The Road to Woodstock

by Michael Lang

  FRED HERRERA OF SWEETWATER: We were the first electric group onstage, with mics for the amps and drums. So we were essentially the sound crew’s sound check. They were adjusting levels all the way through our set, so everything was intermittent. I could sort of hear from the main speakers what was going out to the audience. But I could not hear what was going on on the other side of the stage, and they could not hear us. We were trying to listen to our amplifiers, but we were so spread out that even the bass I played, which was cranked up quite a bit, would just get lost. It would just get sucked up outside in the air there.

  With a haunting tenor voice, singer-songwriter Bert Sommer performed “Jennifer,” “She’s Gone,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” and other ballads, while sitting cross-legged onstage, backed by electric guitars. Artie would produce his next two albums.

  More of the musicians had been showing up at the Holiday Inn in Liberty, and we sent Joyce over in a helicopter to make sure everything was okay there.

  JOYCE MITCHELL: Everyone was at the motel, and they were fighting over rooms—there weren’t enough rooms. Janis was there. I tried to cool her off in the lobby because she was very drunk and very demanding. The Grateful Dead were sweethearts. They said they would share rooms. The Who were there and it was difficult to get Keith Moon settled down. The son of a bitch tried to rape me! I had to really push him to get out of his room. He was grabbing me.

  ELLEN SANDER, MUSIC JOURNALIST: Several miles away, the culmination of pop history was unfolding, but a couple of hundred of its superstars and their touring staff were stranded at the Holiday Inn. The Airplane and the Who had just played Tanglewood a few days before, so they were already there. Somebody had changed a $5 bill at the bar and put all the quarters into the jukebox, playing “Hey Jude” sixty times end to end. The whole bar sang along with the chorus, linking arms, swaying from side to side and laughing, among them Jack Casady, Marty Balin [both of Jefferson Airplane], Janis Joplin, and Jerry Garcia. A high-stakes poker game was going on at the corner of the bar. Later [folk singer] Rosalie Sorrells and Jerry Garcia sat on the floor with guitars and sang folk songs together. Judy Collins headed a long luncheon table in the dining room with [record executives] Clive Davis and Jac Holzman in company.

  After darkness fell, Tim Hardin finally said he was ready to go on. His band had arrived, but he stepped onstage alone with his guitar, playing some of those gorgeous songs he’d written, like “If I Were a Carpenter” and “Reason to Believe.” His set started out strong.

  GILLES MALKINE, GUITARIST FOR TIM HARDIN: I was twenty and playing rhythm guitar with Tim. He did the first half of the set solo. But then, halfway through, he brought out the band. You could not see the end of the crowd. It was like all of humanity looking at you. And most everybody in the band was okay with that, I think, but I was pretty frazzled. I was at the end of my tether. He suddenly threw a title of a song at us that had not yet been written. His wife, Susan, had written a poem called “Snow White Lady” about heroin, so he said, “‘Snow White Lady’ in F,” and he put this crumpled piece of paper on the keyboard and started playing, and so we just went along with him, but it was a disaster. He was kind of chanting—it was a single chord and he was looking for the tune in there. Okay, you might do that in a café somewhere, but Jesus Christ, the whole world was looking at us! From that first tune, we started to get a little better, but any other crowd would have walked out on us, we were that bad. It was so disastrous that afterward I quit the music business for many years.

  I was disappointed when things fell apart onstage for Tim. But once it was over, he was relieved and happy.

  About ten thirty, we were getting Ravi Shankar ready to go on when it started thundering. He was telling Al Aronowitz, “I am frightened in case something goes wrong with so many people,” but once he got out there, his playing transcended the problems of the weather. The vibe was intense. When those spiritual moments would happen, you could really feel them. You could feel everybody coming together.

