by Bob Spitz
Through a columnist at the Village Voice, Goldstein traced a faction of their members to a loft in New York City. He called and was delighted to discover that Hugh Romney himself was in attendance and would see him the next afternoon if he got his body over to their “hole” on Houston Street.
The description was apt. Their apartment was indeed a hole, a single room measuring one hundred by twenty-five, which housed over seventy-five people at the same time. The Farmers were dressed for the occasion, most resembling pictures of the kids Goldstein had seen wandering through the Haight.
Hugh Romney, a certified “freak” with a wide toothless grin, greeted him at the door with a great bear hug and asked Stan to join the members of his “family” around the table in the center of the room.
Goldstein explained briefly what Woodstock Ventures was trying to accomplish, suggesting the festival would truly be a party for the people—one of the Hog Farm’s primary tenets. Instead, Romney’s “family” reacted to Goldstein’s pitch with vehement distaste. They saw the festival as “political opposition”; it was a capitalistic venture and they were communally oriented.
“This alley cat’s obviously a con man, Hugh,” a couple of the family members said. “He’s trying to fuck us over. We don’t want your money, buster.”
“Well, I hope that you’ll change your mind. And if you do, you can’t come unless I pay you.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“I mean that there are going to be about two hundred people involved in making everyone comfortable, and they’ll all be working for a salary. I don’t want anyone to say that some are getting paid and others are not. You could give the money away for all I care, but you gotta take it before you shake it.” He smiled.
“Whaddya got in mind?”
“Well, I’d like you there for a multitude of reasons, a few being crowd control—but you can forget about police assault, I’m talking about health and safety—the clearing of land, maintaining a ‘free kitchen’ to feed those who come without money, a ‘free stage’ behind the main stage where those without tickets could be entertained. . . .”
“Hey, you’re really serious about making this a people’s event,” Romney said.
“Of course I mean business, but I’m by no means serious.” They appreciated Goldstein’s reference to their comic approach to life. “Look, I recognize the fact that if there is a crowd problem, we’d be better off having a bunch of pretty girls without brassieres running after the culprits with seltzer bottles than machine guns and tanks.”
“Now you’re talking!” Romney chortled. “We’d need about fifty cases of seltzer bottles and three truckloads of chocolate cream pies as ammunition for security. I knew we were talking the same lingo, Goldstein. What else you got in store for us?”
They talked into the late afternoon and, again, two days later with Michael Lang at a restaurant called the Kettle, about how it was imperative that the Hog Farm keep peace by discouraging troublemakers. If they kept everybody happy—either by donating food or medical attention or by playing pranks on one another—then they would reduce the possibility of trouble breaking out, as it had at previous festivals.
Goldstein wanted Romney to bring his family to Wallkill a month or two before the festival took place. They were to live on the land and work with the University of Miami art group in getting the site into shape, chopping wood for the playground and gathering crews from the interested kids who were sure to stop by for a job.
“How the hell do you expect me to get eighty of our people from New Mexico, where most of ’em are at right now, all the way to New York? Our bus won’t make it, man. Not carryin’ all eighty of ’em and equipment and stuff.”
They worked out an agreement whereby fifteen men would come with the bus to Wallkill by the beginning of June, and the rest would be flown to New York in a specially chartered jet. They could load the essential equipment onto the plane. Everything else could be purchased in Wallkill.
“Meanwhile,” Stanley pointed out, “I’d like you to prepare some kind of estimate of what it’ll take to get the free kitchen off the ground. How much food you’ll need. What kind of equipment. Anything at all you can think of that we’ll want to have on the site. We’ll make sure you get it. How does that sound?”
“You’re forgetting something, friend. The money. You said we’d be paid and we might as well discuss it now before it gets messy.”
Romney proved an able negotiator. Before the day was out, he had wheedled a promise of $8,000 in cash plus all equipment and living expenses to be turned over to the Hog Farm immediately after the festival. Peace, love, and, most of all, money. It was all beginning to fall into place.
2
A gentleman named George Lax owned the dark beige sandstone office building at 47 West Fifty-seventh Street, which had been designed in the early 1920s to complement the string of townhouse-style buildings joined to either side of it. Stretching a mere seven floors into the Manhattan skyline, it had provided a temporary home for some of the most prestigious New York firms, a high-rent address in the heart of the nouveau entertainment and art district.
Bert Cohen had promised John Roberts that the Woodstock Ventures offices would be ready for occupancy on Monday, May 19, in time to begin a full-scale advertising blitz in the underground press. They also wanted it ready in time as a place equipped to sort the rush of mail orders they expected. An auxiliary staff of sixteen people had been hired to handle ticketing, promotion, bookkeeping, and general office work, and their individual departments were beginning to get cramped on Roberts and Rosenman’s living-room floor. The weekend before the move, however, it was clear that Bert was stalling them about taking possession of the premises, and they wanted to see why for themselves. After several minutes of begging them not to enter the place before it was completed, Bert caved in to their demands and agreed to take John and Joel on a premature tour of their new digs.
