the last minute but got stuck in traffic with the very first haul and had to turn back.
We’d been so busy getting ready we’d nearly forgotten about our recent legal troubles. Paul Marshall had assured us that the attempts to stop the festival by the summer camps and home owners wouldn’t amount to anything. We wouldn’t know for sure until mere days before opening day—when they met before the judge on Tuesday, August 12. Paul, Don Ganoung, and Wes arrived that day in Catskill at 10 A.M. to meet with the state supreme court justice, and it turned out that Paul, as a kid, had gone to one of the camps filing the complaint. He chatted up the camp owner, “Uncle Davy,” before the proceedings—which helped, I think.
During the court session, Paul noted that we’d spent $1,400,000 and were committed to another $300,000 by the time the festival was over; by then, we’d sold 124,000 advance tickets. Finally, after a long day of Wes, Don Ganoung, and Paul Marshall making assurances that we had the means to protect the petitioners’ properties, they all agreed to drop their complaints.
Our final legal hurdle was over. In just three days’ time, the Aquarian Exposition would open on schedule.
nine
AUGUST 13–14, 1969
“Our concession stands aren’t ready! A hundred thousand dollars’ worth of food is going to rot, thanks to you! Who needs this? We’re splitting from here unless we renegotiate our deal!”
“You asshole! You were supposed to have your shit together, and you’re just using this as an excuse to sweeten your deal!” With that, Peter Goodrich slams his fist into Jeffrey Joerger’s face.
I didn’t see that coming.
As Jeff goes down, he yells, “You motherfucker! You hit me!” He goes for a knife he has stashed. Lenny Kaufman, whom I’ve hired as special security, catches this, and when our eyes meet, I nod and he moves toward Joerger to restrain him.
“I’m getting my gun!” Jeffrey shouts as he backs into his trailer and slams and locks the door.
It’s Thursday morning—the day before the festival—and people are pouring in. We’ve lost count since yesterday, but we’ve probably got sixty thousand people already nestled in the bowl and camped in the woods. The guys from Food for Love showed up Tuesday night and have been pissed off ever since because their booths are only halfway built—our crews keep shifting back and forth between the priority projects yet to be completed before opening day. The stage is still not finished. The incessant rain has resulted in a mud pit around its perimeter, which delayed the installation of the concrete footing until just a few days ago. The same abysmal weather conditions have also slowed progress on the concessions for crafts and food. Even the roads we’d built keep turning into swamps.
“Look, Jeffrey, let’s work this out!” John Roberts yells into the slammed door of the trailer. “We’ll have a meeting tonight and resolve this situation.” John says he wonders about Joerger’s sanity, and I’m thinking, Gun?
John, Mel, Joel, and I see that we have a problem. We’ve got the free kitchen at the Hog Farm with plenty of granola and brown rice, but if Food for Love doesn’t come through with hot dogs and hamburgers, we’re going to have thousands of angry, hungry kids on our hands. We radio over to Wes and fill him in on the situation.
“Work it out with them—do whatever it takes,” Wes advises. “The last thing we need are starving kids, especially since we don’t have any New York City cops.”
The last two days before the festival were forty-eight-hours of nonstop fires to be extinguished—literally and figuratively. On Wednesday, Lee got a call at the telephone building office that set the tone for what was to come.
The week before, Joe Fink had come up and surveyed the area and all seemed fine with our pla
n for the “vacationing” police to work in shifts over the three days. We had made arrangements to house, feed, and transport the cops from the city, with the stipulation that they would not bring weapons. But then, in the East Village, the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers started handing out antagonizing leaflets: “Let’s all go to Woodstock and greet the New York fuzz who’ll be unarmed and give them a real warm welcome.” On top of that, Chief Leary saw the photos of the Hog Farm’s JFK arrival splashed over the papers and read that they’d be joining New York’s finest on security detail. So he pulled the plug on the whole thing.
On Wednesday morning, a teletype went out to every precinct in New York City: “It has come to the attention of the Department that certain members of the force have been engaged to do various work assignments during the Woodstock Music and Art Fair…Permission will not be granted for extra employment where, as a condition of employment, the police officer’s uniform, shield, gun or exercise of police authority is not to be used.” It was understood that whoever went against orders could be fired. Joe called Lee with the bad news that the 346 cops we’d selected weren’t coming. When Wes found out, he was livid.
WES POMEROY: Chief Leary shut the door on us…he sent out orders that no New York cop’s going to work up there. It was because of the Hog Farm! He said he’d just found out about it, which was bullshit—and so here we are with our whole Peace Service Corps gone to hell.
LEE MACKLER BLUMER: Wes and Joe Fink started plotting how to overcome it. We were feeling overwhelmed already from seeing the numbers of people who were on the property before there were gates and knew that security was in deep danger.