Barefoot in Babylon

by Bob Spitz

  Pomeroy also suggested they give him authority to hire Don Ganoung, a man from San Francisco with a background diverse enough to confuse even Nero Wolfe. Pomeroy had met Ganoung in 1964 while policing the Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Ganoung was an Episcopal priest, having been one of Bishop Pike’s street priests. He was attending the convention representing the Christians for Social Action, a coalition of mostly religious groups who intended to protest about the rights of the people being revoked at the government’s whim.

  “When I heard the Christians for Social Action were going to be an entity there, I contacted them and arranged a meeting with Don Ganoung at the Good Samaritan parish house on the Patrero.” The Patrero was the troubled Chicano and Samoan district in greater San Francisco. “Ganoung and I began to establish ground rules for the demonstration. No one had ever tried to do this with protesters before, and we worked out a mutual agreement whereby they could express their opinions and expose their problems to the public. That’s all they wanted. I also became their advocate in a strange way because I was their only line of communication to the outside Establishment of which I was a part.”

  Pomeroy and Ganoung became good friends and pursued mutual goals in the area of civil rights and humanities. During this time, Pomeroy found out that Ganoung had a degree from the School of Criminology at Berkeley, was the recipient of a master’s degree in a related area, had been a CID officer in the Korean War, and a juvenile probation officer thereafter before becoming a priest. Pomeroy brought Ganoung into the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration where he worked on personnel selection and screening candidates for the Attorney General’s staff for several months.

  “You need a guy like Ganoung at the festival. He can become invaluable in community relations. Ship him up there a couple weeks ahead of time, and let him mediate matters for you.”

  Lang didn’t hesitate. “Grab him. Offer him anything he likes, but don’t let him shuffle out of our reach.”

  “Tell him we can use him as soon as possible,” Goldstein interjected. “We’re moving up to Wallkill on the sixth, and I’d like him along to smooth the rough edges. If he agrees, I’ll work out an airline ticket for him and a place to stay once he gets here.”

  Pomeroy nodded, and made a note in his appointment book to phone Ganoung. “What do you want me to begin with once my staff is firmed up and out of the way?”

  “I’d like you to organize and coordinate a written security plan, something we can show the town and the rest of the cats helping out around the site. It’s gotta include some way to handle security without seeing security—y’know, like you were sayin’ before.”

  “I’m gonna run him up to the site so he can see what he’s dealing with before tackling the security plan,” Goldstein told Lang.

  “Good.” He turned to Pomeroy. “Then, when you’ve had some time to give this thing some thought, we’ll get together up in Wallkill and begin work.”

  Lang, Pomeroy, and Goldstein stood up and exchanged firm handshakes. As Pomeroy and Goldstein left, Michael turned to Ticia who was beaming her approval. Michael gave her the high sign and collapsed into his chair. It was the first time since beginning this project that he actually felt relaxed about giving up some of the authority. By having this Washington cop at their side, they would finally be recognized as a force to contend with in the eyes of the Establishment. They had been legitimized; Wes Pomeroy had sealed their fate.

  PART TWO

  The Nation at War

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Home Again, and Home Again

  The landlord’s laugh was ready chorus.

  —Robert Burns

  1

  On a palmy, summer afternoon in 1969, there was no better place in Wallkill to measure the pulse of the community than the graded space in the Burger King parking lot on Route 211. It was there one came to rubberneck and exchange confidences. Whether they were nursing a chocolate shake or car-hopping along a row of jacked-up Mustang convertibles that were so popular with teen-agers there, it was possible to keep one eye posted on the traffic that rolled off the Quickway exit directly across the street. The light there, suspended above the pavement by a girded cable, marked the crossroads of the town. It was a regional landmark used for directing visitors anywhere within town boundaries, much like the old school-house or bronze statue or white brick church in other tank towns across the United States. Sooner or later, everyone was bound to cross that intersection, and when he did, the occasion would be noted with telltale speculation.

  If one was patient and withstood several hours’ worth of Whoppers and lukewarm French fries, he could conceivably unravel the town’s innermost secrets—that is, if there were any knotting up at the moment. One eye on the bite; the other on the light. That summer, though, an astute front-seat detective would observe little to finance a whispering campaign.

  The ennui and apathy of rural existence set in like a contagious disease infecting the town’s anemic youth. To hear the kids’ chatter through open car windows, they were the living sum total of the past. The intersection in front of Burger King told the whole miserable story. From a point just over the dashboard, they watched what was the only show in town: a cavalcade of grunting diesel trucks whose familiar inscriptions—Sunoco, Agway, International Harvester, Consolidated Can Corporation—supposedly kept the community alive. “They’re proof to the rest of the country of our productivity, our strength,” a Middletowner lectured his son. Civic pride, however, is not an inherited trait. While the old guard persisted in rambling on about maintaining the status quo, it dawned on the younger generation that, culturally, they were dying.

  That June, those who maintained the vigil at the Burger King/Quickway intersection noticed a sprinkling of brightly colored vans mingled in with the steel-gray truck flow. No one reacted at first; no one realized its significance. No one suspected their small town would ever be singled out as an arena for commercial hijinx in much the same way Professor Harold Hill stole into River City with his satchel full of band uniforms. A transformation, however, was taking place in front of their very eyes, and as time wore on, they watched, transfixed by the excitement before them. First came the vans, then the flatbed trucks piled high with plywood planks and wire fencing, then the heavy machinery. Then it was too late. Babylon had descended upon Wallkill, and with it, like River City’s commotion, came trouble—with a capital T.

  • • •

  The festival stopwatch had been set on June 5 and was immediately activated. Like a time bomb, it could not be defused without exploding. There were no allowances in the schedule for mistakes; excuses would surely prove fatal. With only seventy days allotted for preparations between the move to Wallkill and August 15 when the first guitar would strike a note for eternity, time was everything. Each action had to be negotiated with forethought, every plan carried out with precision. There was no stopping time.

  Mel Lawrence had reached an agreement with a faltering bungalow colony in Bullville, a Catskill Mountain adjunct, to provide housing for the twenty-person crew due to arrive in Wallkill to begin work on June 6. Rosenberg’s was a family retreat known for its Kosher cuisine and was once removed from the mainstream of Catskill celebrity haunts. Its provisions were the solemn, rhymeless necessities that catered to a solid working-class clientele. Each summer, finding themselves handcuffed by inflation, the same faces trudged back to escape fleetingly the humdrum, dispassionate city grind. They carried their green-and-white-striped beach chairs to the pool’s edge, where they passed two weeks locked in expressionless gin rummy tournaments while their children splashed nearby. Lawrence, nonetheless, had remembered it from his teen-age days as a waiter in that region and knew it to be clean, congenial, and accommodating. He had cajoled its owners, an elderly Jewish couple, into making it available to Woodstock Ventures by passing off his band of hippies as a “bunch of nice Jewish kids who promise to
be good while they are guests of the colony.” The next day, the Rosenbergs and their annual summer lodgers gawked shamelessly as a congregation resembling a faction of Hell’s Angels dropped its backpacks in the Main Lodge reception area while awaiting their room assignments. Religious families whose men wore yarmulkes on their heads gathered around them as “Funny, you don’t look Jewish” became a much repeated salutation.

  The first to arrive were Lawrence, Michael Lang, Penny Stallings, a woman friend of John Morris’s named Lee Mackler who was hired to assist the security honchos with police selection, and the five University of Miami artists led by Bill and Jean Ward. They swept down upon this unassuming little hamlet like a tropical storm, and after being transferred to their rooms in unembellished cabins dubbed “The Apple,” “The Berry,” “The Cherry,” and “The Grape,” they squeezed into two rented station wagons and drove over to the Mills property to acquaint themselves with their forthcoming task.

  The site looked like an overgrown picnic area. A knee-high jungle of grass covered the acreage as far as the eye could see, an olive green blanket checkered with dandelions, milkweed, and chicory. Every few hundred yards, a dead tree jutted forth, its leafless limbs stretching like a haggard hawk on descent. The once productive orchard had receded to the road. Mosquitoes glided inches above the soft marshy spots and nested in the disregarded piles of dried ashwood. Nevertheless, its unadorned soul shone through. It was a stunning example of how man botched natural beauty by reckless neglect.

  The hippies wandered across the meadow like pioneers validating a lost deed. They set to work analyzing their respective jobs without a day’s delay. Everyone possessed an identical sense of urgency regarding the festival’s incarnation. Michael did well to heighten that feeling by disclosing to them that, since the first run of festival advertisements had hit the papers last week, mail-order requests averaging twenty to thirty thousand dollars a day were pouring into the uptown office. History was in the making, he assured them, and it was up to each one present to see that the hippie canon was inscribed in the annals with significant import.

  Lawrence set up festival headquarters in a miniature red barn covered with gray slate shingles on the perimeter of Howard Mills’s property, which he had rented from their landlord for a slight additional charge. (Everything not specifically mentioned in the lease, they were informed early, would carry a “slight additional charge.”) Desks and swivel chairs were shipped upstate from the production office. Mel’s desk occupied the hayloft, which permitted him an unobstructed view of what was happening on the site through a second-story window. Penny Stallings was stationed directly beneath him. The other desks and architects’ tables situated across from Penny were reserved for assistants who would gravitate north as their schedules allowed.

  From the first day of occupancy in the barn, Lawrence was buried beneath a tangle of blueprints and structural designs commissioned months before. From here on in, he had to attend to the physical construction of the site; channels for electrical lines had to be plotted, coordinates were set for the sinking of the concrete stage supports, a system of piping to carry water from the towers to the field was pending his approval, lumber had to be ordered for building the stage and lighting towers, county diagrams were unrolled and tacked on a bulletin board to accelerate the festival’s request for additional roads to be laid by the art and field crews. Lawrence then shuttled the sheaves of paper onto Penny’s desk so that she could begin working on deals for ordering hardware and machinery. No one was afforded a moment’s rest, and everyone worked on impulse.

