by Michael Lang
Wes felt betrayed by the brotherhood of police, and even the New York Times ran an editorial admonishing Leary for withdrawing the police at the last minute. Joe stayed in contact with Wes all day, promising to convince some of the men to disobey orders and surreptitiously moonlight for us. Wes reached out to local police agencies and prison officials to try to get people to fill in but was turned down by most. We had to do something—the police were part of the strategy we’d used to convince town officials to let us do the festival. In addition to wanting cops as peacekeepers, we needed them to direct traffic and deal with medical emergencies.
I didn’t want to take any chances with not having any sort of professional security. There were going to be numerous cash payments, between the gates and concessions, so I called a friend, Lenny Kaufman. A former biker, bouncer, and adventurer, Lenny was always steadfast in tough situations and I trusted him completely. I had him round up six or seven men he had absolute confidence in and told him to bring them to the site that night.
Wednesday was another rainy day and it made some of the final electrical work very dicey. The trailer next to the main electrical terminal had stairs that were “hot.” The electricians couldn’t ground them for some reason, so every time you walked up the steps, you’d get a shock. They rushed to complete the elevator for transporting amps and equipment thirty feet up to the stage from the loading area.
Bill Hanley arrived with the special equipment he’d designed to carry the sound as far away as the outer reaches of the grounds. He’d built a custom mixing board and deluxe speakers and had taken out a $3 million insurance policy on the equipment. Cranes were used to place six speakers and horns on top of the towers, and monitors were bolted to the front of the stage. Eddie Kramer, whom I’d met with Hendrix at Miami Pop, would record the concert, along with Lee Osborne, from a sound trailer behind the stage. Ahmet Ertegun had bought the audio rights for Atlantic—Crosby, Stills and Nash’s label.
In addition to the main stage, Hanley put in a smaller sound system for the free stage over by the Hog Farm. There, we’d finished a puppet theater and the playground area the day before. We’d been installing a chain-link fence around the entire site, separating the free area from the section closer to the main stage. I later found out what was happening to some of the fences from Abbie Hoffman’s friend Roz Payne.
ROZ PAYNE: I got there a few days before the festival and camped with the Hog Farm. There were teams of workers putting the posts and wire fences around the property to keep people out who didn’t have tickets. Every night after they would leave, Paul [Krassner], Abbie, Jean-Jacques [Lebel], and I would take down the fence. We left the posts, but took down the wire. We’d do other actions too. We found a sign that said NO TRESPASSING, and Jean-Jacques wrote over it with paint PEOPLE’S BULLETIN BOARD, and we put that up instead. We made a sign that said HO CHI MINH TRAIL for the main pathway through the woods.
All along, we put the word out to the Movement people that there would be free areas. I knew they were crafty enough to sneak people in, but I thought that between advance ticket sales and people buying tickets at the gate, we would do okay financially. With all the rain delays, I stopped caring about the fences and focused on getting the stage and sound together so the concert would start on time.
We finally realized that Steve Cohen had overdesigned the stage roof. For two weeks, the weather had prevented us from putting all the pieces of the puzzle together. The wooden trusses turned out to be way too heavy for our purposes. We never got them properly covered with canvas to make them rainproof. The roof was meant to have cross trusses where the lights would hang. But we couldn’t get the cross trusses up, so Chip would eventually light the whole show with twelve Super Troupers from the towers. “We have 650,000 watts sitting under the stage rusting!” Chip would remind us.
We rented two massive cranes for a thousand dollars a day to assist in the construction of the stage and towers. The cranes became trapped next to the stage because the wooden fence encircling the stage, and other construction, prevented us from getting them out before people started arriving.
CHIP MONCK: What we needed was a real heavy-duty rigger with a full company behind him, and production direction that was exceptionally solid, and grown-up and heavy-duty contractors. But we didn’t have them, and everybody said, “Don’t worry, it’ll happen.” We didn’t have a contractor. We should have done it as though we were constructing a building. There should have been a site supervisor, there should have been an ironworker, a couple of welders. The design was terrific, and it had layers and layers of canvas that were almost like fish scales. It would have been beautiful. We should have had a complete crew that was nothing but staging. We had only four guys who were doing scaffolding. It was a big mistake. You can’t do things like that on a dime. We were all fairly overcome by the size of the thing.
