Barefoot in Babylon

by Bob Spitz

  When he arrived, Cosgrove alarmed him by mentioning that two state troopers were waiting inside. “Christ, Big D., what kind of trouble did you get yourself into?”

  “It’s nothin’ like that. These guys are friends. You’ll see.”

  Cosgrove led Minker into the dark bar where two ordinary looking men were seated on wooden stools enjoying tall glasses of beer. He looked around for the state troopers. No one else was present.

  “These are two guys you should get to know,” Cosgrove told him, pointing to the drinkers. “Cliff Reynolds and Brent Rismiller.” The two men stood up, shook hands with Minker and invited him to join them at a table.

  Reynolds, a blond man with a cold, scrubbed face, did most of the talking. He asked Minker if he had heard about this festival that was moving into the community.

  “Sure. It sounds great, doesn’t it?”

  Reynolds studied him expressionlessly for a moment longer than was necessary before answering. “It’s a goddamn disgrace is what it is. We want it out of here.” Reynolds erupted. He proceeded to spew out flecks of venom almost as rapidly as submachine gun fire. He was incensed that the town had approved the festival without realizing how many “goddamn hippies” would attend.

  Minker listened attentively as Reynolds unwound. Cosgrove had pulled up a chair and voiced his own concern. They were dedicated to putting a stop to the hippie conclave if it meant “going up there to the Mills place with a few shotguns and scaring the hell out of those bastards.”

  “Take it easy, Cliff,” Minker advised. “You have some legal recourse here. There are several ways to approach it, but violence is not one of them.”

  “Then you do it. Just get those hippies out of here for us—whatever it takes.”

  What it took, they decided that morning, was a court-ordered injunction against Woodstock Ventures, which Minker agreed to bring for them for a fee of $350. “I think you have a good chance of stopping this thing if you do it the right way. But you’ve got to do it the right way.”

  “Okay. We’ll play by your rules for now,” Reynolds agreed. “But if that doesn’t work out, we’ll handle it ourselves.”

  4

  The chain of disorganized underground movements lurking in the New York metropolitan area had done their own inimitable share to prickle the inner wheelworks of the festival machinery. As soon as the downtown production office had been established, Lang started receiving visits—“raids,” Michael called them—from Abbie Hoffman, self-styled bad boy of the New Left who periodically descended upon the office shouting anticapitalist war cries and retreated before anyone could invite him in for a smoke. To Hoffman’s utter dismay, the staff there found his guerilla-theatre warfare quite amusing; it was part of the ambience Lang had striven so hard to instill in his undertaking—a type of pseudorevolutionary atmosphere, even if it was played strictly for laughs. Hoffman had been a Village mainstay since his spectacular stage performance in Judge Julius Hoffman’s Chicago courtroom. He had spent his between-trial appearances that year staging rallies against anything that stank of Establishment hype. According to a confidant of his, Abbie was purported to have written “Prankster” in the space allotted for his profession on a department store charge account application. Lang welcomed Hoffman’s camouflaged participation with equally camouflaged opened arms, although neither one would dare admit it to the other for fear of losing face.

  One afternoon during the second weekend in June, Lang and Rosenman were walking through another “friendly chat” in the midst of their ticketing cold war when the phone rang. Michael jumped to answer it before Joel could pick it up. It was Abbie Hoffman.

  “Do-Lang Do-Lang—hey, man, listen. We gotta get together.”

  Michael recognized the voice. “Okay,” he said pleasantly.

  “Just like that? Ho ho, you’re the one I been gunnin’ for, m’man. You got any idea what I want?”

  “No.”

  “I want money. Bread—and plenty of it. Or else.”

  Michael laughed at the absurdity in Hoffman’s voice. He sounded like some cheap gangster on a television detective series. “Or else what?”

  “Fireworks. You’re rippin’ off the people, man. You guys are chargin’ country club prices for street music and that’s a fuckin’, capitalist ripoff. You’re gonna pay, Lang-o.”

  “You jivin’ me, man?”

