Barefoot in Babylon

by Bob Spitz

  If anything, the technical inefficiency and lack of precedents regarding large-scale functions provided Goldstein with a terrible handicap, and he was forced to waste much precious time that might have been better spent bringing in personnel.

  No one, it seemed, had the slightest idea of how to go about providing sufficient sound amplification. Most companies were groping in the dark when it came to handling sound, managing staging, coordinating microphone placement, and recording with interlocking systems. There was no call for it—no professional guidelines; when the various concerns heard the plans were based upon attendance of one hundred thousand people, it overwhelmed them. Goldstein telephoned a half-dozen companies across the country and not one gave him any indication that it would be able to accommodate him. They all, however, suggested he get in touch with a man in Massachusetts named Bill Hanley who, some said, was one of those eccentric, head-in-the-clouds geniuses capable of turning a simple car stereo speaker into a veritable thunderburst. Each time he received a similar description of his talents, Stanley smiled smugly to himself. Bill Hanley, he realized, would fit the bill nicely.

  Goldstein got Hanley’s phone number from a friend who had contracted the sound company to provide amplification at a previous southern pop festival. Hanley “could do anything,” the friend avowed, and owned a stock of equipment powerful enough to simulate an aural reenactment of World War II. But he also warned him that “the guy’s a real bastard to work with, a real irascible dude who doesn’t even want to know from your concept. He thinks he’s goddamn Pablo Picasso. Just tell him what you want and stay out of his way. He’ll deliver.”

  Goldstein had no trouble getting the sound engineer on the phone. But after explaining the magnitude of the undertaking and the dilemma he already faced in trying to enter into some kind of agreement with a sound company able to meet their requirements, Goldstein was abruptly cut off.

  “You say you don’t know what you want?” Hanley inquired in a mocking tone of voice. “I don’t have time to give you a Dick-and-Jane primer in outdoor sound right now, Goldstein. You see, I’m a busy person. Everybody wants me to bail them out of trouble, but nobody knows what they want. I’ll talk to you when you get your scene together. Just decide what it is you need, call me back, and I’ll come down there and plug in my equipment, one-two-three,” mercifully leaving out “’cause you’ve got no place else to turn.”

  “No, man, you don’t seem to understand what we’re building and what it’s gonna entail from . . .”

  “Hey, Goldstein—you’re a fine person to tell me I don’t understand. Get it together, pal. I’ll be hearing from you.”

  Goldstein had little doubt that Hanley was their man; besides his sterling reputation and his already having the necessary equipment, Hanley’s unflagging confidence and his posture that the festival was a simple job placed him high in Goldstein’s esteem. It was Hanley’s ego that troubled him. In exchange for the promise of competent services, he was being forced to play a waiting game, which was comparable to a sophisticated version of Russian roulette, by Hanley’s offhand rules of trade. At this point in his dealings, however, he was so overjoyed to find someone out there who knew it could be done that the other drawbacks were overshadowed by his temporary relief. Goldstein’s intuition had never failed him before. They would use Hanley Sound, Stan assured himself, and the Boy Wonder (if, indeed, he lived up to the reputation) would perform like a supertrooper. If he thought long and hard enough about the whole matter, he was positive he could come up with a surefire plan for putting Bill Hanley’s name on the dotted line and everyone else’s mind at ease. Stanley Goldstein, for the time being, was a contented man.

  4

  Throughout most of March and early April, the business concerning Train had somehow gotten switched onto the wrong track. Instead of merrily chugging along in the blissful “marriage-type relationship” Michael Lang had projected when signing the group to a personal management contract in 1968, they were headed toward the divorce mill faster than a speeding locomotive. No one was happy. Michael was making himself scarce—not picking up the group’s calls or showing up for prearranged meetings. Artie could not have cared less about making a record with Train; the band wondered what had happened to the $125,000 advance from Capitol Records their manager was administering for them; and Capitol Records, everyone’s benefactor, wanted to know who this group called Train was that kept phoning their corporate offices. The multitudinous voices fighting to be heard above the Train wreck resembled a modern-day Tower of Babel. Something had to give.

  Something did.

  Michael was on the verge of lying down and giving up where Train was concerned. The festival preparations were at a crucial stage, and he was well aware that if he left details in the hands of anyone other than Stanley Goldstein, he was in big trouble. He considered John and Joel to be harmless as long as they were kept out of sight. But Joel was beginning to check in with him more often—always at the wrong time; he was “becoming one royal pain in the ass” and was the one person Michael considered a threat to his aspirations. That made Rosenman an adversary. And maybe he should have taken Miles Lourie’s advice and severed his ties with Artie long ago. Now it was too late, and he’d just have to make the best of a bad situation.

  Train was another costly mistake. Once his ticket into the music business, they were old news. Putting Train on tour, no matter how successful their album became, was chickenshit compared to what he stood to make from Woodstock. In all fairness to them and to his own career it was time to cut them loose.

  Together with Artie, Michael approached Roberts and Rosenman with a rehearsed act designed to bring the Train to a grinding halt. They explained that they were suffering from acute guilt inasmuch as they were engaged in an outside project that was a clear conflict of interest under their existing partnership agreement. Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall couldn’t have staged a more convincing charade of false brotherhood.

  “It’s just not right, man,” Artie confessed, hanging his head, “that we should be equally involved in a music-oriented venture such as the festival and still have our gig with Train on the side. We’re gonna score a fortune with them, and so far, we’ve cut you guys out of the take.”

  “So we got a better idea, man, something that really makes sense,” Michael offered. “We’re gonna bring you in on the deal. You know, make Train a part of our enterprises and that way we’ll still be a unified brotherhood.”

  Joel and John were reluctant. Partly because of the enormous sum Michael requested from the corporation as reimbursement for his past expenses incurred in getting Train started and partly because they felt they were beginning to spread their talents (and bankroll) too thin. Management was a risk. There was no assurance that Train would hit. Would John, on a lifetime diet of the Johnny Mann Singers and Perry Como, have the magic touch for picking the next Vanilla Fudge? For that matter, would Joel fare any better having only recently severed his ties with the Yale Glee Club and a Las Vegas–style folk quartet? Hardly. But, after tossing the idea back and forth between them for a few days, they agreed on a mutual belief that “Michael and Artie were the apostles of a new awareness who saw and heard things too finely” for their mild palates. It was like speculating on an obscure stock, John rationalized. The payoff could be equally great. And so, for a hefty five-figure buyout of Lang’s former company, Woodstock Kalaparusha Management was formed—the name originating from a twenty-minute diatribe by Michael, who told them that kalaparusha was the wheellike symbol that encompassed all the signs of the zodiac and would therefore guide their new endeavor under the universal spiritual order.

  Somebody, however, should have informed the members of Train that they were no longer under the Lang stranglehold. Their further attempts to link up with Lang had proved futile, and guitarist Bob Lenox, in an effort to locate his manager, half-jokingly gauged that he had already spoken more to Michael’s father on the telephone
in one week than he had conferred with Lang himself during their entire relationship. Finally, out of a sense of utter frustration and as a precaution against resorting to physical violence to find out where Train stood, Lenox called the parent company at the Capitol Towers in Los Angeles hoping to get a comforting answer from them.

  “We’re a band called Train,” he calmly explained to an officer of the company. “We have these tapes that we’ve recorded under our contract with your company—a very sizeable one, at that—for over $125,000 a year. We’d like to know what we should do with them now that they’re finished and since we cannot find our manager.”

  An uncomfortable silence followed. “Are you still there?” Lennox asked, not quite knowing the required protocol in business situations like these.

  “Uh—yes, I’m here,” a voice responded. “Hang on a second, okay?” the official asked and came back onto the line after what Lenox determined to be time enough for him to have had a brief conference with an associate standing nearby. “Uh, I have a suggestion. Why don’t you send us the tapes you’ve already made so we can hear what we bought for that impressive sum. We’ll get back to you after we give them a listen. And, uh, Mr. Train—I mean, Mr. Lenox—thank you very much for bringing this to our attention.”

  Then, very quickly, Capitol Records swept their executive quarters from inside out.

  During this siege, Artie Kornfeld was systematically able to negotiate his release from the exclusive contract Capitol had with him. After months of captivity, he was, at last, a free agent able openly to ride the festival to new personal heights.

  Train would have welcomed the chance to negotiate so much as a cheeseburger for lunch. Instead, Bob Lenox, representing the band, was called before the Capitol leaders in an inquest regarding the future of their recording contract.

  Unable to find Michael Lang, Lenox elected to attend the meeting by himself. Like a condemned man awaiting the final sentence of death, he wanted to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible.

  Often the final blow never quite manages to come down hard enough on its victim to extinguish the misery. And Capitol Records kept Lenox twitching long after the guitarist had been subdued. One of the newly elected corporate vice-presidents came to that meeting balancing an armload of legal-sized folders and proceeded to point out to Lenox why it was that the company was deeply concerned about its rather enormous investment in Train. Their auditors had determined that entirely too much money had been wasted on the project in respect to the recorded evidence. Someone, it seems, had sold Capitol a bill of goods. He sincerely hoped there was some way their interrelationship could be resolved and, subsequently, dissolved.

  A day later, when the initial shock of being released from the recording contract had begun to wear off, Bob Lenox finally got in touch with someone close to Michael Lang. Lang had asked this person to relay a message to the members of the group: They had been sold, through Michael’s power of attorney, to a company in New York called Woodstock Ventures. Should they be interested in assessing their contractual obligations to that company, they were advised to get in touch with Messers. John Roberts and Joel Rosenman.

  The Train ride was over.

  • • •

  Lang found it next to impossible to convince top-draw groups to sign on to the festival roster. At most of the major booking agencies, his requests for talent were met by polite snubs. “Sorry, the Airplane will be on an extended European tour when you want them.” “Hendrix is holding that very weekend for a promoter in Cleveland.” “Try us again next week. We’ll probably know something by then.” Such was Michael Lang’s plight.

  Lang knew that once a top act was signed up he could use it as a lever to convince others to join the show until being included on the festival bill became a much coveted trophy.

  With the help and advice of Hector Morales, a hip music agent at the William Morris Agency who saw something extraordinary in Lang’s festival design, a game plan for landing a big name or two was devised. Overpayment. If Lang would agree to offer an outrageous sum of money for a group’s appearance and to comply by putting that entire amount into escrow, it would be difficult for an act to refuse the invitation. Groups could always manage to pull in those one-night-stand fees of a couple thousand dollars, but chances for the big money were still far and few between. He had to make it worth their while to take the risk.

  A week later, after the line had been baited with what was considered to be a king’s ransom in performance fees, Hector Morales called Lang to say that he had received a few nibbles. If Michael would remain patient a while longer, it would not be long before they had themselves a prize catch.

  5

  Stanley Goldstein passed what little free time he had in much the same manner most troubleshooters tackle their assignments: by holding theoretical conversations with himself in which he could air all sides of potential problems in the months ahead.

  One of those very first self-dialogues occurred at the hotel while he was waiting for a lighting contractor to return his call. It went something like this: “What is it here we’re dealing with? What are the impressions, be they positive or negative, that one will walk away with? What are the places I’ve enjoyed being, and what is the first thing I’d say about a place that I didn’t like?” He thought about it for a while, pacing around his small room, before arriving at any conclusions. After a period of introspection: “I’d say, ‘It was scuzzy, man, the toilets were fuckin’ filthy, overflowing, the sinks were dirty, it smelled like a shithole.’ We’ve got to have clean and sufficient public rest rooms.” That, he determined, would have to be his next order of business: to find a quantity of portable toilets to handle the weekend’s natural flow.

  It took only a few random calls before Goldstein began to appreciate the convenience of permanent sanitary facilities in established arenas. He had assumed that the portable toilet business was similar to that of operating a regional McDonald’s: A person applied for a franchise and, upon being accepted by the parent company, was then required to attend a seminar taught by trained personnel so that the novice manager could learn how to run his concern down to the last screw holding together the cash register. That, compared to the level of performance exhibited by the existing sanitation companies, would have been like holding a Ph.D. in hygienic engineering. Goldstein found that the local men were tantamount to career speculators; they put up a total of five thousand dollars to go into the portable toilet business, took a franchise by filling out a simple questionnaire about their financial assets, supplied a brief personal history showing they had no arrests, and were anointed Mr. Johnny-on-the-spot for the New York vicinity. First man in, so to speak, had the territory wrapped up. And to complicate matters, these men were dealers, not mechanics versed in the operation of the individual unit. What they did know was that you deliver it, you flush it, you take it back after the event, and you collect your check. Their minimal knowledge provided Stanley with virtually no assistance in plotting a sanitation program.

  Nor could they aid him in calculating the amount of units he would need and the staff necessary to service them. Temporary toilets, he discovered, were basically designed for construction site usage where the number of units is determined by the relatively small number of bodies using them on a daily basis; servicing was only necessary, in those instances, once a week because a supply of decomposing chemicals contained in the base eats up the waste over a period of time. But at a large public gathering where the population demands a continuous turnover at the rest facilities, detoxification by chemicals makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. The disinfectant then becomes the most important element in sanitation because the level of waste matter very rapidly exceeds the level of water in the tanks, producing a terrible stench and destroying the antibodies that prevent bacterial infection.

  Out of desperation, Goldstein contacted health department officials to tap their knowledge and to
provide himself with the fundamental understanding of exactly what precautions would have to be taken by the festival coordinators to avoid dysentery. Much to his surprise and consternation, he found that despite the Department of Health’s supposed understanding of effluence and of the possibility of typhoid arising from an inferior waste disposal system, their expertise did not extend to crowd dynamics.

  The situation called for firsthand observation to establish a set of standards by which he could function. Goldstein, therefore, spent the next week visiting places like Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, Kennedy Airport, movie theatres, concert halls—any facility where rest rooms were expected to service sizeable captive crowds over a number of hours. Armed with a stopwatch and a clipboard, he timed people’s health habits and compared data to arrive at an average length of time he could adapt for his own purposes. One interesting phenomenon he deduced was that during the first period of occupation under one roof—be it one hour or one day—people tend not to use the rest rooms; they expressed a subliminal shyness of them. People accustomed themselves over the years to use the bathroom either before leaving home or at a local gas station on their way. The element of excitement in attending an event also often results in constipation. Sometime between the second and third period (or day) of the event, the situation reverses itself, and diarrhea sets in. Goldstein attributed this to a combination of things: the excitement, a change of living circumstances, water, junk food, long hours, etc. But one thing for certain was that the lines punctually formed like Friday afternoons in a bank, and it was going to be up to him to make sure those anxious people were accommodated.