The Road to Woodstock

by Michael Lang

  TOM SMUCKER, ACTIVIST AND WRITER: We got up there with our MDS literature. And we set up our booth with the others. And behind it was this printing press that was going to run off a newspaper each day…Abbie Hoffman was there, SDS, Motherfuckers, Peaceniks, swamis, Meher Babaites, the Hot Chow Mein truck guys, we were all there, trying to pick up on it…But the booths were never used. The scene [at the festival] was so far-out that people started leaving [our area] right away. Literature got rained on or was never distributed…You took the massive energy, the freedom…all the good music, and general friendliness, and dug that…In the rain and mud, water shortages, heat and cold, the Hog Farm served the people, whatever their ideology.

  More important than politics was community. All these different people coming together and getting along, sharing. The Hog Farm kept several food lines going, and though crowds were queued up at the Portosans and phone banks, no one seemed to mind. People were calling their friends and telling them how great things were. Word started to get out that the picture was quite different from what was being painted by the media.

  The only complaints I heard were from people buying tickets to exchange for burgers and Cokes at the Food for Love concession stands. The lines were long and then they had to wait a second time for the food. Jeffrey and company had mismanaged their supplies, and they were already running low. So they started overcharging for cold hot dogs ($1 each, when the going price was a quarter), which people had to stand in line hours to get. This really pissed off the Motherfuckers and some of the other Movement City people, not to mention the hungry kids.

  Because of reports of shortages, local groups in Sullivan County banded together and gathered thousands of food donations to be airlifted to the site. People who showed up after walking for miles told stories of townspeople offering them food and drink along the way. Stories hit the press of price gouging, but I think most of the residents of White Lake were giving what they could.

  BILL WARD: We’d left the site Friday night to try to make it to the Diamond Horseshoe, got stuck in the jam, and abandoned the car, walking five miles to the motel. Saturday morning I got up early and went back to the car. There were cars everywhere, abandoned all along the road. There was garbage and people everywhere. A nice little old couple along the street had all these hippies camped out in their yard, and they were bringing them food and water, and people were sharing Cokes and stuff. All these groups of people who appeared to be so different were all standing around chatting and sharing things.

  TOM SMUCKER: The few inconveniences gave everyone something to do and developed a reason for cooperation, which made you feel good.

  GILLES MALKINE: Everybody rallied to help each other, to be like family, to play in the mud, to share, to help. A lot of the townspeople felt it too. People said over and over, “The kids are wonderful. We helped them. We ran out of food too.” It was a wonderful thing and brought out the best in everybody. The rain was almost like, “Okay, it’s time to wash now, it’s time to clean up, and let’s not forget where we are.” It wasn’t threatening, and it didn’t dampen the spirit at all. It was like, “Oh, now we’ve got to put up with this—well, we will.” And it was funny and made the mud fun.

  CHRISTINE OLIVEIRA: After it rained, it was awful. It was mud city! I didn’t get that wet because I stayed under the tent, but the mud factor was just unbelievable. We couldn’t get to the concession stands because of the mud slide. It became a joke. We brought a lot of food, and you could always get something. We were right by the Hog Farm. They had macrobiotic food, very healthy vegetables, rice—it was tasty.

  ABBIE HOFFMAN: There were banks of pay phones, and we had one pay phone where our organizers would be the only ones in line. After some hours on Saturday, the festival owners gave us walkie-talkies, gave us access to a helicopter. It was kind of interesting, because the people flying the helicopters were, of course, National Guard. And they were ready to go to Vietnam—they were military types, and here we were, the antithesis. But when it came to things like saving lives and getting out good information about not drinking certain water, all of a sudden the casual sex and the nudity and the drug smoking, and the fact that we were against the war, didn’t matter. So in a sense, we were all Americans. And I can’t remember a single moment of friction.

