by Michael Lang
We put out calls to all the suppliers and staff who had not shown up and urged them to get there immediately before they got stuck in traffic. Dr. Abruzzi finally arrived, and seeing how many people were already there, he arranged for more medical supplies and personnel. Urgent calls went out for additional helicopters as it became obvious we needed them not only to transport sick people but to ferry supplies.
John, who arrived Wednesday morning, and Joel, who’d been on-site since Monday, were really upset about the thousands of people already inside the bowl. All along, we’d said the camping area would be free. But now it looked like the prime spots in front of the stage had already been taken by people who arrived early—before fences, ticket takers, and booths were in place. John talked to Wes about how to handle the thousands of people already inside, and he advised him to let it go, that there was no way to clear out that many people without inciting a riot.
WES POMEROY: It was like being in combat, everything was changing. But you knew what you had, so you just changed with it. It didn’t get really hectic until just about the day before. When all the people started coming at us, we saw them coming in and we started dealing with them as best you could. We knew that we would have no fence and no gate—and that was a great disappointment. But the fence was irrelevant, and there was a hole dug under the fence—and the idea was that they’d quietly let out the word that you could sneak in if you wanted to.
BILL GRAHAM: I went up the day before. I walked around constantly and it was a sight to behold. I thought at the time that it couldn’t come off smoothly because it was such a huge thing and there were no blueprints. It was a first. I knew there were going to be some faults—namely traffic. Ninety thousand mice trying to get into one hole, there had to be some problems.
Thursday night, John, Joel, Peter Goodrich, and I met again with the Food for Love guys at their trailer. They wouldn’t venture outside but sent their attorney to tell us they refused to operate the food concessions unless they got 100 percent of the profits, after reimbursing the $75,000 John had fronted for food. John had really counted on this income and we were all outraged at their extortionary tactics—but as Wes advised us, we agreed to their demands in hopes of fixing it afterward.
Later that night, the Diamond Horseshoe, where nearly two hundred of our staff had been staying, caught on fire and everyone had to flee—luckily no one was hurt. Probably more than half the people staying there were at the site, up all night working. The fire trucks couldn’t get through the jammed roads, but those at the hotel managed to put out the fire. Apparently it was an electrical short in the basement that started it.
Journalists who were arriving in droves kept asking me if we were going to pull it off, was there going to be three days of peace and music? Was the audience going to be peaceful, or would there be violence and chaos like at the other festivals?
“If it turns bad,” I told a reporter from the Washington Post, “they’re not turning against anybody but themselves. Our festival is being done by the people who are the culture. If it can’t be done this way, then I was wrong, wrong about everything!” Ticia, who was by my side, as she had been for the past few weeks, spoke up. “If it comes out the way we dreamed it,” she said, “then people are going to have a different view of this culture—of us.” Ticia couldn’t have been more right.
“Take charge and keep moving”—Harry Lang’s words would come back to me many times that weekend.
THREE DAYS OF PEACE AND MUSIC
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15
Richie Havens
Sweetwater
Bert Sommer
Tim Hardin
Ravi Shankar
Melanie
Arlo Guthrie
Joan Baez
SATURDAY, AUGUST 16
Quill
Country Joe McDonald
Santana
John Sebastian
Keef Hartley Band
Incredible String Band
Canned Heat
Mountain
Grateful Dead
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Janis Joplin
Sly and the Family Stone
The Who
Jefferson Airplane
SUNDAY, AUGUST 17
Joe Cocker and the Grease Band
Country Joe and the Fish
Ten Years After
The Band
Johnny Winter
Blood, Sweat and Tears
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Paul Butterfield Blues Band
Sha Na Na
Jimi Hendrix
ten
AUGUST 15, 1969
“Hey, Richie, how about going on in about an hour?”
“No, man, not me! Get somebody else! I don’t want to be the first act out there!”
“Come on, your band’s here—you can handle this! Think about how cool it will be—to be the first artist onstage.”
“No, man, my bass player’s not here. And if the show’s starting late, and I go out there, the crowd’s gonna go crazy and toss beer cans at me!”
“Well, think about it…”
It’s three o’clock Friday afternoon and I’m trying to convince Richie Havens to kick off the festival. We’ve advertised that the music starts at four—and though people don’t seem restless, some have been huddled in front of the stage since Wednesday. I don’t want to risk the audience waiting too long without music. I’ve been through that before and I don’t want to repeat it.
I’ve been awake for nearly forty-eight hours straight, I’m on my third wind and running on fumes. We’ve been busy since dawn, trying to finish a million things so we can get the music under way. This is the part I love best: seeing everything come together, the final pieces falling into place. We’ve been working on this thing for what feels like a lifetime—and the exhilaration of opening day, combined with the unprecedented numbers of people, is just the juice I need to keep going.
