by Bob Spitz
Baxter was appalled by the sight of loaded weapons around so many kids. He nervously asked Joerger and Howard to get rid of them. He didn’t want to upset them for fear they “would fire at anyone who disagreed with them,” but he finally found the courage to issue an ultimatum: either they agreed to lock the guns in a file cabinet in the office trailer, or he’d leave for New York without another word.
“Cool it, Charlie,” Joerger warned him. “This isn’t time to play Crusader Rabbit. There’s bound to be trouble, and we won’t be safe without them. Now, if you can’t handle the reality of the situation—well, then take off.”
Baxter flew into an uproar that bordered on hysteria. “Okay, man, then that’s it. It’s very simple. I walk. I walk and I tell everybody why I left. I won’t be around guns. I don’t like them. And I’m not about to sit by and watch you shoot some innocent kid. I’m tellin’ you guys—I’m gonna find a cop or someone like that if you don’t lock those damn things up.”
Joerger and Howard reluctantly relinquished their guns, over Weingrad’s vehement objections. It wasn’t just criminals they couldn’t trust, the lawyer said, it was hippies as well. He considered them to be “the scum of the earth.” Nevertheless, Joerger decided to continue on unarmed until a situation arose which called for them to take more extreme actions. “But we know where the guns are in case we need to hold off an attempted robbery,” Joerger reportedly told an executive from Woodstock Ventures, “and we’re not afraid to use them. You’d just better hope everything works out the way it’s supposed to—or else there’s going to be a war.”
• • •
From 4 P.M. until 8:15 Wednesday night, the New York State Police manned a roadblock at the Harriman interchange to the New York State Thruway. Waving what they called a “random sampling” of vehicles over to the side of the road, they searched every car that looked as if it was on its way to the festival. Hippies were ordered out from behind the wheel, told to place their hands on top of their heads, and were frisked for anything that might implicate them in a felony. Most of the frightened kids had their cars systematically torn apart as they looked on in horror. Glove compartments were rifled, personal belongings confiscated, upholstery ripped apart, trunks opened and emptied. To a passerby, the scene might have resembled something out of a movie about Nazi Germany.
By the end of the stretch, two troopers had arrested six young people on nine drug charges, including possession of implements (a water pipe). “The law will not go unobserved,” a statement from the law enforcement agency read, “and all violaters will be prosecuted to its fullest extent.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” was the weary comment of one officer. “If this is what it looks like today, even before it gets going, I don’t want to think about Friday.”
4
The state police continued issuing summonses well into Thursday night, racking up over 150 arrests for possession of marijuana, amphetamines, LSD, heroin, and other “suspicious substances.”
The police had pledged not to interfere with the festival’s own security regimen, but that promise was broken early in the day. It was no secret that the New York cops had been forbidden to participate in the celebration at White Lake. And, besides, the festival had expanded its territory to several miles of surrounding area not covered under the original agreement. The boundaries to the site were not well defined, many of the fences had been torn down by hundreds of hippies eager to gain admittance to the festival grounds without buying a ticket, and there seemed to be no order to the disorder; the cops deemed it to be well within their rights to make on-site arrests.
Two state police cars had cordoned off access to the main road coming into the site where they picked off would-be violators like jungle snipers. Before they knew what had hit them, hippies carrying blankets, picnic baskets, sleeping bags, changes of clothes, and perhaps a half ounce of grass were handcuffed, thrown into the back seat of a patrol car, and driven seven miles into Monticello where they were arraigned and, in most cases, held in lieu of bail.
Wes Pomeroy was furious with the conduct of the state police. Every outside group affiliated with the festival had done its job as planned except for the troopers. It seemed they were only out for one specific purpose: to prove that the hippies’ degenerate society was an accurate assessment of America’s youth.
This was the second time in two days that Pomeroy felt betrayed by his own kind, and it had a marked effect on his performance for the remainder of the festival. To others, it appeared that he walked through his duties as chief of security without power or purpose. The police had cut off Pomeroy’s greatest source of strength—his authority—and in doing so, a security assistant summarized, “they had cut off his balls.”
The lack of assistance he received from the state police was best represented by an exchange Wes had later that afternoon with Captain John Monahan, a former student of Pomeroy’s who would later rise to notoriety as the man who led the charge against the inmates at Attica State Penitentiary.
“John,” Wes asked him, during a moment of reflection, “what would you do now if you had to control disorder with this group?”
“I’d dig a hole,” Monahan answered, without missing a beat.
And dig a hole they did. In their blind rush to intercept drug suspects, the state police inadvertently blocked off entranceways to the festival’s two main parking lots with their patrol cars. Within two hours, traffic had backed up on Hurd Road and out onto Route 17-B, strangling most of the inlets to the Bethel-White Lake community. Nothing moved. Another hour passed, then two, and still no progress was made. The line of cars occasionally inched forward, but they never moved far enough to provide the travelers with hope of reaching the festival. So, the kids took the only remaining option: they abandoned their cars in the middle of the road and walked the rest of the way to Yasgur’s farm while the parking lots, for which the promoters had so preposterously overpaid, stood barren and unavailing.
