by Michael Lang
thirteen
THE AFTERMATH
Monday, August 18, 1 P.M.: I’m looking down on the grounds where I’ve been entrenched for the past three weeks. It’s a very different view from what’s been described to me by those who flew over during the height of the festival—when, for miles, all the eye could see was a blanket of people. A guy in Sweetwater said it looked like fields and fields of wildflowers. Now it’s fields and fields of mud.
I have to get to the bank on Wall Street to meet Joel, John, and Artie, and one of the helicopter pilots has offered me a lift.
As we turn east, I spot something there, in the bowl near the front of the stage: an immense peace sign. It’s made up of garbage—shoes, blankets, cans, bottles, papers, T-shirts, sleeping bags, and watermelon rinds. The kids who have stayed to help with the cleanup have created this symbol of what we all hope will be our legacy.
I keep this image with me as I head to Manhattan and the Bank of North America. Leaving the world of Woodstock for the world of Wall Street, I wonder what I’m literally flying into. John, Joel, Artie, and I will be together for the first time since Thursday. I know we have some unpleasant financial business to deal with—I’m just not sure how unpleasant. Other than the time on Saturday when the Brink’s truck driver arrived at my trailer and I sent him home empty-handed, this is the first time I’ve focused on finances since the festival began. Hopefully, any problems can be resolved. But I don’t know how many checks John has written over the weekend or how much money has yet to be collected from advance-ticket outlets.
After Jimi Hendrix ended his two-hour set Monday morning, the festival was officially over. Because people had been gradually departing since Sunday, traffic moved smoothly, directed by three hundred state police, sheriff’s deputies, and volunteer firemen. People hitching rides held signs with their destination, and Short Line buses ran nonstop from Monticello to New York City. One newspaper described some pretty outrageous departures: “Eleven young people rode fenders, bumpers, hoods, and the roof of a ’57 Chevrolet that scraped the road surface at each bump. A reporter saw three youths tied to the luggage rack on the roof of a Ford station wagon bearing New Jersey license plates…”
Another paper reported that White Lake residents continued to assist festivalgoers, “obviously touched by the plight of the foodless, moneyless, housingless youngsters. Some opened their homes to them for the night and others gave away free food and water. Monticello Police opened up the small town park to provide a sleeping place for those waiting for Short Line buses.”
PARRY TEASDALE: I knew a couple who lived nearby, whose son—a friend of mine—had been killed in Vietnam. When they heard about all these kids with nothing to eat, they said, “There are kids who are hungry, and we’re going to feed them.” They packed up every hot dog they could get and went to the festival and fed young people.
CHRISTINE OLIVEIRA: We got out of there Monday afternoon. We’d stop because we didn’t know exactly which back roads to take home and we didn’t have a map, and people would say, “Do you have enough to eat?” They’d come out with sandwiches.
I spent Monday morning wrapping up as much business as I could before leaving for the meeting at the bank. Mel and Stan were going to oversee the cleanup. We estimated it would take about $50,000 and a minimum of two weeks to restore the land for Max and the other farmers whose fields we’d rented. About eight thousand people were still camped in the surrounding areas, including the Hog Farm and other commune members. Many began helping to remove trash from the grounds. Mel started looking for volunteer assistance, to aid the cleanup crews we’d hired. He began with the Boy Scouts.
MEL LAWRENCE: The cleanup was really interesting. People as far as twenty miles away were calling and saying we needed to clean their barn—they were looking at this situation as an opportunity to get their property cleaned up. We had a front loader push everything into a big pile and load it onto a truck; there were thousands of sleeping bags and articles of clothing left behind.
PENNY STALLINGS: We had so much to do to clean up. Mel referred to the site after everyone left as looking like Andersonville, a Civil War prison camp. The ground was smoking from all the humanity that had been there.
