Barefoot in Babylon

by Bob Spitz

  As they sped through the police barricade and pulled up in the press parking lot behind the concession stands, Roberts and Rosenman were confronted by what appeared to be a solid block of humanity coating the inside of the bowl like a swash of speckled paint. Scattered campfires had been started, over which hot dogs and marshmallows roasted. (Life reported spotting two East Village artists “trying to warm soup in a beer can suspended by string over a wastepaper fire.”) The stage glowed like a sacred talisman, not yet consecrated by an uprighteous roof—but the crew was working on it. “Occasionally, music would come floating up,” Roberts recorded in a memoir, “smells, too: meat, grass, excrement from the nearby Johnnys-On-The-Spot. Considering the exertions of the day—and what was still to come—it was a beguilingly peaceful moment. The armies were at rest, the battle . . . distant.”

  They met Lang and Goodrich in front of the concessions trailer and conveyed Pomeroy’s instructions regarding compromises that might have to be made with the food concern. “We all just keep our mouths shut and nod our agreement,” Joel cautioned them. “Let’s not risk jeopardizing the festival on their account. We’ll have our lawyers straighten things out with them afterwards.”

  That didn’t seem at all satisfactory to Goodrich. He was personally insulted, he said, by Food For Love’s failure to honor an agreement that he had made with them. It reflected poorly on his ability to carry out his responsibility, and he could not allow them to get away with that.

  “Peter, there is no honor among thieves,” Roberts said. “What are you getting all upset about? We’ve been had, that’s all there is to it. Now, we’ve got to make sure that they don’t do us any more harm. I can understand your being upset about it, but would you kindly keep your mouth shut throughout this negotiation? I’ve unfortunately got a lot more at stake here than your pride, and I’d rather not have to worry about pacifying you and these guys at the same time.”

  Roberts waited for Goodrich to remark that he’d respect his wishes, but, at that moment, the door to the trailer swung open and Stephen Weingrad, Food For Love’s lawyer, slipped out.

  “They’re still too angry to talk to you guys,” Weingrad said, gesturing his helplessness with an upturned hand. “They’re talking crazy. They want to go home.”

  “Hey, they can’t do that to us, man,” Michael said softly. “We got a deal.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the way you look at it, but they’re taking a completely different view of the situation. They claim you broke the deal, and that means there’s no reason they’ve got to stay. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “I suggest you make an effort,” Rosenman said. “We’d like to come to terms with them. The concession stands are just about complete, so it would be a shame to spoil everything we’ve both worked for.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Weingrad disappeared inside the trailer and returned a moment later, shaking his head. “They don’t want to stay. I don’t think there’s anything you can do to make them change their minds after the way they’ve been treated.”

  “That’s crazy!” Roberts shouted. He could feel the anger rising in his body, and he checked his temper. “There’s a lot of money to be made here. They’ve done a lot of work to prepare for this, and they can walk away from this extremely well off come Monday morning. I think they should. But we’ve got to reach a settlement.”

  “You’re right, Roberts, but, like I said, they’re talking crazy.”

  “Well, settle them down. You’re their lawyer. They’ll obviously listen to you. Now, we’d like to meet with them, and we’re not going to budge from this spot until we do.”

  Another few minutes passed while Weingrad huddled with his team. When the door to the trailer opened again, it was done so by Charles Baxter who invited them inside.

  Joerger and Howard were seated around a small table in the rear compartment, reviewing a copy of their contract with Woodstock Ventures. Weingrad motioned for the visitors to have a seat, and Baxter propped himself up in the corner, choosing to remain apart from the negotiations.

  “Hey guys,” Michael greeted them cheerfully. “What’s shakin’?”

  “You know damn well what’s shakin’,” Lee Howard sneered.

  “Look, man, we don’t wanna hassle you. We know you’re freaked over what happened this afternoon, and we’re all pretty sorry about it. It’s a bummer.”

  “It’s fuckin’ assault, is what it is,” Joerger said.

