by Bob Spitz
“Y’know what the ‘B’ stands for, dontcha?”
“Yeah—Big Motherfuckin’ Asshole!” someone shouted, and the crowd screamed its approval.
While all this was transpiring, Tom Law, one of the Hog Farm “heads,” sat center stage in the lotus position, guiding the receptive masses through a series of tranquilizing Yoga exercises. “That’s it. Take a deep breath—c’mon, nice and deep now—and keep your spine very straight. That’s where the main energy of your body goes,” he instructed as many as 100,000 attentive students. “Now, let it out very slowly. Very slowly—like a desert breeze. Beautiful, man. That’s it. Peaceful and beautiful, and you’re all outta sight.”
A splinter population of 85,000 others never even bothered to venture into the bowl, but, instead, chose to congregate in one of the isolated theatres of action adjoining the stage grounds.
The Indian art exhibit had been cancelled due to the size of the crowd, but a trio of young guitarists from Long Island moved their show into the Hopi pavilion and led those who gathered around them in a group sing.
Just about a year ago
I set out on the road.
Seekin’ my fame and fortune,
Lookin’ for a pot of gold.
Things got bad, and things got worse,
I guess you will know the tune.
Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again.
Behind them, voices chimed, “I’ve got acid here, mescaline, and hash!”
“Best Colombian dope in the campgrounds!”
“Rolling paper! Pipes and rolling paper! Can’t beat these prices.”
“Straight from Turkey—brainfuckers!”
The playground was initially conceived as a hip environmental nursery for infants and preschoolers, but it was soon taken over by a clique of hippies in no mood to share the facilities with anyone else. They coaxed the younger children off the swings and seesaws, took over the sliding board, and laid uncontested claim to the climbing maze, which Ron Liis had finished building only three days before. Vines had been tied to the tops of trees, and teen-agers took turns on them, swinging out over the fields and dropping into cushions of loosely piled hay.
Yet the most popular of all recreation areas were the three lakes—one behind the campgrounds, one off Perry Road across from the hayfield, and another situated on the other side of the woods behind the crew’s mess hall. Since late morning, they had become festive swimming holes. At first, the cool quartz water attracted only waders who longed to escape the tortuous August humidity. They shed sneakers or sandals, rolled their wide bell-bottomed jeans as high as they would go without cutting off the circulation in their legs, and eased into the shallowest ends of the lakes for a dip before heading back to the bowl. Pretty soon, however, the hippies grew more daring and clothing began disappearing, piece by piece. Shirts and halter tops were blithely cast on shore, then pants, and finally underwear, until heterosexual nude bathing became the instant Aquarian rage.
Young couples shamelessly caressed in the waist-high water. They lathered each other with soap, washed their mate’s hair with warm beer, floated on top of one another until playfulness gave way to immodest lovemaking. A few of the more brazen bathers sunned themselves on towels, oblivious to the people who stopped to gawk.
FETE ON FRIDAY: FREEDOM, POT, SKINNY-DIPPING, a headline in the Times Herald Record capsulized the afternoon’s events. Ethel Romm, the editor’s outspoken wife who was rushed into service when the paper’s team of reporters failed to show, questioned aloud whether or not the Aquarian Exposition would survive its own orgiastic indulgences and, if so, mulled over the possibilities that lay ahead in the two succeeding days. “Maybe there will be a riot today or tomorrow. Maybe it will all turn into a very bad scene. Maybe we’ll all get dysentery or hepatitis,” she speculated. “Right now, we’re at a happy carnival with young children cavorting through inventive playgrounds and older ones swaying to rock and folk music.”
And the music, itself, remained the biggest question mark of all.
As the afternoon wore on, word began circulating through the crowd that the promoters were in a bad way and were not to be trusted.
It was no secret to the hippies that most of the audience was inside the grounds on a free ride. The fences had been “liberated by the People,” and it was beyond reason to even the most virtuous in attendance that the festival’s backers would be able to collect money from their patrons without an organized system of gates and turnstiles. Woodstock Ventures, it was agreed, would surely take a costly bath, and that spelled nothing but trouble.
It was also common knowledge that security had fallen apart. No gathering of the counterculture had ever been held before where there was not strict enforcement of the law. There seemed to be no visible means of getting anyone through the clutter of abandoned cars on the roads around the site. People sensed trouble with the food; the “pirate” vendors from local luncheonettes who flanked the amphitheatre with their refrigerated pushcarts had sold out of ice cream and orangeade, and the snack bars were sorely understaffed. The frequency of stage announcements had drastically declined since the morning, and there was some general uneasiness as to whether there would be any music at all.