  GILLES MALKINE: One act that was miles above everybody else was Ravi Shankar. There was no speaking, it was all pure music. What he did with that crowd was amazing, just with music. And at certain points in the performance, people would stand up and yell because of where he took them. They say it takes several lifetimes to make a sitar player. I believe it, because talk about leaving your mind behind! And just going with the music and with the flow and with a couple of others you’ve played with all your life, like Ustad Alla Rakha, who was the tabla player. He woke up that audience and took them along with him on this soaring musical journey. Nobody else could touch that.

  AL ARONOWITZ, REPORTER FOR THE New York Post: Shankar was in the midst of his performance when the rain began falling, accompanied by a few lightning bolts, and the water was frightening. The rain began collecting in the canopy atop the stage and threatened to collapse it. At another point, festival guards expressed the fear that the stage, built on scaffolding, was beginning to slide in the mud. The harder the rain fell, however, the more determined the crowd seemed to stay. Huddled around bonfires, most of the audience waited an hour while the music was interrupted because the water threatened to short the electrical equipment. But even in the rain, the crowd gave standing ovations.

  The darkness and the heavy rains caused some false alarms and fears about the stage’s sturdiness. Because it was built on the rise of a hill, we were concerned that it was going to move. It may have a bit, but there were poles set in concrete, and if it moved at all, it could have been only a few inches. The tarp hanging over the stage filled with water, so Saturday we used the crane to push the tarp up to empty it. Otherwise a ton of water could have come down on someone’s head.

  After Ravi Shankar’s set, the folksinger Melanie wandered up backstage with Artie Ripp. A friend of Artie Kornfeld’s from the record business, he was working with Melanie and had suggested that she play a few songs with her acoustic guitar. She was fairly unknown then, but from the first verse of “Beautiful People,” she really connected with that unique, quavering voice of hers. All alone up there in the dark, she managed to totally tap into thousands of people huddled together before her. Inspired by what happened, she would go home and write “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain),” which became her first big hit in 1970.

  MELANIE: It was magical. I had my first out-of-body experience. I started walking across the bridge to the stage, and I just left my body, going to a higher view. I watched myself walk onto the stage, sit down, and sing a couple of lines. It started to rain right before I went on. Ravi Shankar had just finished up his performance, and [Chip Monck] said that if you lit candles, it would help to keep the rain away. By the time I finished my set, the whole hillside was a mass of little flickering lights. It was an amazing experience to be there, to be in that time and live through that group of people who were acknowledging each other, as if we were all in one family. Woodstock was an affirmation that we were part of each other.

  The lighting of candles would set a precedent that carries on to this day. The candles became lighters, which have since become cell phones.

  The rain threatened Arlo Guthrie and his band’s performance, but we decided to go for it. By then Arlo, thinking he was off the hook, had dropped some acid. He wasn’t up for going on, but we talked him into it. He did a great set, opening with “Coming Into Los Angeles.” He carried on a kind of one-sided conversation with the audience, stopping in the middle of Dylan’s “Walking Down the Line” to follow a loose thought. Everyone loved it.

  Joan Baez, who was pregnant, did not seem at all put out by the delays. She brought a cup of hot tea to Melanie, who’d been coughing. At one point, Artie and I were standing together and he was saying, “How am I ever going back to Fifty-sixth Street after this—it’s changed my life,” trying to explain to me what he was going through, when Joan walked up and said to him, “I think he knows.” She had a good sense of humor, taking it all in stride even when Abbie Hoffman handed the renown
ed pacifist a switchblade as a gift.

  Finally, just after midnight, Joan went onstage. She started her set with the uplifting gospel song “Oh Happy Day.” She looked out into the crowd and told them about her husband David Harris, who’d just been imprisoned for draft resistance, then sang his favorite old union ballad, “Joe Hill.” Her next song was inspired by her sister Mimi, “Sweet Sir Galahad,” and Joan joked that it was the only song she’d written that she would sing in public. After the folk songs, she moved into some country-rock numbers cowritten by Gram Parsons, “Hickory Wind” and “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man.” Then Joan’s moving, unaccompanied “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” followed by “We Shall Overcome” ended the first day of music around 2 A.M.