  “C’mon, man. We came to work things out with you guys. This festival’s turned into too much of a trip to let anything like this fuck things up.”

  “Yeah,” Roberts agreed, “and we want to know what it will take to smooth things out.”

  “Money, man,” Joerger said. “We want the contract changed. You people have completely abused us. You haven’t given us a place to sell our merchandise, we’ve had to build the stands ourselves, and Goodrich wants to be able to call the shots with the money. That’s no good. We want total control of the money because we don’t think this thing is going to work out anymore.”

  “What’re you sayin’, Jeff?” Lang asked him.

  “I’m sayin’ we want it all, man. We’ll give you back the first $75,000 that comes in, and then we’re gonna take 100 percent of the profits. No more partnership.”

  “That’s not cool, man.”

  “I don’t really give a fuck about cool!”

  “Jeffrey, we’re in trouble as is,” Roberts confessed. “We put you in business because we thought we could make good money from an association of that type. But now, we’re counting on our take from the food to keep us out of the hole.”

  “That’s your problem, man. We gotta protect our own ass. And, anyway, there’s no room here for discussion. We get 100 percent, or you wind up with no food at the festival.”

  “You’ve got us over a barrel.”

  “You bet,” Joerger said, pleased with his position. “You’ve got no choice.”

  “Well, we’ll have to do it your way, but we want it in writing, and we’re not expecting our lawyer to get up here until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “That seems to be in accordance with what my clients want,” Weingrad approved.

  “Yeah, it’s okay with us,” Joerger said, “because, come Friday, if you haven’t signed 100 percent of the profits over to us, we’ll still walk out.”

  5

  By nine o’clock Thursday night, the line of traffic stretched along Route 17-B looked like an uncoiled Slinky, eleven miles in length and four cars deep. “And Mike Lang’s smile was as wide . . .” the New York Post ribbed. “That doesn’t allow for too many lanes of automobiles, but then how bad could Mike Lang feel to be stuck in a traffic jam when every car that got past his happy face was actually headed for his pocket?”

  Considering the pandemic inconvenience on the road, none of the hippies seemed the least bit annoyed. Tens of thousands of hitchhikers marched toward the festival on foot, passing wineskins among the ranks, chanting, laughing, holding hands, waving banners, generously offering joints to strangers, motioning for others stalled in their cars to join them in the pilgrimage to Bethel.

  Journalist Gail Sheehy, recounting her impression of the processional in a New York magazine article, likened it to a national convention of the master race:

  Ten million yards of blue cotton twill and striped T-shirting. The bodies coming out of them stop your breath with their beauty. Luxuriantly tanned, hair swinging free, muscled as though their skin is stretched over bouncing tennis balls. There are more beautiful, happy, healthy-faced young Americans than I ever remember seeing in one place. . . . The road with its thousands of walking feet resembles the main drag out of Delhi. . . . No one honks. No one shouts. No one shoves. It’s unnatural.

  A spokesman from the American Automobile Association declared the road situation an “absolute madhouse,”
and, in an interview the next morning with the New York Times, Wes Pomeroy cautioned: “Anybody who tries to come here is crazy. Sullivan County is a great big parking lot.”

  There were those, however, who thought that Pomeroy and the transportation agencies characteristically overreacted. Even among his staff, there was already serious talk that Pomeroy “had lost control over himself.” One production coordinator glumly told an assistant, “Wes is gone, man. His mind just kinda fell apart when the cops did, and he still hasn’t recovered from the shock. We’d better keep an eye on him for the next couple days. And tell someone to make sure Fabbri covers for him.” It may have been a hasty judgment on the staff’s part, but the loss of his security force, coupled with the bumbling inefficiency of the state police and the Food For Love affair, had temporarily rendered Pomeroy impotent. As for the alarmists, a local underground disk jockey said that referring to the bottleneck as an emergency was “like calling the week-old Sharon Tate murders an infectious conspiracy.” He scoffed at any allusions the papers had made to Bethel as a combat zone and said that the immovable line of cars running through town was merely “an anachronism for the cloistered fate of American prosperity, the final flight of the middle class choked-off in its own exhaust.”