But with the weather forecast not looking good for the weekend, there’s lots of doom talk about potential disasters. Mel, Stan, John Morris, and Chip alternately accost me with problems, ranging from leaking water pipes to angry landowners complaining about trespassers to our unfinished fence (Mel recommends taking down what’s left of it). John and Joel are despairing over the thousands of “freeloaders” who keep increasing by the hour. The roads continue to worsen and we’re worried that crucial supplies won’t make it through.
We’ve added to our helicopter squad to ferry in musicians staying at the Holiday Inn and Howard Johnson’s in Liberty. Among the first to arrive are Richie Havens and his guitarist and percussionist. I’ve spotted them hanging out in the nearly finished artists’ pavilion and figure I’ll at least broach the idea. Richie is a pro—he started playing Village coffeehouses in the early sixties. A tall man with a powerful voice and a unique rhythmic guitar style, he’s always seemed fearless. Our opening act, Sweetwater, a folk-rock band from L.A., is apparently stuck on the road driving from the motel in Liberty. Their equipment truck is in another traffic jam. I don’t want to press the issue right now with Richie, but I don’t let him out of my sight—knowing I may need to hit him up again in an hour or so.
RICHIE HAVENS: Me; my guitarist, Deano [Paul Williams]; and my drummer, Daniel Ben Zebulon, were squeezed into the helicopter’s glass-bubble cockpit. We were sitting behind the pilot with two conga drums, two guitars squeezed between us. The glass surrounded us, top to bottom. Looking below my feet, I could see the ground clearly, as if I were sitting on air. We banked a bit to the left and the sea of trees changed into a different kind of sea, just as beautiful. My mouth dropped when I saw all those people, hundreds of thousands of them. Definitely more than the two hundred fifty thousand reported in the New York papers the following morning, a whole lot more like half a million on the first day.
It was awesome, like double Times Square on New Year’s Eve in perfect daylight with no walls or buildings to hold people in place. The peopl
e filled the field and formed a human blanket across the road to the other side of the hill and into the forests all around the field, where nobody could possibly see the stage. Our helicopter landed right behind the stage. Once I got out, I looked around and saw three roads blocked by the blanket of people, especially the road on the bottom of the hill that went to the staging area.
It was quite mellow everywhere I looked. Even the people nearest the stage weren’t clamoring for anything to happen. It was a summer day and they were having a good time in the country. Some were smokin’ pot, dancing to portable radios, or throwing Frisbees around. Some were lying in the sun or taking naps or making out under blankets. But most of all they were meeting or hanging out with each other. No matter where they came from or how old or young they were. The vibes were good on this spot.
The last twenty-four hours had been a nonstop race against time. The crew worked through the night, trying to finish the stage and—as the sun came up—finally setting the forty-foot wooden turntable in place. If we can just keep going, I thought, I’m certain everything will be fine.
As if in answer to this thought, a beautiful woman arrived backstage with a large plastic bag of white powder. A good Samaritan had ordered a pound of cocaine to distribute to the various crews who’d been working all night and now had to get through what was sure to be a sleepless weekend. At about 8 A.M., all the crew heads gathered backstage in front of the production trailers. Just as the powder was dumped onto a card table to be divided and distributed, the clouds suddenly opened up and rain poured down like a fire hose. Before anyone could move, the sparkling granules turned into a gooey mess. People scrambled for the white paste as it ran in rivulets into the ground.
The gods had spoken again.
Last-minute decisions had to be made. I approached Chip Monck and John Morris and told them they were to handle MC duties. John had already been on the mic, testing it on Thursday when Bill Hanley and his team got the PA up and running. John has announced concerts at the Fillmore and loves the spotlight. Though Chip’s never done this before, he is articulate and has an authoritative presence that will make him a good MC.
CHIP MONCK: At seven in the morning on the first day, Michael came over to me onstage while I was working and said, “Chip, since there’s not much lighting to do, you have another job, master of ceremonies.” All of a sudden, you can actually hear my knees knocking together! I was terrified! He was just, “Do the job and get it done.” The first thing I announced was for people in the bowl to stand up and move back from the stage. Then all of the little notes started coming up about “Harold, please go to the blue tent in the back for your pills for your diabetes”—of course, that meant somebody was going to make a dope deal.
By Friday morning, at least two hundred thousand people were packed into Max’s fields. With the fences down, we all knew it was impossible to collect or sell tickets—even though people were looking for places to buy them—but we kept batting around ideas on what to do. I could not locate Keith O’Connor or Joel, so I called Mel to find out what had happened to our ticket operation. He said he was out of the loop. Apparently, the portable booths to be staffed with ticket sellers had never arrived.
