The Road to Woodstock

by Michael Lang

  ALAN DOUGLAS, PRODUCER AND MUSIC EXECUTIVE: My guys ran out of film on Thursday, so we loaded the car on Friday to supply them with more film and cameras. There were six of us with cameras and film in everybody’s lap, and by the time we got there it was late. We finally got to a place where the cars were all parked on both sides of the road as far as you could see. The police stopped us and said, “I’m sorry, this is as far as you can go,” and we explained that we had what the camera people needed, and they said, “Sorry, you have to stay here, you cannot go any farther than this,” and made us park the car. I said, “Where is the site?” and they said, “It’s just a couple of miles,” and they pointed to a forest and a path.

  We all got out carrying stuff, and we walked for eight hours to get there. We were imbibing refreshments the whole way. We missed Friday night completely and got there Saturday morning. Everybody was so wasted we just fell down when we got there. Michael had made arrangements behind the stage for his friends and family, and everybody pitched tents. We were deeply involved in a Lenny Bruce project at that time, so a young lady named Doris Dynamite fixed our tent up and had a Lenny Bruce flag flying in front of it. I was lying in the tent most of the day, and finally in the afternoon I walked to the stage, and the crowd was amazing. Michael always says, “The crowd was the star.” He was right. They were just so inspiring. I never heard the musicians play the way they did, and of course, all you could see was the whites of their eyes. The whole place was hallucinating, so it was always a little bit unreal.

  ELLEN SANDER: By Saturday afternoon, there was a break in the weather. The Airplane were due to play late at night, to close the show, but they wanted to see the festival, as did all the performers at the Holiday Inn. Stories of the size of the crowd and amazing mess came in hourly. Finally, a caravan of at least a dozen cars assembled. Among those gathered was Bear—Augustus Stanley Owsley III, previously known as the acid king of San Francisco, a renowned soundman and keeper of the stash that could levitate the entire festival. And escorting the Airplane, their old ladies, and this mammoth stash were four state troopers who headed the caravan and brought up the rear, escorting a good dozen cars right into the festival area.

  The stars and their guests unloaded and walked to a pavilion where fruit, wine, sandwiches, and punch were plentiful and flowing. Somebody immediately began putting acid into a huge vat of punch. A few moments later they were caught in the act and ten gallons of punch was poured out on the ground, but not before some of it had gone into the bloodstreams of people unsuspectingly drinking what had been poured into paper cups. Al Aronowitz, alerted as to the contents of his glass as he was drinking, spat and sprayed a mouthful out, cursing angrily.

  We walked a monkey bridge from the performers’ area to the stage, a suspended path of slats that went twenty feet up from the ground, over the wall separating the stars from the main mulch and affording them a star’s-eye view of those hundreds of thousands of people, meadows full of them, stretched out over a field about a half mile away. And all of them were on their feet, dancing to Santana’s Latin-based rock; they were like a great writhing mass of T-shirts and bottles of pop and smiles, with clouds and clouds of sweet pungent smoke rising from within their midst.

  One thing I was careful about all weekend: to never drink from a cup or open bottle handed to me. I didn’t want to get dosed. I was just too involved in the moment and had too many balls in the air to step outside that consciousness. Before the end of the weekend, Artie and Linda had been dosed, and even Mel and Joyce, both usually pretty straight, dropped acid.

  Though Garcia, Owsley, and other members of the Grateful Dead had arrived early, Bob Weir and Dead manager Rock Scully showed up on Saturday after their limo got stuck on the highway and they had to walk in.

  ROCK SCULLY, THEN MANAGER OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD: The couple of hundred tabs of sunshine acid that I’d stashed in a silver art nouveau case were leaking out down my leg under the relentless rain. My pores were saturated with the stuff. My mouth was smeared with this Day-Glo acid, my hand a giant raw orange claw, my pants bright saffron. There was a river of orange acid trailing behind me and strange, mutant strains of vegetation were beginning to sprout in my wake.

  BOB WEIR OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD: Once I got there I camped out in a tent about a half mile from the stage. I sort of drifted around. It was muddy. There wasn’t enough food or facilities. But everybody was pretty much into it, they were gonna make the most of it.

  PAUL KANTNER OF JEFFERSON AIRPLANE: We always liked to go into water of untested depth, so we went to Woodstock with open minds. And it was fucked up, which was good. If it would have been completely organized, then it would have been really fucked up. But the sense of chaos and anarchy—two of my favorite words—prevailed and made it what it was. No fences, no security, none of that shit.

  I got high on acid, walked around, hung out. People were setting up tents and campfires, cooking, swimming, and dancing. It was like a children’s crusade, a great social experiment. It simply hadn’t happened before. It was akin to white-water rafting in that you never know what’s around the next bend and you’re not even worried about it because you’re too busy pushing yourself off the rocks.

  After John Sebastian, we kept things moving, and readied the stage for the Keef Hartley Band. The group played a mix of jazz, blues, and rock. Drummer Keef Hartley had been a member of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers for several years, and his new band had expanded the blues sound to include horns. They covered an old Sleepy John Estes song, “Leaving Trunk,” in an extended jam that segued into originals like “Sinnin’ for You” and “Just to Cry.”

  Up next was the Incredible String Band, whose folk-psychedelic improvisations featured banjo, oud, mandolin, and keyboards. Lead singer Robin Williamson started the set by reciting a lengthy poem. From Scotland, the band was inspired by old English folk music and Indian ragas, like Ravi Shankar’s modal music. You could hear this blend in songs like “When You Find Out Who You Are.” They were the forerunners of today’s freak-folk movement.

  Canned Heat kept the crowd pumped up, playing “Going Up the Country” and some boogie blues, including one they improvised on the spot and later called “Woodstock Boogie.” I didn’t get to see much of their set because of my confrontation with Wolff and McIntire over the money issues for the Who and the Dead.

  I later found out that after they left my trailer, they cornered John Morris with the same threat. As John was the one who’d pushed the Who to agree to Woodstock, he felt obligated to get them paid. He knew that he had absolutely no shot with me, so—going off the reservation once again—he called over to Joel at the telephone building. He convinced him that the Who and the Dead wouldn’t play without cash, spicing the demand with the image of a rioting mob enraged by the no-show.

  Joel set out to solve what he didn’t realize was a trumped-up dilemma. He called Charlie Prince, manager of the White Lake bank where we’d opened an account, and told him the situation. Shuttled by helicopter, Charlie let himself into the bank, locked up on a Saturday night, searched for some blank cashier’s checks, and filled them out for us. That’s how much some of the townspeople believed in us.

  Mountain was on by the time I got back to the stage. They played a harder blues than Canned Heat, with Leslie West’s growling vocals and blistering guitar. They were another new face and the crowd loved them, especially on standards like “Stormy Monday” and a Jack Bruce epic, “Theme from an Imaginary Western.” Not to be outdone by Canned Heat, they came up with their own song at the festival, which they called “For Yasgur’s Farm.”

  LESLIE WEST: I think I had the most amplifiers of anybody there. It was paralyzing because that stage, that setting, was some kind of natural amphitheater. The sound was so loud and shocking that I got scared. But once I started playing, I just kept going because I was afraid to stop.

  More and more artists had appeared in the pavilion area. Mountain had brought a bunch of roast chickens with them, which t
hey were sharing with Janis Joplin and her band. Janis was pouring champagne for everyone. John Sebastian was running in and out when not tending to the “dressing room”—the VW camper he’d been overseeing.

  JOHN SEBASTIAN: At this point I was mainly engaged in keeping the tent dry. Because of the rains, Sly Stone was having trouble staying clean. He had much more spectacular stage gear than other folks. I was trying to loosen him up at one point and I walked over and his sister was grumping about something. I said, “Gee, is there anything I can do? Use the tent or something?” And Sly said, “Oh, she just needs a little red meat, and she’ll be fine.”

  I wonder if Sister Rose ever found her way over to Bill Graham’s trailer and all those steaks.

  Next up: the Grateful Dead. By then, a combination of the weather and hallucinogenics proved their undoing. As they were loading their heavy equipment onto the forty-foot turntable onstage, the platform’s wheels collapsed. This caused a delay, which was lengthened when the Dead insisted that their soundman Owsley Stanley rewire the stage for their set. Tinkering with the sound system and their hookups resulted in constant shocks from the guitars.

  ROCK SCULLY: We’re getting ready to put our equipment onstage. It’s all on risers, but our gear is so heavy it breaks the wheels of the risers and we have to move everything in by hand, which takes forever. In the meantime, incessant nightmare announcements are coming over the PA. “Please everyone, get off the tower, someone just fell!” “Don’t take the brown acid, there’s bad acid out there!” They don’t say what the thousands who have already taken it should do…

  I make the mistake of thinking, What more can happen? And then suddenly, as if someone pulled a cord—darkness falls. The wind picks up and the stage starts vibrating, physically quaking. Our beautiful giant light-show screen has turned into a sail and is moving the stage through the sea of mud like the good ship Marie Celeste. It is starting to slide, it is, uh-oh, tipping over, and Dicken, my brother, has to climb up the mizzenmast and slash the screen with a bowie knife. Not a good omen, Captain…

  In the middle of their very first number, “St. Stephen,” this crazy guy we know runs out into the middle of the stage and starts flinging LSD off the stage. After all those announcements! Okay, his acid is purple, but it looks brown. Oh no, it’s the brown acid—the acid you’re…not supposed to take. When Garcia sees this mad, crazy guy throwing what looks like brown acid off the stage, something he might under normal circumstances have thought droll and antic now looks ominous. He is asking himself the question men zonked out of their minds on psychotropic substances should never ask themselves: “Why me?”

  To make matters worse, the Dead are playing horribly. They just cannot get started, can’t get it right. Not one song. And the sound is awful, and it is windy and blustery and cold. Finally the Dead set finishes up with “Lovelight,” but even Pigpen’s sure-fire rabble-rouser can’t quite pull it off. Thank God that’s over!

  JERRY GARCIA: Jeez, we were awful! We were just plumb atrocious! I was high and I saw blue balls of electricity bouncing across the stage and leaping onto my guitar when I touched the strings. People behind the amplifiers kept yelling, “The stage is collapsing! The stage is collapsing!” As a human being, I had a wonderful time hanging out with friends and sharing great little jams. But our performance onstage was musically a total disaster that is best left forgotten.

  BOB WEIR: It was raining toads when we played. The rain was part of our nightmare. The other part was our soundman, who decided that the ground situation on the stage was all wrong. It took him about two hours to change it, which held up the show. He finally got it set the way he wanted it, but every time I touched my instrument I got a shock. The stage was wet and the electricity was coming through me. I was conducting! Touching my guitar and the microphone was nearly fatal. There was a great big blue spark about the size of a baseball, and I got lifted off my feet and sent back eight or ten feet to my amplifier. Some people made their careers at Woodstock, but we spent about twenty years making up for it. It was probably the worst set we’ve ever performed.

  TOM CONSTANTEN, GRATEFUL DEAD KEYBOARDIST: The audience was nice and vinegary by the time we got on. They looked like one of those Hieronymus Bosch paintings, with ten thousand grotesque bodies. The electricity during the performance didn’t bother me, but because everyone else was so frazzled it made the tempo hard. It was not an especially long performance. I think we played for forty-five minutes. Everyone was glad to get off, we felt like an android jukebox.

  With the Dead scrambling offstage around 10 P.M., we tried to quickly get ready for Creedence Clearwater Revival. I think the Dead’s experience made Creedence nervous too, but they didn’t show it. They were practically a hit machine by then, and they played with conviction and intensity: “Born on the Bayou,” “Green River,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Proud Mary,” “I Put a Spell on You.” On and on, with John Fogerty’s bluesy voice, guitar leads, and masterful harmonica playing, and a great finale of “Suzie Q.”

  STU COOK, CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL BASSIST: You couldn’t see anything. We had some technical problems. After the first song, we weren’t sure there was anybody there. It was quiet. But some guy, way the hell out there, yelled, “We’re with you!” Okay, I guess that’s who the concert’s for. And on and on we played, and we had no idea what we were involved in. Later, it started to dawn on us just what had happened, and we thought we’d never ever see anything like that again.

  JOCKO MARCELLINO, SHA NA NA DRUMMER: I had taken some mind-altering stuff and it wasn’t FDA-approved, I’ll tell ya. I thought, “I’ve got to be alone,” and there were 500,000 people! So I wandered up to the top of the hill to try to get it together. Creedence was rockin’ “Born on the Bayou.” And hearing that put me back in the groove.

  JOHN SEBASTIAN: Creedence Clearwater delivered a set that was every bit as important and delicious as any other performer at Woodstock. I think they may not have had any other serious competition besides Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix. It was so tight and so wonderfully strong, particularly in my psychedelicized state. But Fogerty came off that stage and said, “Well, you guys really screwed that one up.”

  Janis Joplin and her new band, a kind of Stax/Volt Revue with horns, were next. I was a little disappointed in their performance. Of course Janis’s voice was as amazing as ever, but she kept turning around to give direction to the musicians, who’d played with her only a couple of times. At one point, she let Snooky Flowers, a funky R & B vocalist, take the lead on Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose”—and kicking off her shoes, she seemed happy dancing and strutting around barefoot. Her devastating testifying on “Try ( Just a Little Bit Harder)” and “Work Me Lord” crushed the audience, and they begged her not to stop. At the end of her long set, after a gut-wrenching “Piece of My Heart” and “Ball and Chain,” I almost expected everyone to just collapse in a heap.

  ELLEN SANDER: Janis Joplin danced with them as if they were one, they shouted back at her, they wouldn’t let her off until they’d drained off every drop of her energy.

  Everyone was primed for Sly and the Family Stone—who were ready to put on a SHOW. They were decked out in fantastic outfits—Sly in white fringe, Sister Rose in her platinum wig and fringed go-go dress, and bassist Larry Graham in a feathered hat with matching suit. Their performance was beyond phenomenal—“M’Lady,” “Sing a Simple Song,” “You Can Make It If You Try,” “Everyday People.” During the spectacular finale, “Dance to the Music”/“Music Lover”/“I Want to Take You Higher,” Sly took us all to a psychedelic church as he and five hundred thousand people did a feverish call-and-response like a preacher and his congregation in a revival down South.

  CARLOS SANTANA: I got to witness the peak of the festival, which was Sly Stone. I don’t think he ever played that good again—steam was literally coming out of his Afro.

  ELLEN SANDER: Grace Slick and Janis Joplin were dancing together, their eyes tight shut and their fists clench
ed and their bodies whipping around. “Higher!” Sly shouted into the crowd. “Higher!” they boomed back with the force of half a million voices at their loudest. He threw up his arms in a peace sign, a billow of fringe unfurled around them, and the audience responded, shouting “Higher” in unison and raising their arms and fingers into the air, joyously, desperately, arms and hands and fingers raised in peace signs, heads and voices crying out into the night, crying the anguished plea of the sixties, “Higher, higher!”

  It took a while to come down after Sly’s performance, but leave it to Abbie Hoffman to turn the mood around. He grabbed me backstage, saying in a panicked voice, “I just saw someone running around with a gun, you’ve got to help me find him!”

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but Abbie, after a twenty-four-hour shift in the medical tents, had decided to take the edge off. He’d popped a hit, or two or three, of acid. Not seeing anyone from security around, he and I went to find the gunman.

  “I think he went under the stage!” Abbie said with total conviction, so we started looking everywhere under the massive structure where assistants were changing film magazines. After a few minutes of futile searching, Abbie stopped. He turned to me with this perplexed look and said, “You really aren’t afraid to die, are you?”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of this, but I started to question the wisdom of this quest. When the “nut with a gun” turned into the “nut with a knife,” I realized the only nut I was likely to run into down there was Abbie.

  It was three thirty in the morning and the Who were about to go on, so I said, “Look, Abbie, whoever you saw is gone, so let’s just go watch some music and chill out for a few minutes.”