Michael Lang tuned into the undulating pulse of the crowd and prepared to head off an adverse reaction that would mar the euphoria of his manmade paradise. He had to come up with some way of whetting their appetites, something truly revolutionary, that would boost the audience’s spirit until Sweetwater arrived to dispel any rumors of closing down the show.
John Morris sat across from him in the trailer, his ear seemingly glued to the telephone. Morris had been trying for over an hour to convince the White Lake fire marshall to send in a truck so they could hose down the crowd. He forgot, however, that it was impossible to get an engine either in or out of the site because of the snarled road situation.
“Son,” the marshall replied, “I wouldn’t know what to tell you if you called me and said your entire carnival over there was on fire. It’s that bad a mess.”
“Hey—cut it out, will you.” Michael waved Morris off the phone. “Hang up, man. Listen, I know what we’re going to do.”
Morris slammed the receiver down on the hook. “This has gone a little too far, Michael. You’ve got a dangerous situation heating up out there.”
“Don’t worry about it, man. I know how to handle this. Trust me.” It was an old line, but it always seemed to do the trick.
• • •
Twenty minutes later, John Roberts was fighting his way through the lines in front of the refreshment stands. He had come there out of desperation to present Jeffrey Joerger with a piece of paper turning 100 percent of the concession profits over to Food For Love, but so far he had been unable to locate him among the disorganized ranks. He was just about to try the location trailer when he heard the announcement over the public address system.
“Ladies and gentlemen”—it sounded like John Morris, but he couldn’t be sure—“the promoters of this concert, Woodstock Ventures, have declared this a free festival. A free festival,” the voice repeated. “The show’s on us—” A vocal explosion rampaged across the bowl. It was so deafening an acclamation that Roberts had to cup his hands over his ears. “We’ll be getting it on at four this afternoon, so please be patient with us till then.”
Almost at once, Roberts felt lightheaded, and he leaned against the side of the concession trailer to steady himself until the dizzyness passed. That was it, he thought—the whole ball game. He had nervously been stringing himself along since Wednesday on the slim notion that some tie-dyed angel of mercy would swoop down on White Lake and rescue his investment from obliteration. Now, it was too late for any miracle.
And yet, Roberts was struck by a morbid sense of relief knowing that further attempts to salvage the wreck would be in vain. The festival had gone bust, and that’s all there w
as to it. He’d survive. He’d learn from this experience and climb back out of debt because he had learned a little bit about what he could accomplish with the right help. He had also come to learn more about himself and, oddly enough, had acquired a newfound respect for his own ingenuity. It might take a few years for him to get back on his feet, but he would—he had no doubt about that. And now, it seemed there was nothing left for him to do but sit back for the next two and a half days and enjoy the show.
• • •
“Has anybody heard from Bert Cohen?” one of the press representatives from Wartoke inquired of a production assistant. Cohen had started out from New Jersey the night before in an enormous tractor-trailer carrying 100,000 copies of a festival program that the promoters intended to distribute for free. By 3:30, he had still not arrived, nor did anybody backstage seem to know the whereabouts of the festival’s “advertising specialist” or his cargo. “We’ve got 300 members of the international press corps waiting for that material. Could you have someone check on it for me?”
The assistant returned to her trailer and made a series of calls to information centers scattered around the site. Forty-five minutes later she skipped back to the press tent wearing an impish grin on her face. “Pick a day and a time, and give me two dollars,” she sportively instructed the publicist.
“There’s no time for games right now. Have you located Bert?”
“Oh yeah.” Her eyes twinkled. “I’ve got a pretty good idea of where he’s at this very moment. That’s why I’m smiling. I think I’m going to win the pool.”
The publicist was losing her patience. “What are you talking about?”
“Bert’s somewhere on the Thruway between Spring Valley and Suffern,” she tittered. It was nearly sixty miles south of Bethel. “He’s been calling in every hour giving us his location, and so far he’s only moved three miles in the last four hours. The traffic’s so fucked up that he might sit there to next March. That’s one of the reasons I’m smiling like I am. Joel started a pool among the staff to guess when Bert shows up—winner take all—and I’ve got Sunday at 2:30. It’s no contest!”
3
At 4:35, Sweetwater’s equipment truck was spotted from the air. A helicopter pilot, accompanied by two production assistants, had made a number of sweeps over the immediate area before making a positive identification of it. It was wedged in on all sides by invulnerable columns of traffic, three miles from the West Shore Road intersection to Yasgur’s farm. A team of state troopers was dispatched to free the truck and clear a narrow path leading to the service entrance behind the stage. However, they radioed back to security, “It could take hours.”