  JOHN MORRIS: At the end of Friday night, we still had so many things to do that were stacked up. It was more like it was the first round, and “What can we do here? What can we shore up? Where are we? What’s happening? What are we lacking? What are we doing?” We worked all that night. They were out there and we had to take care of them somehow. We had to make it work.

  Friday felt like an eternity, but an eternity in heaven. Against all odds and despite the infrastructure being stretched almost to the breaking point, we were living—at least for the moment—in the kind of world we had envisioned.

  There had been a million moving, spinning parts, all coming together, and I was in my element. After about a two-hour nap late Friday night in one of the trailers, I was ready to start doing it all over again.

  eleven

  AUGUST 16, 1969

  “If we don’t get the cash, we’re not going on!”

  It’s late Saturday afternoon and the Grateful Dead’s road manager, Jon McIntire, and the Who’s John Wolff have cornered me by my production trailer. Emotions are heating up. It’s the road manager’s job to get paid before the band hits the stage.

  “Look, we’ll give you a check,” I tell them. “The check will be good after the weekend. Everybody’s in the same boat—there is no cash on the site. The gates are down, it’s a free concert, you know what we’re up against—”

  “That’s not good enough—it’s got to be cash or else no music,” Wolff repeats. We owe them the second half of their fees: the Dead $3,375 and the Who $6,250. I don’t know how we could get the money in time for them to go on.

  “We’re in a real bind for cash,” I repeat, “but I will give you a check now and you can go to the bank Monday morning and cash it, and I promise it will be good.”

  “Only if it’s a certified check,” they insist.

  It dawns on me how to get these guys to let their acts play. Deep down, I know the Dead won’t pose a problem; their friends are here, they’ll play no matter what. Jerry Garcia has already been jamming at the free stage. The Who, on the other hand, might be looking for an excuse not to perform. They still seem pissed off that they agreed to play what will turn out to be the most important show of their career. Since Pete Townshend arrived, he’s been scowling at everyone and keeping to himself. This peace-and-love thing isn’t for him.

  I look straight at Wolff. “If that’s your decision, I’ll go out and make the announcement that the Who won’t be performing because we have no cash.”

  The Who are important musically and are one of the best live acts around, so this is a bit of a gamble. I know I’d never make that announcement. But, with all the changes in lineups and the unscheduled acts, the audience probably won’t even notice if they don’t play.

  Wolff and McIntire exchange glances. “Forget it!” Wolff says before they stomp off. That’s the last I’ll hear from them until Monday, I think.

  Mel Lawrence was the first of our staff up on Saturday morning. At dawn, he walked around the site to make sure everyone had made it through the rainy night okay. Mel was into preemptive action and wanted to take care of business early.

  MEL LAWRENCE: After this incredible Friday night, people just slept in the bowl—right in the spot where they were. All these people were asleep and it was quiet, and I made my way down to the stage and the production offices, where everybody’s asleep too. It was maybe six or something, and I knew we had to clean up the place, so my crew and I got garbage bags and we put them all along one side of the bowl in a line.

  When the crowd began to wake up, Mel went up onstage and made a little speech about “why don’t we just clean up our areas? We’re going to pass along garbage bags for you to put your trash in, and then we’ll pick them up.” That worked. We put on some music, and we were off to Saturday.

  ABBIE HOFFMAN: The morning after the rains came…a cat came out of his tent and made a fist at the sky: “Fuck off rain, we’re staying here forever!” It was then that the battle began for me. It was then that I felt at peace. It was about 5 A.M. and I had a hunk of brown canvas over me with a hole cut out for the head. I reminded myself of General George Patton inspecting the troops of Normandy as I walked around assessing the damage. The main performance area had turned into a huge slide of mud, people, collapsed tents, overturned motorcycles, cans, bottles, and garbage galore—man, there was more fuckin’ garbage unloaded in Woodstock Nation that night than in the Lower East Side during the entire garbage strike.