  Michael was on hand for the first few days’ activities, strolling across the grounds with a tattered paperback copy of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test stuffed into his back pocket. He and Mel fantasized about the crowds that would descend upon the very spot they stood on in slightly more than two months’ time. “You see that hill over there, kid?” Lawrence asked him, cradling Michael with an arm and pointing to the bowl’s grassy knoll. “Fifty thousand kids, m’man. Fifty thousand of those little fuckers are gonna bound in here to see this show.” They’d slap each other’s palms and cap off their elation by sharing a joint. Together, they walked off approximate measurements for the campgrounds, which were to be cut from the remains of the orchard. Some of the dead trees would have to be chopped down; they decided to prune them for camping firewood and to use what was left for a playground. They also conceived a network of paths, which had to be tramped through the trees, to facilitate getting from one section of the site to another.

  One problem was obvious from the onset. “We’re gonna run into trouble with parking,” Mel advised Lang on one of their morning jaunts across the field. “We’ve got just enough room to stash a few hundred cars around the entrance, but after that, we’re in for nothing but headaches. You know as well as I do that we’re gonna be bombarded with wheels—maybe up to twenty thousand a day.”

  “How about parking ’em on the ground behind the stage and having ’em walk from there around to the gate?”

  “Good thinkin’, pal. Tell you what: I’ll appoint you to go out there at night with a flashlight and try to coax fifty thousand half-crazed hippies through a ten-foot entranceway. Ever see a stampede from up close? Try that, and I guarantee that you will. There’s no access to that area. There aren’t enough adequate roads to keep the cars moving without creating a goddamn traffic jam.”

  “Can we build one?”

  “Not in the amount of time we’ve got. A two-lane road wouldn’t help. What we need is enough access to handle more than the twenty thousand cars a day, several roads leading into that area so we can convert them to one-way drives. That way, at least we’d have a little control over the flow. But that’d take too much time. You gotta remember, we’re gonna be rollin’ over people’s land and they’re gonna be screamin’ their fuckin’ heads off about that. We’ll be tossed outta here on our asses so fast we won’t know what hit us. What we can do is to rebuild and pave the road above the site so that it gives us another means to get ’em in the front door. Beyond that, I think we’re gonna have ourselves a helluva problem.”

  Lawrence informed Lang that he was investigating various methods of alternative busing. Hopefully, he’d locate one or several large fields within the town, which he could rent and where people could be directed to park their cars before they ever came within proximity of the festival grounds. They’d have to contract a private bus company to shuttle those with tickets from the parking lot onto the site. “It’ll be expensive,” he contended, “but it’ll avoid creating a devastating situation with the traffic.”

  “That’s cool,” Lang approved. “Don’t worry about the bread. It’s more important that we let it happen.”

  “Yeah. I figured that’d be your reaction. Hey kid, you sure you got the bucks behind you? We’re in over our fuckin’ heads with this thing. I’m no longer playin’ bingo with a sack full of nickels and dimes. This gig could float a major political campaign.”

  “Don’t worry, Mel. It’s no hassle. I got it all under control.” Michael smiled and gave him the high sign.

  “All right. I just hadda say it once now that we’re goin’ for broke. I’ll ride around later this afternoon and see what I can dig up in the way of fields. I talked to Goldstein a little while ago. He’s latched onto this company outta Cambridge that is some kinda hip efficiency organization. They drop in, look at the layout, and determine how we can slide through it with a little more breathing room. Maybe they can do something about the traffic situation. Meanwhile, I suggest you tack on to the ads some kinda warning that kids should leave their wheels at home and take public transportation. If we can encourage that and it works, we’ll reduce the risk of a fiasco by a helluva lot. Otherwise we’re fucked.”

  Michael made a note of it and slipped it into the front cover of his book.

  “What’s the latest word on bands?” Mel asked.

  “The contrac
ts just came in for Sweetwater, and I signed BS&T yesterday.”

  “Hey, far fuckin’ out!”

  Michael had spent a considerable amount of time searching for another headliner. Blood, Sweat and Tears was considered of superstar magnitude. Their signing was a conspicuous feather in Lang’s frumpy leather cap. By mid-1969, their second album, Blood, Sweat and Tears (minus founder Al Kooper), was firmly stationed at the top of the charts, and their unique sound—a synthesis of electric blues and jazz—began to dominate commercial rock music. All of the up-and-coming recording artists were incorporating a horn section like BS&T’s into their bands and were similarly experimenting with more spontaneous chord progressions. Chicago Transit Authority, another progressive group who captured the teen-age market, followed suit but had not yet worked their way into matching sales figures. Lang went with the proven commodity. Blood, Sweat and Tears had just come off a series of Top Forty hits. He banked on the percentage theory of their still being hot in mid-August.

  “They hit us for fifteen grand, man.”

  Lawrence whistled. “That’s a shitload of bread. They oughta direct traffic, work the concession booths, and do lights for that kinda money.” They both laughed.

  “They’ll pack ’em in, though. I checked it out, and they’re selling out faster than almost any other American group on the road. They also got a lotta class with Clayton-Thomas, and all. And Sweetwater’ll be a good act to stick on Friday’s show.”