  The Boston Globe took it all in a lighter perspective and facetiously suggested that “perhaps someday this would be the way the world would end—in an endless traffic jam.”

  But that was an outsider’s view, typically uncompassionate. The area’s homeowners failed to see the humor in what they were calling “a human debacle.” Some of the hippies tossed garbage into their yards on the way through, or paused to urinate against their trees “like common beggars.” Others drove their cars up over the curb and attempted to reach the festival by shortcut, by wheeling across newly seeded lawns or vegetable patches. “This isn’t the way we were told it would be,” cried an outraged mother as she cradled her two children into the nap of her dress, “not the Christian brotherhood that Father Ganoung had described to us.”

  Along a two-mile stretch, residents leaned out of upper-story windows screaming at teen-agers who trespassed on their property or lined up their families in beach chairs in front of their homes. “It was all we could do to stave off the siege,” a homeowner maintained to a state trooper, defending his right to spray intruders with a garden hose.

  So much for practicality. The traffic, however, remained stranded on the roadways, an immovable bastion of hippie enfranchisement, closing off all access to the country village. No chartered buses were being allowed off Route 17-B and into the site area; hundreds had taken their place in line on the Quickway, and, according to reports, hundreds more were on their way from over thirty-five states. None of them, of course, would ever come within more than ten miles of the festival site.

  Thousands of young people carrying specially stamped tickets patiently waited their turns behind yellow police barricades at New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, preparing to board one of the Short Line buses to Monticello or Bethel. The company had to rent an extra twenty vehicles to even approach satisfying the inordinate demand for seats, and they interspersed departures every fifteen minutes, from 7:30 A.M. to 10:15 P.M. New York Times reporter Lacey Fosburgh chatted with some of the young travelers milling around the depot who, she said, “spoke with gusto about marijuana and music, and the weekend ahead.”

  “They were so upset,” an eighteen-year-old girl from Philadelphia said of her parents’ reaction to her trip north. “I’ve never done much traveling and they were so afraid of riots and police trouble and drugs. We had to sit down and talk it all out.” A sixteen-year-old boy from Westbury, Long Island, construed his outing as an edification of life to extort his parents’ consent. “My parents knew there’d be drugs there, that it’ll be a bit wild. They didn’t want me to come,” he said. “I know there’ll be drugs everywhere and I wonder what it will all be like. I’ve never been away from home before. I wonder what will happen to all of us.”

  Now, most of those same young pioneers were stranded on the dark Quickway, pleading with obstinate bus drivers to let them out so they could walk the rest of the way. “Driver Is Not Permitted To Make Unscheduled Stops,” a white sticker read above the dashboard of each licensed carrier. So they sat, and they sat, and they sat—hoping for some small miracle that would enable them to be delivered at their destination in time to hear the opening bars of music. By midnight, however, it seemed unlikely that even a tank could barge its way through the unconquerable mess.

  Closer to the site, fire engines forlornly retreated from an unanswered alarm, unable to pass through local intersections, as a crew of hippies desperately battled a blaze on the first floor of the Diamond Horseshoe Hotel.

  John Morris grumbled to a dumbfounded reporter from the New York Post that it took him and Michael Lang an hour and twenty minutes to reach their hotel rooms the night before the festival. It seemed to the reporter such an inappropriate, foolish claim for a festival leader to make—to squawk coquettishly about his discomfort, standing in the midst of seismic pandemonium. “Even if they had been able to get to their accommodations for some sleep,” he asked his readers, “what dreams could Lang possibly have left?”

  PART THREE

  Alas, Babylon!

  CHAPTER TEN

  Friday, August 15, 1969

  If these are the kids that are going to inherit the world, I don’t fear for it.