  Our plans for garbage removal were extensive. They were based on calculations made by Peter, Stan, and Mel. We had estimated the number of cups, plates, cans, bottles, and food wrappers we’d use in a day. We weighed what we thought would be the average size, multiplied it by four days, and then multiplied that number by two hundred thousand. With that information, we contracted for the largest trash compactors available and placed them strategically around the site. We would collect the garbage, take it to the compactors, then load it into trucks to haul to a local dump. A pretty good plan, and it worked beautifully the first day—until we got to the “haul it away” part—traffic was just too heavy to make it through.

  With radio reports about traffic jams and a lack of supplies coming in, rumors about food and water shortages, chaos and misery were rampant in the ill-informed media. To the press, it was a disaster area. I knew things were not that bad. I made my way around the site to see for myself. Going through the crowds, I ran into Mel, who was working on a fix for one of the lines of overflowing Portosans. The honeywagons had been able to service them on Friday, but by Saturday they were getting stuck trying to get off the site. Mel resorted to a variation of one of our earlier sanitation plans: dig deep trenches and backfill them with earth after each dump. We got a backhoe in to dig a trench a hundred feet long, wide and deep, and that’s where the waste would go.

  MEL LAWRENCE: The trench was on top of a hill. That’s where they dumped the waste. And the next year, I heard they had a great corn crop there!

  MIRIAM YASGUR: Kids were running motorcycles through our fields planted with corn right across from our office plant. They were breaking cornstalks, and Max promptly called Michael and said, “Do you know they’re destroying this field, which is not part of the land that I rented to you at all?” It didn’t take very long until a whole group of young kids came out and put signs all around the field: DON’T RIDE THROUGH THIS FIELD…THESE ARE MAX’S CROPS. Nobody ever rode through the field again. They kept going around it. People were camping along the sides of the road, and they started coming up my driveway and I went out and I said to the young people, “Look, we cannot have people camping along the driveway. Our men are working, they have to get in and out.” They moved. Nobody camped on my driveway. Nobody camped near the dairy.

  The board of health had sent a guy to the site on Friday morning to inspect everything. According to Mel, he could have had us shut down. But he brought his daughter with him and she disappeared as soon as they arrived. He spent the entire weekend looking for her—and never got around to filing his report. I’m sure his daughter was having the time of her life.

  In the early morning, I headed over to the Hog Farm and Movement City. Unbelievably, en route, I ran into my old friend Ellen Lemisch. She hopped on the back
of my bike, and we talked as I took her on my rounds. At one point, she said, “Do you realize what you’ve done, Lang?” That shook me, as I suddenly did realize that this was now something we had done—no longer something we were trying to do. All our spirits had set sail days ago and Woodstock was now moving under its own steam.

  Throughout the day, between sets and whenever I thought things were under control, I’d take a few minutes to get on my bike and check out our not-so-little city—the hospital tents, the heliport, the free stage, the various campgrounds, Movement City, the free kitchens. Communications between the different areas on-site were limited, so that was the only way to get a real-time take on the situation. Everybody seemed to be holding it together. I said a quick hello to Paul Krassner, who was hanging out at the Yippie booth.

  PAUL KRASSNER, YIPPIE COFOUNDER AND PUBLISHER OF THE REALIST: Woodstock fit our original vision of what the protest at the Chicago Democratic Convention should have been the year before: an alternative event with music, a special community with people who shared the same value system where you couldn’t separate the idealism from the irreverence.

  STAN GOLDSTEIN: The crowd began to be its own self-policing, self-regulating, self-controlling entity.

  There were makeshift lean-tos, tepees, pup tents, shelters made out of bales of hay. Just as we’d hoped, sprinkled around the perimeter were little encampments of people sharing everything. I noticed fewer and fewer people manning the Movement City booths set up by various political organizations. The entire gathering had become Movement City.