I rented the lights from Charlie at Altman Stage Lighting in Yonkers. In the end he was really pissed off because his five hundred C-clamps—at six dollars apiece—were all locked tight with rust. So they had to be thrown away. There were three arcs, precisely 100 feet out on the left and 15 degrees right of the center line of the stage; there were another three on another tower. And then almost 15 degrees off your exact right and left were two more follow spots. So we only had the ten. That was just enough—there was no ambience, there was no background, there was nothing else. The only other scenic element really was what we call a carnival socket, which are the little lamps that usually hang in an old-time used-car lot, with the piece of cable and lots of little lightbulbs—we had little 7½-watt lightbulbs, one every foot, and they were on the guy wires that held the scaffolding towers in place. And that’s all, so you wouldn’t walk into them in the dark, but also they gave some sort of flavor.
We kept experiencing a drop in water pressure—we had fourteen miles of water pipes that began springing leaks once people arrived. Chris had brilliantly placed plastic cases with vintage army crank phones at locations along the pipeline, so that when a leak was found, a call could be made from the spot and the crew could more quickly fix the problem. We had hundreds of DANGER signs made up and placed next to the pipes to prevent people from stepping on them and causing more leaks.
It was obvious there were going to be lots more people than we’d originally told Max, so I went over to his house to talk to him about it. People were already coming by the tens of thousands. “We were thinking up to two hundred thousand people would come, but it looks like it could be more,” I told him. “But we’ll take care of it.”
I barely got the words out before he ducked back under the oxygen tent in his bedroom. Miriam was worried about the crowds and chaos being a strain on Max—rightfully so, because it would have been a big strain on anyone. When he emerged, after his dose of oxygen, Max seemed unfazed. He knew the size of the facility we were building and that our preparations were as sound as possible. For two weeks, he’d been there constantly with us, and I guess the numbers didn’t come as a complete surprise to him.
WES POMEROY: [By Wednesday], there’s no more time for planning. You just deal with what you’ve got, that’s all. A lot of people would call and say, “What are you going to do about this? We’ve got a lot of people out here in my field!” We negotiated with them and we’d commit ourselves to buy the crop. People were coming in there and camping all over their young alfalfa and ruining their crops, and we were in a bind. We just made sure that if the claim was correct and we were able to verify that, we’d take care of it.
It was very much like a military operation logistically. The dynamics are all the same—you do all the planning you can, and you get all your supply lines built, and you get all your supplies ordered that you need to have—food, latrines—and you get going, and if those lines break down, then you build other lines.
We had a detailed shift plan for security, covering general patrols and direction and admission to the parking lots. With the New York cops out of commission, Wes concei
ved a strategy with the state police that included one-way traffic and certain roads that would be open only to emergency and service vehicles. When Wes called the state troopers on Wednesday to put it into effect, the man who headed up the designated New York State Police barracks decided not to cooperate and refused to implement the traffic plan.
STAN GOLDSTEIN: Not only did we now have no more traffic plan to implement, we also did not have police to stand on the roads and direct people to the leased parking lots. When people didn’t know where to park, they simply parked wherever they could, which turned the roads into what they turned into. As a little sidelight: The New York state cop in charge of that barracks who refused to cooperate with us is the fellow who subsequently was in charge of the retaking of Attica prison. He gave the order to fire and later tried to cover up the fact that he and his men killed the hostages.
When the state police tossed our plan, they set up a roadblock at the nearest exit off the thruway, where they’d stop any suspicious-looking cars and search them. Eight kids were arrested on various drug charges, some for possession of pipes. We’d arranged for lawyers to come up to offer free legal advice for these very circumstances. Eventually, there’d be about eighty drug busts—not too bad, though, considering the numbers who came.
Short Line had added extra buses from Port Authority in New York to Bethel to meet the demand, and a few people were flying into the small Sullivan County airport, but most were traveling to the festival by car. As caravans began to stream into White Lake, the townsfolk hung out on the sidewalk, watching as if it were a circus parade.
Abbie Hoffman later told a funny story about the Short Line bus ride from New York that his wife, Anita, related.