  PARRY TEASDALE: A friend of mine was wandering around the site and told me on Saturday there was a guy doing video over in Movement City, and I said, “Somebody else doing video—how can that possibly be?” It was so new, I thought I was the only one around who had it. There was David Cort, and he had some portable video equipment, so I said, “Why don’t I get some of my equipment to your site?” I took it over to Movement City—my monitor, my camera, my recorder—and we set my system up at this kind of lean-to booth, so people could come by and see themselves and talk. At this time, seeing themselves on a video screen was a novelty. David and I also went around together and shot sequences of people who were working in the medical tent and people bringing in water—interviewing people and recording what was going on around Movement City.

  HUGH ROMNEY: There was an amazing energy, and once you surrendered to it, you could just keep going. That energy just took over. It was a sensational feeling to be used by the energy. What ran Woodstock was the spirit of volunteerism, that instant life-support system.

  More and more people, some who’d been traveling since Friday, continued to arrive. As the crowds mounted, the number of people who needed medical attention increased. Most of the cases were people who’d cut their feet on broken bottles. Helicopters transported serious cases to Sullivan County hospitals. By Saturday, there would be some twenty doctors and fifty nurses on-site—and more due in. Horribly, we found out early Saturday morning that a seventeen-year-old, Raymond Mizsak, from Trenton, New Jersey, was killed after being run over by a tractor while he slept in his bedroll next to the road. It was devastating news. There would be two more deaths on Sunday, one from a heroin overdose, the other from a burst appendix. Over the course of the weekend, two babies were born—one in a car stuck in traffic on the road and the other in a local hospital after the mother was airlifted out in a helicopter.

  The community reached out to help: when the local facilities were overwhelmed, a high school in Monticello was transformed into a hospital ward. A regional airlines, now defunct, Mohawk, volunteered the use of a forty-seat plane to fly in Don Goldmacher and June Finer from New York City’s Medical Committee for Human Rights, along with other medical personnel and supplies. We expanded our medical operations by turning the staff “canteen”—a huge pink-and-white-striped tent—into another field hospital.

  PENNY STALLINGS: Peter Goodrich was in charge of what was supposed to be the workers’ break tent. By Saturday afternoon it was clear that none of us were going to get any sleep, let alone stroll over to the canteen for a meal. So I proposed to Peter that we convert the tent into a medical clinic. People were getting cuts and sprains from walking barefoot in the mud. And there were enough bad trips to fill a mini psycho ward.

  There was fire in Peter’s eyes as he informed me that he had no intention of relinquishing his tent. Peter had decked the last person he had had a disagreement with—so it took all my courage to tell him that I would take the responsibility for making the change. In other words, this was going to happen—and I would fight for it if I had to. Seething with rage, he turned and sloshed through the mud, ranting all the way. To my relief, Chris Langhart had no problem with taking an order from me. Along with two of his guys, he ran water and electricity lines into the tent with dazzling speed. Other crew guys laid plywood down on the wet ground and brought in the cots, blankets, and medical supplies that had been delivered to us by the National Guard.

  Abbie Hoffman, whose father had been a medical-supply distributor, jumped in and became a huge help, lending his activist ingenuity to tense situations. He worked with the doctors in the medical tents and assisted the Hog Farm. Originally bad trips and broken bones were being tre
ated in the same facility and that was not working out. A separate trips tent was created and operated by the Hog Farm, which solved the problem. The Hog Farm’s method to deal with a bad trip was to gently talk the person down, offering love and comfort until the worst was over. Then they’d ask the person to stay on and help the next one who came in freaking out.

  ROZ PAYNE: I was helping Abbie in the hospital tent with Don Goldmacher and June Finer. June was a fabulous doctor who worked in clinics, and Don worked in a methadone clinic in the South Bronx, and they were always at all the demonstrations.

  ABBIE HOFFMAN: Signs went up fast: CUTS, WAITING ROOM, ADMISSION, VOLUNTEERS, REST, EMERGENCY, HEAT TABLETS. Old friends began coming over. Abe Peck, ex-editor of the Chicago Seed and one of the best cats alive, ran the volunteer operation. Roz Payne from Newsreel took over information control and kept the visitors out of the area.

  A local politician requested that the National Guard, which was bivouacked nearby, supply helicopters. The guard agreed, and their helicopters transported donated food—in all, something like ten thousand sandwiches, water, fruit, and canned goods were donated by people all over Sullivan County. The first National Guard chopper couldn’t find a place to land near the free kitchens, so it left until someone reached Stan. He rounded up a massive group of people in a field near the kitchens, got them to hold hands and form a giant circle, then sit down. They placed a marker in the middle to indicate the landing spot. Once they landed, everyone in the circle became porters, unloading the helicopter and transporting the food to the free kitchens.

  At some point during the afternoon, a New York Times reporter grabbed me for an interview. I quickly told him, “It’s about the best behaved five hundred thousand people in one place on a rainy, muddy weekend that can be imagined. There have been no fights or incidents of violence of any kind.” A state police official told the same reporter he was “dumbfounded by the size of the crowd. I can hardly believe that there haven’t been even small incidents of misbehavior by the young people.”

  HENRY DILTZ: Behind the stage there was a lake and everyone would go nude swimming. They were really like gypsies. They all took off their clothes and went swimming in the pond. Then I got out and went up to the wharf and started taking photos and nobody cared. I took this beautiful photo of one girl kind of bobbing around in the water with lily pads. Looked like a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

  JANE FRIEDMAN: We walked around and we weren’t on acid or any drug, but it was like being on a drug, just feeling the total relaxation of this entire huge group of people. Everybody was relaxed. There wasn’t any tension, there wasn’t any stress, there wasn’t any anger, there weren’t petty squabbles. Probably it was all the drugs, but at the same time, it was this big mass of wonderful serenity. And the artists were really cool. Everybody was very proud to be there.

  Quill, the band from Boston that had performed the public-service concerts for us in Wallkill, opened the show on Saturday a little after noon. After a rainy morning, it had turned hot and humid. Quill had all kinds of percussion instruments they threw out to the audience to get people to play along. They were an upbeat young band in the unenviable position of getting things going while the sound was being adjusted. So they played free-form jams and psychedelia-tinged songs like “They Live the Life” and “That’s How I Eat.”

  By then, John had corralled Joe McDonald into playing to keep the crowd happy while we set up for Santana. He was due to go on with his band the Fish on Sunday, but when John spotted him hanging out, he grabbed him. There’d been talk that Joe might go solo anyway, so basically John convinced him somehow that there was no time like the present to give it a try.

  COUNTRY JOE McDONALD: I said I didn’t have a guitar. I didn’t even have a guitar pick, just a matchbook cover. They gave me a rope for a strap.

  I just sang a mixed-bag folk set. Not too many people were paying attention to me. I was watching them and they were talking. They knew Country Joe and the Fish, so I wasn’t really surprised. I was just Muzak or something. I knew my job was just to go up and kill time. But after about an hour, I got more confident, I figured I had nothing more to lose. Boredom brings on confidence. I stopped playing for a minute and went over and asked [my manager] if I should try out the cheer. I came back out.

  And I said, “Give me an F.” And everybody turned and looked at me, and said, “F.”

  Then I said, “Give me a U.” And they yelled back, “U!” And it went on like that. And I went on singing the song and they all kept staring at me. My adrenaline got really pumping.

  Though the crowd might not have connected with Joe’s acoustic “Ring of Fire” or “Tennessee Stud,” they totally got the “Fish Cheer” and his wry antiwar song, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” which became a Woodstock anthem and a highlight of the movie. Hundreds of thousands of people singing along to “So it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam” made quite a statement against the war.

  Between sets, Hugh Romney ended up onstage making announcements, becoming an audience favorite in the process.

  HUGH ROMNEY: I was working pretty much full-time with the drug talk-down situation, busy moving from one situation to the next. How I ended up getting onstage was that I had some announcements to give Chip to make, and I was also on his case because he’d made this announcement about avoiding the “blue acid.” Chip said, “Come on up and do it yourself.” He had no problem letting me talk on the microphone, and the only times I ever went up there were when I had something to say toward the collective consciousness. Later, when the rains came and they were announcing it was a disaster area, I said, “There’s a little bit of heaven in every disaster area!”

  Hugh calmed people’s fears about the “bad acid.” “It’s not poison,” he said from the stage, “it’s just poorly manufactured.”

  Santana was up next, and I was really looking forward to their performance. I hoped they would boost the energy level of the day. Hardly anyone had seen them on the East Coast, though they’d been playing around the Bay Area for a couple of years.

  CARLOS SANTANA: We got to Woodstock at eleven in the morning. We’d heard it was a disaster area. They flew us in on a helicopter. We hung around with Jerry Garcia and we found out that we didn’t have to go on until eight at night. They told us just to cool out and take it easy.

  One thing led to another. I wanted to take some mescaline. Just at the point that I was peaking, this guy came over and said, “Look, if you don’t go on right now, you guys are not going to play.” I went out there and I saw this ocean as far as I could see. An ocean of flesh and hair and teeth and hands. I just played. I prayed that the Lord would keep me in tune and in time. I had played loaded before, but not to that big of a crowd. Because it was like plugging into a whole bunch of hearts—and all those people at the same time. But we managed. It was incredible. I’ll never forget the way the music sounded, bouncing up against a field of bodies. For the band as a whole, it was great.

  GREGG ROLIE, SANTANA VOCALIST/KEYBOARDIST: We played to each other. Carlos’s back was usually to the audience because we played like jazz players. And 500,000 people happened to be there. You can see the first ten or twenty thousand; after that, it’s all just hair and teeth. So there was nothing to be afraid of. If I had known what it was all about and what Woodstock ended up meaning, I probably would have been frightened to death.

  With its monster rhythm section, Santana was the first group that really got everyone up and dancing. I flashed on my parents’ nightclub where people did the mambo on Saturday nights. Carlos Santana had merged that Latin sound with rock and roll and it was phenomenal. On “Soul Sacrifice,” Michael Shrieve played one of most amazing drum solos I have ever heard, with the percussionists joining in and Carlos’s soaring guitar building everything to a crescendo. The audience went nuts—it was obvious another star was being born.

  MICHAEL SHRIEVE, SANTANA DRUMMER: The size o
f the crowd was so big, it was like standing on the beach and looking at the ocean, and you see the water and the horizon and sky. It was a sea of people as far as you could see. We were like a little street gang there making music together and hoping that it went over. But when I look at the drum solo I took, it drives me crazy because of some choices that I made, in terms of stopping the groove and going really soft. But for the audience it worked. It was very tribal.

  People continued to pack the bowl, while more and more artists and friends filtered in backstage. While we cleared the stage of Santana’s equipment, Chip Monck spotted John Sebastian and grabbed him to play a few songs onstage. He had dropped some acid but went on anyway, talking to the audience like they were old friends.

  “This is a mindfuck,” he told them and started a kind of acid rap before doing “Rainbows All Over Your Blues,” “Darlin’ Be Home Soon,” “Younger Generation.” By the time he finished, the sun had come out. John has since said it was his worst performance ever, but I thought it was wonderful how he embraced that huge audience as family, reinforcing the idea of our gathering as a new community.

  HENRY DILTZ, PHOTOGRAPHER: I got behind John Sebastian onstage and took a shot of this lone figure in this colorful jacket with this sea of humanity in front. John and his tie-dyed clothes, standing there and giving the peace sign. All little bumps of heads off into infinity. All the way over to your left, and all to your right. And the hillside totally covered with camps and tents.

  JOHN SEBASTIAN: I’ve spent years living down the outfit I was wearing—it was tie-dyed Levi’s jeans and jacket. My Woodstock “suit of lights,” as someone called it.