• • •
Mel Lawrence spent the latter part of Thursday morning in his trailer going over the checklist he had first compiled back in June. He smiled to himself as he recalled his conversation with Michael Lang that same week in a suite at the Plaza Hotel. “It sounds like a helluva undertaking,” was how he had responded to Lang’s graphic and extraordinary portrayal of the festival. “The biggest one ever”—it was the type of exaggeration that came effortlessly to Michael, and Mel accepted it without reservation. He still accepted it. “It’ll work, man,” the kid had said, confidently. “I’m gonna make history with this one.” Now, he had twenty-four hours—thirty, at the most—to keep the festival from collapsing, and yet he still had every reason to believe it would be a dramatic and memorable success.
Lawrence had made a postdawn inspection of the site and came away with the impression that everything was just a few hours away from completion.
The campgrounds were as finished as they would ever be. Wednesday night, 11,000 people moved in there, most of them planning on a five-day stay, and 40,000 more were rumored to be on their way. If the need arose, a spillover could pitch tents in the adjoining parking lot on the other side of the road as it didn’t appear that any additional vehicles would be admitted into the area. Otherwise, everyone seemed comfortable.
Lawrence checked the Port-O-Sans, which separated the campgrounds from the puppet theatre, and found all of them to be clean and in good working order. The Free Kitchen was also ready to go. Some of the Hog Farm women had been up since before sunrise, preparing cauldrons of gruel, which they mixed with black iron shovels. A wide selection of fruit had been sliced for breakfast, and mammoth kettles of cider were being warmed over an open flame in anticipation of 60,000 early risers.
An eerie calm pervaded the woods next to the campgrounds as Lawrence continued on his rounds. Electricity had been run in from behind the stage and thousands of tiny light bulbs glistened in the thicket. Bird
s darted in and out of the brush picking at garbage cans. Rabbits scampered along the paths. Lawrence tested a water fountain there and found its pressure to be a little too low for his liking. He’d send Langhart or one of the other plumbers over to adjust it as soon as time permitted.
The night before, an organized black market moved into the woods and did energetic business, openly trading in a variety of contraband. Signs declaring “Pharmacy Now Open For Business” and “Le Drug Store” were propped against tree trunks as consumers were lured there by the temptation of forbidden fruit. Current prices (“subject to change,” a notice read) were posted in Day-Glo paint. One competitive wholesaler boasted “We Will Not Be Undersold.” Another offered a mix-and-match plan whereby customers could concoct their own combination packages, much as one ordered a family-style dinner in a Chinese restaurant. It was more than he had bargained for, Lawrence thought, retrieving the discarded signs, but as long as the dealers maintained a low profile and didn’t pose a threat to security, not much harm could come of it. The kids had to buy their dope from somebody. And so far, that activity was confined to the woods and away from the main entrance.
A few weeks earlier, Lang and Peter Goodrich had planned to corner the festival’s drug market by bringing a shipment of dope through the Florida Keys by motorboat. On Monday afternoon, however, word was passed through the underground that their stash had been impounded by the Coast Guard. It looked as though the capitalist tradition of free enterprise would prevail after all.
On the other side of the woods, Lawrence veered off toward the stage area and the ever-expanding performers’ colony, which had been under steady construction throughout most of the night.
The huge wooden box sitting at the foot of the sloping lawn had actually begun to resemble a stage. Early that morning, Jay Drevers and a crew of thirty men positioned the 40-foot turntable in the center of the bandstand and attached dozens of swivel castors to its plywood underbelly so that it could roll around upstage. A passenger elevator converted out of a giant forklift was latched onto the back end of the floor, and two young carpenters worked at fitting an asbestos roof over its exposed shaft.
Fifteen other men hammered away at a picket fence ten feet in front of the stage that was strategically designed to keep the audience at a safe distance and to create a photographers’ pit for the press. The only thing yet to be completed was a roof, and Drevers hadn’t yet decided exactly how they were going to put one up without overloading the trusses.
Lawrence spent a few minutes watching the sound crew as they worked at getting their equipment into place without slowing down the stagehands. Bill Hanley had flown in a staff of twelve young sound engineers from New York and Boston that morning who were familiar with the audio requirements of all the acts on the bill. They worked with a crane to get all the speakers and horns on top of the towers and in focus before patching everything into the special 440-volt/440-amp three-phase power system that was normally used only by sprawling industrial complexes. Hanley had built a custom speaker to carry sound to the farthest reaches of Yasgur’s farm, and prepared revolutionary mixing boards to blend the sound “because nothing straight off the shelf was capable of handling such an unprecedented and remarkable job.” All told, the setup required that Hanley Sound take out a $3-million insurance policy to cover its equipment before leaving Boston. According to one expert’s cumulative eye, the hi-fi equipment in the bowl represented the most expensive sound system ever assembled at one time in any given location.
By 10:30 A.M., the cables connecting the speakers to the power were buried. Separate Crown DC300 monitors were bolted on to the front of the stage, and the main current was turned on for the first time to test and set microphone levels.
“Hey—good morning! Welcome to the Woodstock Music and Art Festival, gang!” John Morris’s voice thundered across the site.