ABBIE HOFFMAN: Anita told me about how this bus was comin’ up the thruway and how it was all freaks and everyone laughin’, singin’, and passin’ around dope, and the bus stalled in traffic and the kids saw this cat standin’ in the road needin’ a ride and they all started jumpin’ up and down and yellin’, “Pick him up! Pick him up! Pick him up!” and the bus driver began sweatin’ all over and shoutin’ out things about company regulations and other kinds of horseshit. A sort of instant people’s militia was formed and they’d started up the aisle when all of a sudden the bus doors opened and this freak with a knapsack on his back came aboard. Everybody was jokin’ and clownin’ and even the bus driver felt better. He didn’t accept the joint a cat tried to lay on him but he scratched the guy’s shaggy head of hair and smiled.
Short Line later ran an ad quoting bus drivers about the joys of transporting kids to Woodstock. One of the drivers, Eugene Jennings, said, “We were stuck in traffic for three hours up there and the only noise I heard was jokes about the EXPRESS sign on the bus. Their fashion may be a little sloppy, but they were clean and generous. It’s sort of live and let live with them.”
After a couple hours of sleep Wednesday night, I woke up to the first sunny, cloudless day I could remember in over a week. This has got to be a good sign, I thought. Sure enough, some problems worked themselves out on Thursday, though others developed in their place—like the Food for Love standoff. By that afternoon, as Joe Fink had promised, police began arriving from New York, reporting for duty.
WES POMEROY: Finally on Thursday, we got word that a bunch of cops wanted to talk to us. They showed up and said, “We’re here, we want to work,” so I sent Don Ganoung to talk to guys like “Robin Hood” and “Errol Flynn.” They were all using aliases. They wanted to be paid in cash and more money than we had promised. We felt like we were being extorted but we had no way out of it. We did hire them for twelve-hour shifts for a hundred dollars a day, which is double what we were going to pay—and we had to pay them in cash. I was very angry about the whole thing, but there was nothing I could do. There was another level of security we used, guards for houses and farms. They were special deputy sheriffs—we set up a guard service for those folks who lived there.
That evening, Wes and John Fabbri called me over to meet the 276 cops who showed up for orientation and to receive their “uniforms” and walkie-talkies. “Here’s the boss,” they said as my introduction. Amazingly, nobody laughed. I reminded the police that their job was to help people, not to hassle them for petty offenses. To have a good time. And not to get too high. That drew a laugh.
The other good news on Thursday came from Artie—he’d finally gotten us a film deal. From his years in the music business, he had two contacts at Warner Bros. who had the clout to make a deal. Before coming to Warner Bros., Freddy Weintraub ran the Bitter End in the Village and Ted Ashley owned the talent agency Ashley’s Famous, which handled the Cowsills—whom Artie had managed. Ted had become president of Warner Bros. Pictures and Freddy vice president. Artie met with them on Thursday.
ARTIE KORNFELD: I said to them, “If there’s a riot and everybody dies, you’ll have one of the biggest-selling movies of all time. If it goes the way we hope it will go, you’ll have a wonderfully beautiful movie that will make us all a lot of money.” We sat there with pencil and paper and wrote out our movie deal—fifty percent split, Warner and Woodstock Ventures after negative costs, then we had to bring Wadleigh in to make a deal with him to do the direction, and that was the movie deal. It was for a hundred thousand for film footage—it was only signed by Ted Ashley and me. That’s how it happened. And then I got into a limousine and went upstate, and the limousine broke down, and my wife and I wound up hitchhiking up to the festival.
JOYCE MITCHELL: I was at the meeting that Artie Kornfeld had with Freddy, and one of the questions Freddy asked me was “How many groups do we have releases from?” This was after Michael had sent me to try to get releases, and I think we had releases for maybe half a dozen acts—and none of the majors.