The original plan was that the gates to the main field would open at 1 P.M.—but, of course, there were no gates. Artie thought we could get women “dressed in diaphanous gowns” to pass the hat—and he hadn’t even been dosed yet. When I saw the cameras filming our rather tense discussions, I ushered everyone away from the lens. Though I wanted Woodstock to be documented, there are limits.
Later that afternoon, after talking to John and Wes, we came to terms with what a couple hundred thousand people already knew. John was devastated. I had John Morris make an announcement from the stage, stating the obvious: “The concert is free from now on.” Following the applause, he went on: “The people putting this on are gonna take a bath—a big bath…” Our hope was that this message would inspire people to pitch in and help their neighbors; we were all in this together no matter what.
JOYCE MITCHELL: We were pretty sure it was going to be a free festival long before it was announced. It was a combination of all the various underground groups who came to Michael, plus the fact that we knew we could never get that damn fence built in time. There was an awful lot we knew that we didn’t share with other people. It wasn’t conspiratorial—it just was. It was really clear from Michael’s point of view that what was important was getting the festival on.
WES POMEROY: I felt like I was letting them down, like somehow I had failed, but I had to be honest: I told John, “There’s not anything we can do about it—I can’t protect your money,” and I suggested that if they wanted to, they could set up a couple of places where they encouraged people to donate. I thought that would be pretty effective, because people were feeling grateful. Some people were asking, “Where do we give our money?” But for some reason, that wasn’t carried forward.
Chip and John kept reassuring people from the stage that the concert would begin soon. We started playing the new Led Zeppelin and Crosby, Stills and Nash albums over the PA and the vibe seemed good. At one point Stephen Stills called John Morris in the production office. David Geffen or someone had told him about the crowds and he and the band were getting nervous about the gig. “Listen to this—we’re playing the record and people love it!” John reassured him, holding the receiver out so Stills could hear “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” followed by applause. “Okay, we’ll be there!” Stephen said. “We’re coming in by helicopter Sunday.”
At one point, Bill Graham turned up backstage. John Morris tried to engage him and commiserate about the traffic difficulties and crowds of people. Bill was at a loss; no one had ever had to deal with the things we were facing. “It’s time to stop being a promoter—and be a producer!” he told me. “You’ve got all these people here! What are you going to do with them?” “We’re going to take care of them, Bill,” I said, as I climbed the stairs to the stage.
Around 4 P.M., I was at a sort of command post Chip had set up off to the side of stage right. That’s where I would spend much of the weekend. I heard the roar of motorcycles and saw a group of about twenty bikes coming up West Shore Road, right behind the stage. Concern swept over me for a moment when I realized it was a gang of bikers from the city. When they passed by, I noticed how polite they were being to the people moving aside so they could get through. As they moved on, they were swallowed up by the crowd.
ROB KENNEDY, FESTIVALGOER: The audience was one living, breathing organism. There were no boundaries. There were naked people, high people, straight people, and every kind of people in between. It was a very cool crowd. A funny story: One of my friends brought a very large Sherlock Holmes–type pipe. The stem was at least ten inches long and it had a huge bowl that always induced cough attacks. After a particularly bad fit of hacking, another of our friends got furious and heaved the thing as far as he could behind us into the crowd. The pipe owner got really upset and started yelling, “Throw it back. Throw it back!” Suddenly it reappeared—still burning—right upside the head of the guy who threw it away. Instant karma!
In the woods near the concessions area, a casbah of drugs and paraphernalia sprang up. Wares included an assortment of acid, THC, mescaline, peyote, mushrooms, several varieties of grass and hash. Booths sold rolling papers, pipes, roach clips, cigarettes.
People kept pouring into the site all day. It took eight or more hours to drive the one hundred miles from New York. Traffic came to a standstill on the thruway miles before hitting exit 16, which led to a very clogged Route 17. Eventually, the state police would no longer allow cars to exit there. The twelve-mile-long Route 17B had stopped moving since Thursday night. By Friday afternoon, traffic was tied up within a twenty-mile radius of the site.
GREIL MARCUS, MUSIC JOURNALIST: The intrepid Rolling Stone crew thought it would be bright to beat the traffic, so we left the city early in the morning and headed up…We got to Monticello, a littl
e town eight miles from the festival…Eight miles of two-lane road jammed with thousands of cars that barely moved. Engines boiling over, people collapsed on the side of the road, everyone smiling in a common bewilderment. Automotive casualties looked like the skeletons of horses that died on the Oregon Trail. People began to improvise, drive on soft shoulders until they hit the few thousand who’d thought of the same thing, then stopping again. Finally the two lanes were transformed into four and still nothing moved…A lot of kids were pulling over and starting to walk through the fields. Beat-out kids heading back told us nothing moved up ahead and that we had six miles to go. It was a cosmic traffic jam, where all the cars fall into place like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and stay there forever…It was an amazing sight, the highway to White Lake: It looked, as someone said, like Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow.