Barefoot in Babylon

by Bob Spitz

  Rosenman underwent several bargaining sessions with the old man, each one more frustrating than the last. And more time-consuming. Filippini grew to look forward to Rosenman’s visits and never failed to break out a bottle of chianti over which, he said, it was customary in the old country to settle all differences.

  But, as James Russell Lowell wrote, “There is no good in arguing with the inevitable,” and, in this case, the inevitable was practically five days away. Filippini could have it whichever way he wanted, Joel thought. Come Friday, there’d be no stopping them. If a water shortage arose, they’d begin pumping the pond to avert a disaster with or without a written agreement. He suspected that any court of law would exhibit leniency under the circumstances.

  Filippini, despite his tendency toward “countrified ignorance,” reached the same conclusion as Joel, and delivered the terms of settlement with practiced finesse: $5,000 for the right to pump water, without restriction, from the lake for a period lasting not longer than ten days, take it or leave it.

  They took it.

  • • •

  John Roberts spent that same evening, the evening of August 11, alone in his New York apartment, packing for Wednesday’s trip upstate. Roberts was blissfully loose, perhaps even exploiting a touch of the old sangfroid kept in reserve for just such an occasion, as he tossed a few toiletries into a monogrammed overnight bag on the bed. An all-too-conspicuous maelstrom surged within a few hours of shattering his cozy world, but for the moment, Roberts felt no pain.

  The balance sheet on his night table was responsible for John’s current state of mind. As of that afternoon’s accounting, Woodstock Ventures had posted receipt of advance ticket sales totaling $1,107,936. It was true that they had run through nearly twice that sum in order to produce the festival, and, yes, it had been somewhat infuriating that he had allowed himself to be taken in by those two, Lang and Kornfeld, but it appeared now as though the inequities would cancel out one another. From where he stood, they were in for a hearty gate, which would undoubtedly lift them into the black for the first time in months.

  Roberts admitted to himself that as long as they broke even in this venture he’d be happy. For all the hassles he’d endured, despite the traumas and the tribulations that had contributed to his sleepless nights, for all the uncertainty and delusion, it had been a hell of a summer. He had finally wormed his way out from under the stigma of failure. He was caught up in the midst of an exciting, although somewhat notorious, cultural phenomenon. And his father, whom he had invited to accompany him to Bethel, would have to come to terms with John’s emerging professional status or be damned by his narrow-mindedness.

  Of course, Roberts attributed an even greater measure of optimism to their impending film deal, of which he expected to hear good news any day.

  Some weeks ago, right after Wallkill caved in, the three active partners—Michael, Joel, and John—confessed that it was no longer expedient for them to rely solely on Artie Kornfeld to wrap up any movie transaction at all, let alone in enough time for a major studio to jettison a field crew to Bethel. Psychedelic drugs had shot Artie’s personality full of holes. He was a human being only inasmuch as his heart beat steadily and his brain received electrochemical impulses, but otherwise, Artie was what the hippies referred to as a “deadhead” or a “casualty.” His behavior paralleled that of a retarded child. He chose to glide through the summer of 1969 in a “purple haze,” oblivious of the world at large. They’d have to cover for him. The only way they could keep a film deal from slipping through their fingers was for Woodstock Ventures to have its own camera crew standing in the wings while their attorneys raced against the clock to find a legitimate distributor.

  Lang very swiftly hired two Englishmen, Michael Margetz and Malcolm Hart, to film the preliminary activity on and around the site, and that was proceeding rather nicely. For the concert footage, they commissioned a young team of filmmakers named Bob Meurice and Michael Wadleigh, whose studio on upper Broadway Lang had urged his partners to visit during the last week in July.

  Neither John nor Joel had ever heard of Wadleigh-Meurice Productions before. Nor, for that matter, had any of their moviegoing friends who were usually well informed when it came to matching names to credits. The little they managed to dig up about them from industry associates was either irrelevant to their interests or circumstantial. As with the rest of their half-assed gambles, Roberts and Rosenman had to feel their way through this end of the enterprise with extreme caution and hope they wouldn’t ultimately be taken to the cleaners.

  Michael Wadleigh, they learned, was a medical-school dropout from Ohio whose honey-colored long hair, undernourished leanness, pious eyes, Zapata moustache, and wing-tipped beard invited comparison to a twentieth-century Christ. He shunned traditional Hollywood slickness and convention for an informal existence in the East. Wadleigh had made a documentary about the war called No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger, which had received critical acclaim, but aside from that, he had relatively little experience or renown as a film director. Bob Meurice was the more conservative of the two, outspoken and fearless, and his credentials were as incomplete as his partner’s. Nevertheless, Roberts and Rosenman found them enthusiastic about doing a film on the festival, and they had even volunteered to work on speculation. Since no distributor was involved as yet, they would pay for their own raw stock (which they estimated would come to roughly $100,000) and use their influence (whatever that might be) to place the finished product with a major film company for distribution.

  That was indirectly what Roberts had been waiting to hear all along: there was somebody else out there, besides him, who was willing to invest money in the festival. Until now, the deals Lang had brought to them were sweet ones for everyone but Roberts and Rosenman. This was indeed a welcome change of pace.

  Even so, money alone was not to be the determining factor that led to Wadleigh-Meurice Productions’ clinching the Woodstock deal. Michael Wadleigh invited Roberts to screen a few reels of his experimental work so that John might get a better feeling for what the director had in mind for their film—should he be given the chance to shoot it. Wadleigh had heard that the reason the major distributors shied away from making a commitment so far was because they remained unconvinced that a documentary about a rock festival could capture the emotional, as well as the musical, excitement of the event. They felt—and rightly so—that a movie without those basic ingredients was clearly box office poison.

  Wadleigh agreed with the experts who believed that a lot was lost in the translation from live concert to film, no matter how “in touch” the director and cameraman were with their subject. However, he also claimed to have found a way around it. He had been toying with the split-screen technique of editing and found it to be most effective in energizing a documentary. When two completely different scenes were projected onto the screen at the same time and shown side by side, the viewer was treated to much the same kind of superabundant, electrified thrills one experienced at a three-ring circus.

  After sitting through a few examples of that type of filmmaking, Roberts was a firm believer that Wadleigh knew what he was talking about.

  The deal they entered into as a result of that meeting was potentially advantageous for both groups. Wadleigh-Meurice Productions would raise all the necessary monies for the production of the film. In addition to their being awarded exclusive filming rights, they could retain artistic control by placing the finished movie with a distributor with whom they felt comfortable. That indirectly removed all responsibility from Artie’s hands. Woodstock Ventures would retain fifty percent of the producer’s royalty after the distributor took his cut, and Wadleigh-Meurice would share thirty percent of that. Everyone expressed satisfaction with his end of the package.

  A week later, Bob Meurice called Roberts back to inquire whether or not John might be interested in renegotiating their deal. Meurice had second thoughts about bankrolling
a documentary about a festival that might not take place. Woodstock Ventures, he pointed out, was still under the threat of an injunction, and, anyway, Meurice hadn’t had much luck in finding investors to underwrite the costs of their production. He wondered whether Woodstock Ventures might put up the $100,000 to make the film, for which, in return, they could take one hundred percent of the profits.

  Roberts was adamantly opposed to an alteration in the contract no matter what concessions were made. He told Meurice that he was already in over his head as far as his own company’s financing was concerned. His personal accounts were drained. Woodstock Ventures needed refunding. This time it just couldn’t be any other way—he’d have to pass.

  John was relieved. It had been the first time he dared to say “no” to anybody since going into business with Lang and Kornfeld. He’d been a pushover these last few months; nobody knew it better than he. But, by politely refusing Bob Meurice’s request, he had scaled something of a psychological hurdle that had been troubling him. Polite, but firm. It hadn’t been so bad. He’d won for a change.

  This time, however, Roberts had made a mistake—a very costly mistake. It would haunt him for at least a decade. Over the course of the next week, their film distribution deal would pass through the hands of just about every major studio in Hollywood, the terms would vary according to the offer, Paramount and Columbia would renege on promises, and Meurice and Wadleigh would ultimately reach an agreement with Warner Brothers. And, in their haste, when the terms of the deal were set, the promoters of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair would lose points as rapidly as a dog sheds its winter coat. But John Roberts’s decision not to stake Wadleigh-Meurice Productions to $100,000, after all the money that had been squandered on wasted efforts and bribes, on luxury sports cars and helicopter rides, on unused land and pointless legal battles, turned out to be the most unrewarding and, perhaps, the most tragic decision of his career.

  3

  Construction continued on the site throughout Tuesday, August 12, despite periodic showers.

  Lang, Steve Cohen, Ticia Bernuth, and John Morris spent most of that afternoon galloping back and forth across the bowl on horseback, ignoring the hundreds of dedicated laborers in their path who worked to carry the preparations to their hurried climax. “At that moment,” a bare-chested stake driver attested, “we felt humiliated, just blown away. It was like massah and the gentry had come down from the castle to ride among the slaves.”

  By Wednesday morning, though, the enervated crews had a fresh source from which they borrowed encouragement.

  Cars, jeeps, buses, and trains had been arriving in Monticello throughout the night, all bursting at the seams with hippies en route to the festival. They came from as far west as California and Washington, from as deep into the south as Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, and, to the north, from Maine and Wisconsin—all lacking overnight accommodations. They hadn’t given much thought to lodging before leaving home, and as they quite rudely discovered upon arrival, Sullivan County’s motels were either booked solid through the festival weekend or off limits to hippies.

  With no other option open to them, an estimated thirty thousand teen-agers, “many barefoot and looking like pioneers,” descended upon the site, and, by 11:00 that morning, were settled snugly into the open bowl on Yasgur’s farm.

  “My God,” a stagehand exclaimed to a friend, as they struggled to keep the trusses from slipping, “it’s for real! I never had time to stop and think about whether anybody was actually gonna show up for this thing—but there they are! Far fuckin’ out, man—there they are!”

  As he had promised Stan Goldstein and Michael Lang back in April, Bill Hanley pulled his sound truck into the service road behind the stage around the same time the crowds started arriving, plugged some equipment into a portable amplifier, and piped prerecorded music out to the sheer delight of the audience.

  Get your motor runnin’, head out on the highway,

  Lookin’ for adventure, and whatever comes our way . . .

  Bulldozers roared in the background as they smoothed rock fill and gravel into mudholes. The rain had washed away a few trails in the woods and temporarily choked off the press and service vehicle parking lots above the concession area, but, aside from that, the land itself was in pretty good shape. In time, the sun would dry everything out.

  What promised to be their biggest headache for the duration of the festival revealed itself quickly enough. By high noon, a staff technician noticed a severe drop in water pressure and made a spot check of the wells. Everything seemed to be in top working order. But the gauges continued to weaken. By 1:00 p.m., they were dangerously low. Ordinarily, that signaled a water emergency, but it was too early for that to occur. The water supply had hardly been in operation for two hours. The two 10,000-gallon tanks were full, and the wells were functioning at peak performance, yielding anywhere from 7 to 35 gallons a minute each, depending upon their size. It had to be something else, something incidental to the water supply that was causing the problem. That narrowed it down to only one possibility: pipes.

  Chris Langhart got hold of a jeep and followed the fourteen-mile aquaduct around the festival grounds checking the flow of water in each of the plastic arteries. He was behind the wheel for no longer than five minutes, perhaps, when he came across several instances of trouble, each one identical in context and inherent to the problem of overall maintanance of the plumbing system.

  Langhart had been looking for an occlusion of some sort, a chunk of debris lodged in a pipe joint or a wad of hardened mud balled up at a critical pivot. Instead, he found the problem to be a human one, which should have been evident when they began laying the waterline. The audience, who had begun milling around the area, stepped on the pipes without realizing how fragile they were and inadvertently pushed their feet through the soft plastic casing. Subsequently, the line had sprung leaks in, at least, ten different locations, thereby cutting off the pressure.

  Luckily, Langhart had had the good sense to install emergency communications equipment along the way for just such an occasion. He had found a surplus outfit in Lima, Ohio, which specialized in reconditioning army crank phones, and had ordered a quantity of them for the festival. When they buried the pumping aparatus, Langhart also concealed a crank phone in a plastic case next to each well head, pilot valve, and fountain so that, in case of an emergency, a field technician could locate the problem and call it in to a central operator who, in turn, would dispatch a repair crew to the trouble spot.

  Reaching into a crevice, he pulled up a crank phone, explained the situation to a voice on the other end of the line, and, within minutes, Langhart and two assistants were bandaging the broken slots with rubber sheeting and holding them in place with multiple radiator clamps acquired from an auto supply wholesaler.

  “We need signs,” he said to Mel Lawrence. “Have one of your guys over at the print shop run off a couple hundred warnings that we can plant every few feet or so. And while you’re at it—Max is half-crazy over all those kids tromping through the crops and riding his cows. The poor guy’s gonna head straight for the coronary care unit if we don’t do something about it.”

  Lawrence radioed the request to the men from Intermedia who operated the silkscreen presses at the print shack. Like clockwork, they hand-stenciled 200 “Danger” signs, one which identified “Max’s Barn,” and another requesting that those who had recently joined the festival community “Please Let Max’s Cows Moo In Peace.”

  “The crowd seems to be enjoying themselves and behaving rather orderly,” Lawrence told a disc jockey from Rahway, New Jersey, who called to find out what was “going down in White Lake.” It was to be the first of over 250 similar broadcast interviews the festival staff would give over the course of the long weekend. “There’s plenty to eat, enough room to run around for three days without stopping, and probably the best vibes anywhere on the continent. These kids are in love, man. Th
ey’re high on life. You oughta make it up here and see for yourself.”

  “So then, there will, in fact, be a Woodstock festival.”

  “You’re damn straight! Whoops—I forgot, I’m on the air. Sorry. It just sorta slipped out.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Lawrence. Can you tell us something about the facilities?”

  Mel went through the list of Woodstock amenities and rattled off the full lineup of performers, adding that Jeff Beck had called that morning to cancel because of sickness. “But he’s the only one, so far. Most of the groups have arrived or are on their way to the site. We’ve still got to finish the stage, but aside from that, we’re ready to rock and roll.”

  “We’ve had reports that traffic around the Monticello area is beginning to become boxed up.”

  “Not from where I’m standing, man.” Lawrence lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the site approach from Hurd Road. A few cars waited their turn to enter the parking lot, but, other than that, the street was clear. “Which means that Route 17-B is also pretty decent. We’re all set for you. The state police have got it all under control, and we don’t anticipate a single car to be backed up from around here now until next Monday.”

  • • •

  John Roberts met his father and his brother, Billy, at 9:30 A.M. on the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue to keep them from seeing his psychedelic office. The ride to White Lake was as somber an occasion as any Roberts family reunion since John had graduated from college. To an outsider, the trio might have appeared overwhelmed by the implications of their journey, fully aware that young people from all over the United States were on their way to the festival, but to John Roberts, it seemed like the instant replay of a bad dream.