HENRY DILTZ: What was left was muddied junk. Bags of food, clothes, all soaking wet and trampled in the mud. With all this stuff lying around just like dead bodies. You’ve seen those old pictures of battlefields on glass plates, of bloated horse bodies, cannonballs, dead soldiers lying in the field. That’s what it looked like.
Staff members gathered at my production trailer. Until our financial situation was settled, I had to explain that we couldn’t pay anyone. While this was going on, reporters were there asking questions. When a New York Times reporter inquired about our financial status, I told him we’d spent a lot more than we’d made: “So many came…and we had to take care of them. It was worth it.” The writer went on to report in the Times: “Today a trailer serving as a business office was filled with young workers expecting to be paid. They were told to take only what they absolutely needed until the sponsors could obtain cash. In the spirit of sharing that has marked the weekend, champagne and cigarettes were proffered.”
Stan stayed in Bethel for the next three weeks during the bulk of the cleanup and dismantling process. He created request forms so that neighbors could file claims for loss and damages or just to ask for trash removal.
STAN GOLDSTEIN: I stayed to calm fevered brows. There were two immediate fallouts: A group of very vocal, unhappy people in whose fields and lawns people had settled, who claimed all kinds of damage from the marauding hordes. Then there were the other people who said, “Wow, what a miraculous thing you guys have done…the kids were great…how did you manage to do it?!” Of course, most of the merchants and businesspeople in the area were very happy. They’d never done so much business in such a short length of time.
Various people began filing lawsuits, including the president of the Monticello Raceway, which had planned a race for that weekend; eventually, about eighty lawsuits would be filed. (Most would be settled out of court or dropped.) Politicians started calling for an investigation into the festival. One, Representative Martin McKneally (R-Newburgh), flew over the site in a helicopter and issued a statement saying, “The stench that arose from the hill on Yasgur Farm will remain in the nostrils of the people of Sullivan County for years to come.” He went on to compare the smell to “Egyptian filth.” State Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz announced he had been contacted by officials from New York City to investigate the festival. Lefkowitz was concerned about ticket buyers who could not get to the festival. As tickets were not collected, it was impossible to tell who had made it to the site and who hadn’t. John and Joel later settled on paying a lump sum of $25,000 to the state to cover any such claims.
While people were clearing the site, various tools and equipment just disappeared. We had told the Hog Farm they could take any equipment left over in their area and they took us up on it.
ROZ PAYNE: I stayed a few days after the festival was over—everyone’s leaving, the piles of garbage are being left, and here we have sound equipment from the stage, we have a printing press, we have generators that are left behind, we have a field hospital. Most people are gone by this time. The Hog Farm is picking up bottles. I contacted people in New York to bring up the largest rental truck they could find. I also had a friend of mine drive up my little red Volkswagen. We filled up the U-Haul truck with the entire field hospital, except for a small refrigerator, which we put in the back of my VW. We put the printing press in the rental truck—whatever we saw, we took. Somebody took air conditioners from the trailers. We gave the printing press to the Black Panthers, which they printed their newspaper on. We gave the field hospital to the Black Panthers Free Clinic.
PENNY STALLINGS: The Hog Farm started loading building equipment that we had rented into their buses, and I said, “No, no, you can’t do that—we need it for next year.” The festiva
l was going to happen again, I thought—from that point on, there would be a gathering of the tribes, a sea change in philosophy and political thinking in the country.
But Mel said to me about the equipment, “What do you care? Just let them take it.” That was the hippie philosophy—we all share. But I knew John would be paying for it. He was a wonderful guy and I wanted him to pay for the next one the following summer.
Though some of the local officials were angry about the havoc and inconveniences, many had positive things to say. Sullivan County sheriff Louis Ratner told reporters, “I never met a nicer bunch of kids in my life,” and another cop said, “When our police cars were getting stuck they even helped us get them out. I think a lot of police here are looking at their attitudes.” Though there had been alarms sounded about medical emergencies, in the end, Dr. Abruzzi reported that his team had treated about five thousand people since Thursday, but almost half of the cases were cut feet. “It’s about what you’d expect for a city of over three hundred thousand people,” he said of the number of people they treated.