Cohen had entrusted the office decoration to a young industrial designer fresh out of school named Barry Reischman. Reischman had been in Concert Hall’s employ for something under six months and, in his boss’s judgment, was “bright, creative, stoned-out, functional hip—a real prototype of the late 1960s.” In the case of Woodstock Ventures’ new suite, the emphasis of Reischman’s architectual prowess was unmistakably on stoned-out.
John and Joel’s communal office, which looked out over Fifty-seventh Street, was built on a series of wooden risers, graduated in tiers and covered in royal-blue carpeting. The middle of the room had been hollowed out, the rugs dropping off into what looked like a huge pit. When filled with pillows, it was to be their conference area. There were no desks or chairs in the room; wooden crates had been randomly inserted beneath the carpeting to create “seating bumps” and “free-form nooks and crannies, which could be extremely functional if they used their imagination.”
John Roberts’s first impression of his new quarters was nausea. “What the hell are you doing, Bert?” he exploded. “We’ve gotta have space to work, not a place to loll around on the floor in our suits. This is the most uncomfortable-looking stuff I’ve ever seen.”
“Oh, it’ll be great, man. It’s a little far out,” Cohen admitted, “but when it’s done, it’ll be beautiful and you’ll love it.”
“It’s done, Bert—and I don’t love it.”
But Cohen hadn’t heard him. He and his staff were already swinging down the hall continuing their funhouse tour.
The next room, a spare office, was draped from floor to ceiling in stretched nylon—“so there are no sharp angles,” Bert pointed out proudly. “No need to worry about sharp angles while you’re working.” All lighting was concealed behind the satiny walls, which cast a back-lit theatrical effect over the work area. Rosenman was convinced no Woodstock employee would get any work done there. It was the most unfunctional mess he had ever laid his eyes on.
Th
e accounting office next door was in a transitory state of several shades of turquoise. Only a week before, they had hired a bookkeeper named Renee Levine, an older conservative woman from Brooklyn who was not about to pass her working day toiling in whorehouse decor. “You’re crazy!” she screamed at Roberts when she entered the office. “If you think I’m going to work with numerical figures while looking at a room like this, you’re completely off the wall!” Fearing she would bolt out the front door never to return, Roberts ordered the immediate repainting of the room in more sedate tones.
The ticket office toward the back of the floor was painted alternating stripes of red, white, and blue in a high-gloss finish. A net extended over the ceiling and diffused the fluorescent lighting so that weblike shadows danced on the walls. Some early mail orders for the event had already started to arrive based upon word of mouth, and they were being attended to by Keith O’Connor, a bearded, disheveled young man who had been coaxed away from his job at the Fillmore East box office. The room was being prepared for his specialized accounting “system,” a procedure only O’Connor seemed equipped to comprehend. Predicting close to fifty thousand mail orders in the upcoming weeks, his system consisted only of a spiral notebook and a pencil. If they were correct in assuming an advance order of nearly two million dollars, Keith’s abstract system would undoubtedly give Roberts’s accountants palpitations.
Beyond the ticket office was Michael’s shadowy sanctuary, a low-keyed cubicle painted silvery-gray to complement the charcoal area rug and tasteful oversized desk already in place. In view of its intended occupant, both Joel and John were somewhat taken aback by the room’s conservative trimmings. No black-light posters, no peace signs etched into the wall, no stuffed animals or toys on the floor, no saying from Chairman Abbie taped to the wall. What they had feared most was that they would open the door onto a Turkish opium den with beaded-mirror pillows slung in front of mammoth hookah pipes laden with brandy and hash. Ironically, what they found was both a shock and a disappointment; they thought they had Lang pegged as a heathen, but perhaps they had been wrong.
Getting past the shocking red and green bathrooms flanking either side of the back hallway, Bert prepared his “guests” for his final and most fabulous creation. “Artie’s pad, man. This office’ll knock you out. It’s just . . . it’s just . . . well, beyond words. It’s too groovy to describe. See for yourself.”
Joel and John meekly entered the office and soared into the twilight zone, an excursion best described by the ingenuous gasp from John’s mouth. It was like a scene out of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. The walls, paneled in a light veneer, did little to distract from the gaudy, bright purple carpeting. Hanging from the canary-yellow ceiling was a berry-colored veil that dropped across the top of the room, creating a tent effect, whose purpose it was to focus the eye down onto an immense rosewood desk where Artie Kornfeld was to conduct his business. Artie’s chair was anything but functional, a highbacked throne lathed in various shades of velvet—although it did put him within reaching distance of a bank of sound equipment positioned against the rear wall and seemingly powerful enough to blast a family of deaf mutes out of their minds. Directly opposite the desk was a raised platform under a panel of spotlights where one was asked to lounge when “hanging out” with Mr. Kornfeld.
“Very psychedelic, Bert,” Joel managed to get out before asking to be excused.
“Whaddya think, John?” the designer inquired.
“Uh, yeah, Bert—psychedelic. Incredibly far out. I, uh, never would have conceived of such a layout in my most bizarre fantasies. You have some, uh, imagination.”