  “Jive ass, I’m jivin’ you. Who’s jivin’ who, man? You’re gonna be one rich dude in a couple of months, and I think it’s about time you start contributin’ to the cause. You can pay on the installment plan if you like, but you better open up your heart awful quickly if you know what’s good for that little festival of yours.”

  “I repeat: Or else what?”

  “Or else it’ll be one bad scene up there in Wallkill, man. Just try and collect any of that rich-kid bread without us on your side of the gate. You’d look awful silly tryin’ to explain to the pigs how all that acid crept into your water supply. What a trip! How’s that for openers?”

  “Uh, yeah. Fine. C’mon over and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Not a chance, man. Why don’t you and your playfriends take a stroll over our way and we’ll play house. Say, next Thursday afternoon—threeish?”

  “I gotta make an appointment with you?”

  “Sure, man. I got a big fuckin’ secretary who sits on my knee and lights my joint.”

  “You mean joints.”

  “Sure. Anything you say.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “You’re a sweetheart.”

  • • •

  Hoffman and his merry band of thieves lived in a slovenly tenement on the Lower East Side, just around the corner from the Fillmore East. On June 19, Joel, Michael and Artie trudged up the stoop to the building with suspicious smiles plastered across their faces. Even Lang was admittedly out of his element going in there: he had no idea what to expect from Hoffman’s phone conversation and knew this crowd could get tough if they had to. The meeting could go any number of ways.

  Lang had been on his guard from the moment he agreed to the meeting. What’s more, he was worried about having Joel along for the ride. Joel’s idea of hanging out, Lang thought, was an afternoon on the Princeton Club’s squash court with a well-placed colleague. He was certain Hoffman and his cronies would smell Joel’s manufactured hipness from underneath his slipcovered jeans and sculptured short hair. If Rosenman so much as uttered a logical word, he’d “blow the lid off Abbie’s scam.” They all had to be cool.

  “We need these cats on our side,” Lang had pleaded with him the afternoon when the call had come in. “They’re pretty groovy guys to have around, and they have a direct line to the underground which’d be invaluable to us. If they’re in our corner, we can’t miss.”

  “I thought Bert Cohen was taking care of the underground press for us,” Joel said, recalling the fifteen-thousand-dollar check he had countersigned over to Concert Hall Publications back in April for that very reason.

  “Well, yeah—Bert’s handlin’ the underground and all, but we need to take our message to the streets and that’s where these guys come in. They’ll put the word out that it’s cool to come to the festival.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Whew! I don’t even want to consider that, man. It’d be a bummer.”

  “What do they want?”

  “I don’t know what they’ll ask for, man. They’re weird dudes. Could be anything. Free tickets, maybe, or a booth for their leaflets and shit. Fuck it! They may even want some stage time.”

  But as with everything else he had done concerning the festival so far, Michael had sorely underestimated Hoffman’s avarice.

  “We want fifty grand, man,” he said emphatically. They were seated around a small table in Abbie’s apartment with Michael, Joel, Artie Kornfeld, and a few members of Hoffman’s ra
gtag entourage. “That’s not askin’ too much, is it?” He smiled.

  Lang chuckled and shook his head. “Come off it, man. We don’t have that kinda bread.”

  “Don’t give me that shit, pal. You motherfuckin’ capitalist bastards are swimmin’ in cash. Me?—I just want enough to bathe in. I gotta pay the bills for my trial, man. All the time I was up on that bench in court representin’ the people, the accountants were puttin’ it down on my tab. I figure I got it comin’, man, seein’ as how I was speakin’ for all of us.”

  “Look, if you’re really for the people, man, we’ll give you some bread to do work,” Michael conceded. “If you want to come up and distribute information—great— I’ll make sure you get some space and some booths. But fifty grand is out of the question.”

  “That’s it, huh? Well, we’ll take you up on those booths, but it won’t do you or us any good if there’s no festival, will it?” Hoffman laughed raucously and encouraged his friends to join him. “I’ll save us all some time, man. No negotiatin’. No jerkin’ each other off. We’ll take ten G’s and not a cent less. Or else.”

  “Or else what?”

  “Or else that fuckin’ festival is gonna end up around your ass.”

  • • •

  Joel was furious over Hoffman’s demands. “That’s fuckin’ extortion, man,” he declared walking back to the downtown office. “They can shove it if they think we’re gonna be a party to that.”

  “We don’t have any choice, man,” Michael said. “They got us over a barrel. We have to pay it. Ten G’s—just look at it as insurance.”

  “I’m lookin’ at it as ten thousand dollars down the drain, Michael. You know damn well where that money’s going—into Hoffman’s pocket.”

  “You’re probably right, but it doesn’t make any difference. We’ve still gotta pay it. Lemme explain something to you. As much as they’re all for peace and love, man, they’d as soon nail you to the wall if you tried to fuck with them. See, if we don’t shell out the bread for Abbie, man, they’re gonna turn the kids off to the festival. They can do it, too. They’ll pass out leaflets callin’ us assholes, they’ll picket the festival and, who knows, maybe they’ll even storm the gates. We can’t take that chance. We’ll have a fuckin’ riot up there. Anyway, they’ll add color to what we’re doin’ if they’re on our side—a nice sidelight to the music and all. It’ll be worth ten grand. You think I wanna give ’em the bread? Shit, man, I’d rather put it towards another band or something. I’d have been real happy if they left it alone like it was none o’ their fuckin’ business, which it’s not. But it’s too late for that. If you think ten grand’s a lotta money, let me tell you—it’ll cost us a lot more than that to fight ’em off.”

  In a bizarre way, Michael’s reasoning made good business sense to Joel and John. It was like renting an apartment in New York City, they thought: It was outrageous to spend four hundred dollars a month for a one-bedroom apartment, but if a person waited too long, he would eventually have to swallow his outrage and settle for the same thing at five hundred dollars a month. Supply and demand. Anyway, Michael said they had to do it, and he obviously knew how to handle this bunch.

  Throughout the remainder of that week, substantial bundles of petty cash were drawn on the Woodstock Ventures account. When ten thousand dollars had been accumulated, it was sent to the downtown office for Lang and, later that night, turned over to Abbie Hoffman. For ten thousand dollars the New Left had taken a considerable turn to the right; hip capitalism was in vogue on the Lower East Side. Years later, for a considerable advance from a major publishing house, Hoffman would attribute the festival’s destruction to “the egocentric greed of the Rock Empire itself . . . the stealing from each other.” He had an inside track on that information and had, at last, earned his recognition as that culture’s leader.

  • • •

  The same afternoon the powwow took place in Abbie Hoffman’s East Village lair, Stanley Goldstein, recognized as a duly employed representative of Woodstock Ventures, Inc., was served with a summons ordering the festival’s principals to appear before the State Supreme Court in Goshen, New York, on July 7. At that time, a motion, brought by several Wallkill complainants, would be heard for an injunction restraining the Aquarian Exposition from being held in that town.

  The action was initiated by two families, Mr. and Mrs. Martin Nowack and Mr. and Mrs. Adam Papuga, who owned tracts of land adjoining Mills Heights “on behalf of themselves and all other residents and property owners in the Town of Wallkill, County of Orange, New York.” The papers had been filed that morning by their attorney, Jules Minker, who, it seemed, was making a career out of representing people opposed to the festival.

  According to papers signed by Minker’s clients, they charged that the “security force planned for the event [was] inadequate, that their lives and property [would] be in jeopardy, and that local roads [would] be so obstructed that emergency travel [would] be impossible.” The Times Herald Record, however, was quick to point out that “the plaintiffs must prove a clear and present danger exists, for which monetary compensation could not be given.”

  One of the plaintiffs’ earliest public supporters was Cliff Reynolds, who had been busily collecting over two hundred signatures on a petition that condemned the festival.

  Goldstein immediately telephoned Samuel W. Eager, Jr., a Middletown attorney who, only two days before, had agreed to represent Woodstock Ventures locally. Eager was the meticulously mannered, gaunt son of a local judge whose family had long supported Republican causes within the immediate community. He was highly respected for his unemotional, staunchly conservative practice of jurisprudence, and several residents who had known the family for as long as they could remember were surprised to see Sam take the case.