We got roundly criticized by the New York Times, which particularly upset John and Joel. The Monday edition ran an editorial, NIGHTMARE IN THE CATKILLS, condemning us:
The sponsors of this event, who apparently had not the slightest concern for the turmoil it would cause, should be made to account for their mismanagement. To try to cram several hundred thousand people into a 600-acre farm with only a few hastily installed sanitary facilities shows a complete lack of responsibility.
In contrast, Max had kind words about us. Monday afternoon, he held a press conference at his farm, where he told the assembled journalists: “The kids were wonderful, honest, sincere, good kids who said, ‘Here we are. This is what we are. This is the way we dress. These are our morals.’ There wasn’t one incident the whole time. The kids were polite, shared everything with everyone, and they forced me to open my eyes. I think America has to take notice. What happened at Bethel this past weekend was that these young people together with our local residents turned the Aquarian festival into a dramatic victory for the spirit of peace, goodwill, and human kindness.”
No one was sure exactly how many people were at the festival. Aerial photographs were studied and estimates averaged around 450,000 to half a million. The White Lake historian Charlie Feldman was certain “there were 700,000 people there. The attendance estimate is based on aerial photos and there were thousands of people under trees,” who couldn’t be counted.
Arriving at the Wall Street heliport by midafternoon, I rushed into the executive offices of the bank. I entered a large, darkly paneled room and looked around for my partners. They were not easy to find, with all the lawyers, bankers, and bankruptcy attorneys in attendance. I finally spotted them in the president’s office surrounded by John’s brother Billy, an attorney; several more lawyer types; and an older gentleman who turned out to be the bank president. When I first poked my head in, I had noticed a large fish tank against the wall. I thought, Could that be piranha? It was at that moment the smell of fear and angst and anger in the room washed over me.
Unbeknownst to me, Artie had invited a couple of people along to the meeting. While still pretty stoned at Woodstock, he’d told Albert Grossman and Artie Ripp about the Monday appointment. Apparently, both were interested in forming a partnership with Artie and me. They suggested raising money to buy out Joel’s and John’s shares of Woodstock Ventures. They believed the Woodstock film was going to be huge and there was great value in the corporate name.
ARTIE RIPP: I was like a closet rabbi and thinking how do we make this thing work—how do you realize other opportunities after this? The undertaking itself had been like the Normandy invasion. I was friends with Albert Grossman, who was clearly a power player because of the acts he controlled and his influence in the business in general. We went on the helicopter from Woodstock with Artie. We fly to Wall Street and we go to the banker’s office—and here’s a guy who’s got both a picture of Chairman Mao on the wall and a piranha in a fish tank in his office. Already I know this guy is off the fuckin’ cliff someplace. He wants to make it clear that he’s an out-of-the-box thinker and left of right and right of left and not anyplace near center.
ARTIE KORNFELD: I walked into the meeting with Artie Ripp, and the banker was throwing meat in his piranha tank. After coming from this beautiful experience, I was seeing everything that I hated about the world of capitalism.
The meeting had been going on since nine that morning. John had been writing checks all weekend to pay a long stream of people who managed to get to the telephone building. Now he and his family were going to have to guarantee over a million dollars to the bank to make good on those checks. The other option was for Woodstock Ventures to declare bankruptcy. The bank officials said they would hold all checks until Thursday, by which time an accounting of whatever incoming funds there were could be completed.
Regardless, there was no clear financial picture to be had at the meeting, or at least no one was interested in giving one to me. At a minimum, I was expecting the four of us to sit down and assess our situation and explore possible solutions. We were not without assets. We had created a huge amount of goodwill; we had the film and recordings of what had become an event of historic proportions. But it became clear that John’s brother Billy was representing the Roberts family, who for all practical purposes had taken over control of Woodstock Ventures. The Roberts clan was taking an admirable position in backing John, taking us all out of the bankruptcy fire, but I sensed they had no interest in seeing our partnership continue. The die had been cast before I even touched down at the heliport.