“Thanks, man. It was a trip. My guys should be outta here in a few weeks. . . .”
“A few weeks!” John was annoyed. “We’ve got to get started in here now!”
“But we can put the finishing touches on while you’re doing your thing. Just pretend we’re not even around.” Bert Cohen always had the right answer in his hip pocket.
Roberts and Rosenman were more disturbed by the implications arising from the decoration of Artie’s psychedelic hovel than they were about the overall fiasco in their offices. “It’s something out of a three-year-old’s fantasy,” John commented. “Just bizarre! And what’s more, Artie loves it. He’s like a little kid whenever he goes in there. It’s fuckin’ scary.”
Kornfeld’s entire existence since leaving Capitol Records had been regulated by his constant experimentation with drugs. Artie’s previous enthusiasm for the record business had been considerably numbed and he began to function in quick, spasmodic movements accompanied by slurred speech. There was strong evidence offered by his closest friends to support the theory that Artie was firmly entrenched in the world of psychedelic drugs with plenty of money at his disposal to support a thirsty curiosity.
One afternoon, soon after Woodstock Ventures had moved permanently into the new offices, Artie encountered Bert Cohen alone in the reception area, inspecting his staff’s work. The conversation eventually turned to drugs, and to Bert’s virtual abstention every time something was offered to him.
“Why aren’t you into grass, man?” Artie asked. “Grass is great, hash is even greater. But y’know what I’d really get off on? Mesc.”
Mescaline, to which Artie referred, was a psychedelic hallucinogen rapidly growing in street popularity. Artificially produced in a laboratory, its source was peyote, a cactus whose crown is sliced off and dried to form a hard brownish disc known as the mescal button. The high one received from it was fast and fluid in much the same kaleidoscopic way that LSD parachuted its users into colorful dreamworlds. Its source, though, was scarce and expensive.
Two weeks later Bert came across Artie as he came stumbling out of his purple and yellow kingdom, head in the air, holding a conversation with nobody in particular, and realized he had found a source.
“Hey, man—anyone know where I can score some more great mesc?” Artie mumbled. “Time to buckle in and take off for space. Whoooosh!” Then he noticed Cohen standing by the receptionist’s desk. “Bert—hey Bert, baby.” Artie fell into the bigger man’s arms and draped a languid hand around Cohen’s back. A young girl in jeans and bare feet sitting at the desk looked on in bewildered embarrassment. Artie caught her expression of concern and tightened his clasp on Cohen. “Don’t worry. Bert’s my brother, baby. My brother!”
Artie slapped Cohen good-naturedly on the back a few more times and smiled. Pointing at Cohen again, he put his head on Bert’s shoulder and closed his eyes. He muttered something about great mesc.
And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed.
3
Michael’s blueprint for technical expertise was by no means a doctrine of probity. It was hunting season—hip music people were a rare species and Lang needed his staff completed. Everything that walked, talked, flew, or glided was considered fair game.
Nor was there honor even among the hippest of thieves. Lang recognized that the only qualified personnel in the field with any kind of track record worked for Bill Graham over at the Fillmore East on Second Avenue and he worked hard at making himself known around the backstage area.
Graham was the undisputed sultan of psychedelic rock. Since 1964, he had nurtured San Francisco’s acid rock arietta into an empire of countercultural dialectics to the sweet tune of millions and gradually drew it eastward. With it, he developed a corps of hippies who kept the machinery humming. He taught them about dramatic lighting, amplification, balancing and mixing sound (which was simultaneously carried over as many as sixteen microphones), staging, and group travel. He had even gone as far as divulging his methods of negotiating for talent and reading contracts. Of course, what he was really doing was training the future competition, making sure that when the time came for rock to
emerge as a major industry, he would have cloned the master race who helm the controls. And they would owe him. Graham’s children.
Graham pulled his road show into New York in late 1968, a city in which he was not exactly welcomed with open arms by the local promoters. His idea was to bridge the east-west cultural gap with a common denominator, which he, of course, would establish. The result was Graham’s opening a carbon copy of his San Francisco rock emporium, the Fillmore, on the Lower East Side in an old, dilapidated vaudeville house. Called the Fillmore East, it was another huge success from the moment Bill Graham opened its doors.
Lang had sanctioned midnight raids on Graham’s staff almost from the word go. Bill Hanley had blasted the Fillmore’s sound senses and Keith O’Connor had manned the box office; both were now securely within the Woodstock camp. But there were more urgent, more complex duties to be assigned, and Lang had his eye on several of Graham’s most prized generals.
E. H. Beresford “Chip” Monck was one of the few acknowledged professionals among the expanding rock forces, and he had been firmly implanted there for some time. He had started his career in New York in the late fifties, providing lighting for folk performers like Odetta, Josh White, Harry Belafonte, and Geoffrey Holder at the Village Gate. In between stands, he took several of those acts on extended tours across the country and subsequently found himself in Africa with Miriam Makeba, and Australia with Peter, Paul and Mary.