  —Max Yasgur

  The Lamb that belonged to the Sheep, whose skin the Wolf was wearing, began to follow the Wolf in the Sheep’s clothing. . . . Appearances are deceptive.

  —Aesop, from a “Fable”

  1

  An unexpected cowl of fog had rolled in early that morning, bathing the Hudson Valley in a shadowy ethereal film. Still, army helicopters, using sophisticated infrared equipment, had been able to deliver clear reconnaissance data to State Department observers in Albany, obtained while flying low over the restricted festival region.

  The photographs must have resembled the aftereffect of an attack of deadly gas on a densely populated city. It looked like a civilization in suspended animation. Cars were stalled on every highway, road, and lane in a five-mile radius of the site. Open fields, parking lots, lawns, and even cemetery plots were dotted with cars and tents. Teen-agers slept on the grass along highway median strips and on the roofs of cars. But the most awesome sight of all—an apparition so extraordinary that it must have jolted even the most acclimated eyewitness—had to be the spectacle of 175,000 apparently lifeless bodies draped across the wide open spaces of Yasgur’s farm.

  Promptly at 7 A.M., the governor’s office phoned the command trailer on top of the hill for the purpose of officially declaring White Lake in a state of emergency.

  “We’ve moved the National Guard into the area, and we’re preparing to send troops onto the farm as soon as we’ve been given the word,” a state aide to Nelson Rockefeller solemnly informed a volunteer phone operator. “If everything works out the way we hope it will, we should have the city cleared of young people by no later than noon.”

  Luckily the young girl assigned to hold down the phones in Lawrence’s trailer did not panic. “Hey, wait a second, man. I don’t think you want to do anything like that. Everything’s under control here, really in good shape, you know. Just do me a favor, huh, and don’t send in the troops or anybody like that until you’ve spoken to Mel Lawrence; he’s our director of operations. I expect him any minute, and I think he’ll tell you that everything’s groovy up here.”

  Lawrence had gone back to the Holiday Inn to shower and freshen up about two o’clock in the morning and never returned.

  “Excuse me, miss, but we’ve been informed by local authorities that the festival has turned into an all-out disaster. The governor is quite concerned about the health and welfare of, not only the people in that community, but also those of you attending the festi
val. We can airlift people out to safety in practically no time.”

  “Safety? Mister, this is safety. We’ve got 175,000 people sound asleep out on that field right now. Just sleepin’. It sure doesn’t look to me like an emergency situation. I mean, you’ve got to see it to believe it, man. Everybody’s layin’ there asleep with a big grin plastered across their face. They’re all dreaming, and when they wake up, they’re going to find out that all their dreams have come true. It’s beautiful. I think you owe it to all the people who’ve knocked themselves out over the past few weeks not to be taken in by lies, man. Really—we’re all okay and having an outrageous time.”

  The girl immediately called Lawrence at the motel and filled him in on the details. “Wonderful!” he said, trying to shake himself out of trancelike exhaustion. “Okay, look, I’ll call the security guys and have them handle it. If any other politicos like that call, just tell ’em the same thing. ‘It’s groovy, man, we’re havin’ a great time, wish you were here.’ Try anything you think’ll talk ’em out of sending in dogs. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes to give you a hand.”

  Lawrence called the security office and got Lee Mackler. She informed him that Wes Pomeroy and John Roberts had left for Monticello about 6:30 A.M. and weren’t expected back until the afternoon. “But there’s nothing to worry about, Mel. We’ve been taking calls like that all morning. Fabbri and I have been telling everybody the same thing: ‘Peace and love, man, we’re cool, no need to get uptight about anything.’ Fabbri gives them the official rundown and refers whoever’s on the other end of the line to the sheriff. He’s a real arrogant asshole, but he’s on our side. God bless him. Ever think you’d hear me say such nice things about a pig?”

  “You’re all heart, Lee,” Lawrence conceded. “All right. I guess we sit tight and take it all in stride. It looks like we’re all in for a long, hot weekend.”