Michael Wadleigh signed on as director with Warner Bros. on Friday. The studio ended up giving us another $50,000 that day for extra helicopters to transport artists to the site. And when the musicians arrived, Artie would walk with them from the artists’ pavilion to the stage to get their permission to be filmed. They would be paid an additional 50 percent of their performance fee for film rights. The movie would make lifelong careers for many of the acts who performed that weekend. Some artists, though, would never agree to be in the film; Neil Young (who joined Crosby, Stills and Nash right before their performance) and the Grateful Dead said no (they didn’t appear in the Monterey Pop movie either). Albert Grossman refused to allow any of his artists to be in the film, though Warner Bros. eventually got Richie Havens on board—the Band and Janis Joplin would finally appear in the director’s cut twenty-five years later.
At one point, we could have owned the film outright. Before Artie signed the Warner Bros. deal, Bob Maurice contacted John Roberts, pleading with him to invest $100,000, which they really needed to pay for Kodak raw stock, cameramen flying in from the West Coast, and other expenses. In exchange, Woodstock Ventures would own all the rights. It was a gamble and John was so overwhelmed with our skyrocketing costs and underwhelmed with what he saw as potential for the film, he said no. He thought it was unlikely that a documentary film would ever make a cent.
All afternoon on Thursday, people poured into the site. The film’s associate producer Dale Bell, Michael Wadleigh, and their crew arrived, including documentary cameramen David Myers and Al Wertheimer, among others, and editors/assistant directors Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese, just out of NYU Film School. John Binder, the unit supervisor, later remembered asking Michael Margetts for the lay of the land, who told him, “‘When I see something interesting, I just press the button’—that set the tone for the whole movie. You couldn’t organize Woodstock, and nobody did.”
DALE BELL: I had put together eighty people in four days to get them up there by Thursday morning, after begging, borrowing, and stealing all of the camera gear so that we would have the same interchangeable gear—lenses, magazines, cameras, motors. Thank God for Michael and Chris Langhart and Steve Cohen and Chip: I had asked for a lip on the fron
t of that stage—plywood four-by-eights, strung at about four feet below the level of the stage so that our guys would have absolutely perfect camera angles. We knew that everything was going to be handheld. We knew that we needed eight magazine changers and assistant camera people under the stage all the time when there was music, just changing magazines and keeping track of who shot what, and what camera roll it was.
Some of the film crew began shooting local residents and their reactions to the festival, as well as people abandoning their cars on clogged roads, which by midafternoon on Thursday were already backed up for miles. Tiny Route 17B was becoming a twenty-mile-long parking lot, and we started hearing reports that the delays on the larger Route 17 were beginning to back up into the New York State Thruway.
PARRY TEASDALE, UNDERGROUND VIDEOGRAPHER: I was twenty-one that summer and knew the area because my grandmother had a summer house nearby. I got there early in the week, set up camp, left briefly, then came back with some friends on Thursday night. I remember feeling, as we were walking along Hurd Road, that we were in a sea of humanity. Everyone was going only in one direction—in. And there really wasn’t any room for vehicles, they couldn’t make it in. It was way too crowded. All around me it was dark, and all you could hear were people walking and talking quietly. Occasionally somebody would sing, or somebody would bang on a drum, but I felt what I thought it must be like to walk on a pilgrimage in India.
ROB KENNEDY, FESTIVALGOER: I was sixteen and hitched from northern New Jersey with three of my friends. We split into groups of two and hitchhiked up Route 17, and interestingly enough both groups hit Bethel at sunset on Thursday, so we didn’t have too much trouble reuniting. It was a fairly long walk in, and we stopped as we got closer to the festival grounds to set up tents and eat something. By the time we did that, my friend Mark had found the festival site and came back beaming. We were all getting off on acid pretty heavy and wandered on to the festival. We brought meager supplies that got consumed rapidly. But I don’t remember being hungry much. We all had tickets that proved to be totally unnecessary. I had sent for my Friday ticket by mail and bought my Saturday and Sunday tickets last minute from another friend who didn’t go. Once we were on the festival grounds, we pretty much staked out one area so we wouldn’t get lost from each other. On acid, the numbers of people were overwhelming. The concept of finding your way back to a huddle of four friends when you went to piss was mind-boggling. So we pretty much hunkered down in one spot from Thursday night through Sunday morning. I don’t think any of us believed there were that many hippies in the USA. We were the only freaks in our high school at that time. We knew there were some in surrounding towns, but we had no idea. That was one of the most empowering aspects of Woodstock. We realized we had the numbers.