  Eager advised Goldstein to send the papers over to his Dolson Avenue office and to go about festival business as though nothing had happened. He would make all the necessary calls to those involved with the action and would immediately begin drafting their defense. Meanwhile, he had been gathering information concerning his new clients’ dilemma. Only a day before, he had called Jack Schlosser to request an informal meeting between the members of the town board and the four Woodstock officers. Schlosser consented, setting aside Thursday evening, June 19, at 7:30 in his office; it was the same day on which Goldstein was served with the complaint.

  Eager meant business. Normally, he was not one to jump to a conclusion, electing instead to pore over every shred of available information until his position, based on legal precedent, became clear. This time, however, he had formed an opinion about the conflict before he even agreed to take Woodstock’s account. Aside from the fact that holding such an event in the Town of Wallkill seemed personally attractive to him, it appeared to Sam Eager that a legal wrong had been done the boys. No matter how he personally felt about rock music and long hair (and he detested both), it was his duty as a lawyer to defend a person or a group of people against such injustices.

  “Sam was sticking his neck out further than he may have realized,” a friend of the family’s declared. “It was an admirable gesture from a legal standpoint, but one which most people around here found foolhardy. If he lost the case, he could slowly reinstate himself into the mainstream here in Wallkill, but if he won, if the town was forced to hold the festival as scheduled against its will and Sam had caused it, he would be ostracized and possibly even run out of town.”

  Eager’s first test of resolute endurance came that very evening at the informal board meeting to review the festival staff and their method of operations. Eager had instructed his clients to be prepared to present a cohesive, fully documented explanation of their plans. The men they would be facing that night were considered by him to be “probing analysts,” a label Eager substituted for something more critical of their celebrated bellyaching. He wanted them to be able to justify their every move under cross-examination.


  The council’s biggest grievance lay with traffic. Not only did they disapprove of the number of cars slated to enter Wallkill for the weekend, but they also opposed any amendment to the transportation problem. Construction had begun that spring on Route 211, the main access to the Quickway, and that was the main thoroughfare in the festival shuttle scheme. “That road is a hazard now,” Schlosser pointed out. “It’s the main route for getting to and from all the shopping districts. Right now, it’s an intersection to avoid. How do you expect me to allow you to use that road to bring in twenty thousand cars a day? You load something like this festival onto it and it’ll be a complete mess.”

  Then, one of the other board members asked what would be done about sanitation. Three days, to him, seemed “like an awfully long time for somebody to go without taking a shit.” It drew a hearty round of laughter from his colleagues.

  Mel smiled through the raillery. He explained their negotiations with two companies, Port-O-San and Johnny-On-The-Spot, to provide one hundred transportable toilets for the event. “These are companies with years of experience in large-scale sanitation, and they have been advising us on proper use and care of the units. We’ll have a fully trained staff to oversee that phase of the operation by the time August rolls around.”

  “Where do you intend to get rid of the waste?” asked a man who was dressed in baggy overalls.

  Lawrence answered without hesitation. “The two companies I mentioned will have tank trucks standing by. They’ll empty what has not chemically decomposed into the trucks. Don’t you think they know what they’re doing either? All your goddamn construction crews use the same facilities I’m talking about, and I’ll bet my last nickel you don’t ask your builders how they intend to get rid of the waste. I ran down to take a look at that new Sears that’s coming up in Middletown, and what I saw was pathetic. Their sanitation facilities stink—literally. Why, every goddamn infraction of your existing health codes is being taken advantage of by those guys and you don’t even give it two minutes of your time. Instead, you want us to schlep our entire plans in here because you’re afraid of hippies. Why don’t you cut us a break and stick to what’s relevant? I didn’t intend to have to answer for us and all the professional companies involved, and I shouldn’t have to. You want to know if Port-O-San can handle the festival—you give ’em a call. If you used your heads in the first place, you’d know they could handle their part of the act.”