Still, I could not help thinking about what John must be going through. It tore at me that he and Joel had not had the same amazing experience with Woodstock that Artie and I had. For whatever reason, they’d spent a miserable three days stuck in the telephone building in White Lake and now John was having to pledge his trust to pay our bills. I certainly did not have the money to pay my share, and neither did Artie or Joel. I also knew that as bad as John felt, Joel’s position—he was John’s partner but the Roberts family considered him an outsider—was somehow worse.
Joel and John were devastated and turned their anger and resentment toward Artie and me. John’s family was similarly disposed toward us, and even Joel appeared to have become somewhat persona non grata in their eyes. It quickly became them against us. We agreed to table things and reconvene when more information was available.
There was no joy in Mudville that day.
LEE MACKLER BLUMER: John and Joel came back from the meeting and they were very disturbed. I guess that’s when John’s father said he was going to bail him out. Later he would say they could never use the logo or call anything Woodstock again. John Roberts promised he would never give anybody the license while his father was alive. His father thought it sullied the family’s name. I think John’s brother finally came around, realizing that it was a cultural phenomenon and that he had so much to do with it. But I don’t think his father ever really forgave John for Woodstock.
I needed to get some sleep before heading back to White Lake to follow up on the situation there. I checked into the Chelsea Hotel and slept for eighteen hours. On my way out, about two o’clock the next day, I saw Janis Joplin, feathers and all, in the lobby. She and her band had been staying there too. “It’s you!” she screamed. As I looked around to see who she was yelling at, she jumped all over me.
Public opinion was doing a complete turnaround over the festival. On Tuesday, the New York Times published yet another editorial, this time more positive and titled MORNING AFTER AT BETHEL. The Boston Globe compared Woodstock to the march on Washington, writing:
The Woodstock Music and Art Festival will surely go down in history as a mass event of great and positive significance in the life of the country…That this many young people could assemble so peaceably and with such good humor in a mile-square area…speaks volumes about their dedicati
on to the ideal of respect for the dignity of the individual…In a nation beset with a crescendo of violence, this is a vibrantly hopeful sign. If violence is infectious, so, happily, is nonviolence. The benign character of the young people gathered at Bethel communicated itself to many of their elders, including policemen, and the generation gap was successfully bridged in countless cases. Any event which can do this is touched with greatness.
There was one gap, though, that we weren’t bridging.
Al Aronowitz concluded his daily coverage in the New York Post with an article on August 19 titled AFTERMATH AT BETHEL: GARBAGE & CREDITORS. In it he asked:
You wonder where the four kids who promoted this thing are going to get the money [to pay off their debts], and Mike Lang smiles and tells you how happy he is. Meanwhile back in New York, his partner, 24-year-old John Roberts, is busy transferring several hundred thousand dollars from one account to another. It was Roberts’ personal fortune that was used to underwrite the venture, with the liability divided four ways. “John,” says Mike Lang, wearing the same Indian leather vest he has worn all week, “is very happy with the success of this thing,” and he tells you how the town and the county and Max Yasgur…have asked the festival to return next year…You ask why you haven’t seen John Roberts all weekend. “Oh,” says Mike, “John didn’t come. He was too nervous.”
On Monday morning, when questioned by Aronowitz, I had been optimistic about the future of Woodstock Ventures. And I didn’t really have a good answer as to why John or Joel couldn’t find thirty minutes to come to the field.
I spent all day Wednesday in White Lake to make sure the cleanup was proceeding and to let the staff know what was up. John had promised that everyone would be paid. I borrowed a pickup truck and drove the fields and back roads to get a sense of the job ahead. It was extensive. We were missing about forty rental vehicles; more than twenty were never found. Some wound up in lakes and ponds.