A clamor of 65,000 voices deliriously cheered his greeting in an ovation that lasted nearly five minutes.
“That sounds great! Look—you guys sit tight out there. It’s supposed to be a gorgeous day, and we’re expecting another 50,000 or so brothers to join us in the next couple hours.”
Another roar of approval drowned out the clatter of machinery encompassing the site.
“We’ve got a few things we’ve gotta finish up here, so pardon us if we’re a little inconsiderate. We know you’re out there. You might want to check out the playground or grab a bite to eat while you’re waiting. But, whatever you do, don’t go away. We’re gonna have ourselves a helluva party, and you’re all invited!”
The fanfare the audience gave Morris was deafening. Lawrence clapped him on the back as he chugged down the stairs leading from the stage to the production trailers. “That was outta sight, man. Keep it up. Every half hour or so get back on those microphones and give this crowd some encouragement. We’ve got a lotta time to kill before the music starts.”
And, yet, not a moment to lose, Lawrence thought. There was still a lot of ground he had to cover before checking everything against his master production list. He wanted to go around back to see how the bridge was coming along, and also to have a look at the performers’ pavilion and an employee mess hall that Peter Goodrich was setting up, but something he saw out of the corner of his eye stopped him in his tracks. The medical trailer, which was supposed to have been in operation since Wednesday morning, was padlocked and dark.
“What is this shit?” Lawrence barked, tugging in vain at the front door. “Hey—is anybody in there? C’mon, open up. You’ve got people waiting out here.”
A young couple sitting on the grass whom Lawrence judged to be around sixteen years old scrambled to their feet. “Hey, it’s cool, man. We’re okay. Don’t get uptight.” The pretty green-eyed girl with long braids smiled at him.
“I’m not uptight,” Lawrence protested, “I’m in charge.”
“Wow, man! In charge. Far out.”
“Right—far out. Listen, did either of you guys see anybody enter or leave this trailer since you’ve been out here?”
They told him they hadn’t and asked Mel if he knew when the doctor was due to arrive.
“Well, he shoulda been here by now, but I’m gonna give him a call just in case. Why? Are you guys hurt or something?”
“Not really.” The boy smiled sheepishly. “Y’see, my old lady and I were ballin’ all night, and this morning she looked in her bag and found out she forgot her pill. We thought maybe the doctor could, y’know, like help us out without her having to call home. That wouldn’t be too cool.”
“I can imagine,” Mel agreed. “Yeah, look, I’m gonna get in touch with him right away, and I’ll ask him to bring a bunch of contraceptives along. But you guys do yourselves a favor and keep your pants on till he gets here. Okay?”
“You’re beautiful, man. Peace.”
“Yeah, piece—that’s what got you guys into this spot in the first place.”
Lawrence made his way through the crowd to the top of the hill and called Bill Abruzzi at his office in Wappingers Falls. “C’mon, man, get it together, will you. You wait much longer, and you’re gonna get caught up in all that traffic comin’ in here.” Lawrence told him about police reports of cars backed up all the way to Monticello, and advised him to travel the back roads.
“My wife and a nurse named Betsy Morris are on their way in now,” Abruzzi said. “There’s another woman from Wallkill named Rikki Sanderson who’s en route and should be there within an hour or so. They’ll be able to hold down the fort until I can close up here. I’ve got a patient now, and another one waiting, so I should get out of here by 2, figure 2:30 to be safe. What’s the latest crowd estimate?”
“Well, the cops say 65,000, but I think there’s that many in the bowl alone. My guess would be nearer to 85,000 with another 100,000 or so on their way. I know this sounds a little crazy, but I think we could possibly hit 250,000 before the weekend�
�s out.”
“Then you’d better get someone to triple my order for first aid supplies and find another ambulance or two that we can keep on standby. To tell you the truth, I could probably use another twenty hands or so if you think we’re going to draw that large. I’d like to put out an immediate medical alert to round up more doctors. Can you handle the cost?”
“Whatever. Just get ’em here if we need them. I’ll make sure they get paid. Oh yeah—one more thing. You got any birth control pills in the trailer?”
“Sure. Fifty-seven varieties. My wife’ll know where they are.”
“Okay, but I think you might want to bring a whole trunkload of them up with you. I’ve got a sneaky feeling that by tomorrow night, this place is gonna be Fuck City.”
• • •
“We got trouble with the food.” It sounded like Michael Lang’s voice crackling over the walkie-talkie, but Lawrence couldn’t be sure. “I can’t make out what you’re sayin’. You wanna do that again.” “We got trouble with the food cats.” It was Lang, loud and clear. “Get over to the trailer right away.”
Mel shut off the radio frequency and left a note on the desk pinpointing his whereabouts in case anyone was looking for him. Trouble with the food could mean almost anything, he thought. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have his hands full with a hundred other problems. But it also wasn’t Michael’s style to sound the alarm unless tragedy was already upon them. Grabbing a walkie-talkie, he bolted out of the office and ran across the top of the hill to the concessions trailer.
When he got there, he found Lang, John Roberts, Lee Howard, Lenny, and another Black Shirt security tough standing in front of the camper watching Peter Goodrich trying to break down the door.