The festival executive staff had made a career out of buying time at a premium. Lee Mackler resourcefully located another four helicopters in an upstate aviation-school hangar and added them onto the payroll at a cost of $80 an hour for each one. The Federal Aviation Agency prohibited all scheduled planes from flying less than 2,500 feet over the festival site to provide the helicopters with unobstructed and safe access for emergencies. Within twenty minutes, the new reserves hovered over Sweetwater’s van while three roadies lugged equipment to a grassy plain on the other side of the highway, preparing for the airlift.
In any event, Sweetwater wouldn’t be ready to go on until seven o’clock that evening, and John Morris, wrapped in his third white bush jacket (the first two had wilted), began to articulate his panic.
“We’ve gotta get somebody on stage quickly,” he rumbled, “otherwise we’re going to have a mutiny on our hands. Those kids have been sitting out there all day in sweltering ninety-degree weather. I don’t know how they’ve managed to have kept their heads so far—maybe we’ve just been lucky bastards—but it can’t last if we don’t find something to distract them with. That jackknife was as close a call as I want to see in my lifetime.”
Ten minutes before, a Konglike hippie had climbed up the side of the 80-foot scaffolding that supported the sound system while 200,000 voices egged him on. “Jump! Jump! Jump!” they chanted, not knowing what to expect from the bearded daredevil once he made it to the top. He sped toward the final section of railing with the same determination he had when he set out. “Jump! Jump! Jump!” Pulling himself onto the uppermost platform, he blessed the crowd with a peace sign, gratefully bowed to their applause, and then suicidally flung himself over the side.
“That kid should have broken his neck,” Morris said in disbelief, “but he walked away without so much as a scratch! It’s got me fooled. All I know is—it can’t last. We’ve gotta make a move while we still can.”
Michael Lang agreed.
Together, the two production coordinators combed the performers’ pavilion until they came across Richie Havens who was in the process of tuning his guitar.
“Richie—look, man, we got a problem,” Lang told him, pulling up a chair and straddling it. “Sweetwater hasn’t made the scene yet. We got ’em comin’ in by copter, but it’s gonna take too long. How about openin’ the show for us?”
“C’mon, man, don’t do that to me.” Havens explained that he wasn’t concerned about the crowd. Years before, he had played in front of 17,000 people at the Newport Folk Festival, and as far as he was concerned, “that was the whole world.” Once you see 17,000, he told them, you forget about numbers. “I just don’t think I can get ready in time.”
“You’re the only guy who can save us, Richie,” Morris said. “We don’t have all the amplifiers ready to go yet, but that shouldn’t interfere with your performance anyway. It’ll give us time, man.”
“Well, wait a minute now. What do you mean? Tim Hardin’s here too, y’know.” He pointed to the entertainer sitting across the way from them. “He’s got an acoustic guitar.”
“He won’t do it, man. He’s scared shitless.”
Havens laughed. “What can I say? Okay—give me a couple minutes to get ready and to round up the rest of the group. I’ll do it.”
Not waiting around to hear another word, Lang and Morris rushed off to alert the stage crew. It was 5:01 P.M.
• • •
Chip Monck stood off to one side of the stage with a clipboard, and performed a final check of the production facilities.
“Lights,” he spurted into a crooked mouthpiece, pointing to the typed word at the top of his list with a ballpoint pen.
“All set,” a voice whistled over his headset. He paused for a moment, not fully satisfied with the response. “It’s okay here, too,” another person confirmed. Monck scratched an “x” in front of the descriptive heading and moved his pen down the page.
“Levels?”
“Tested and approved. Six mikes working center stage, two on standby.”
To his left, Monck heard the familiar gnashing of sound technicians adjusting the height on the microphone stands. A quartet of stagehands moved the equipment for Richie Havens’s backup group into position. A gooseneck microphone was contorted into the shape of a rollercoaster in order to properly amplify a set of congas, and a boom was angled to pick up Richie’s guitar.
“Recording?”
“Rolling,” came the affirmative reply, and he marked another “x” next to the remote crew’s entry.
Monck lifted his eyes and stared at the mixing platform that seemed to levitate a few feet above the crowd in front of the stage. “Console?”
The boy seated behind the computerized board met Chip’s eyes and nodded. “Picking it all up beautifully.”
Monck made his last notation on the sheet, and scanned each of the production stations around the bowl that were patched into his network with amused interest. “Well, friends—if that’s the case”—his voice was one decibel above a whisper—“then I think we’re about to have ourselves a festival.”
• • •
More than 150 people jammed the back lip of the stage as John Morris escorted Richie Havens and his
accompanists across the bridge from the performers’ area to where they waited for the elevator to be sent down to them. Everyone on stage—the electricians, construction crew, sound men, stagehands, Steve Cohen, Jay Drevers, Ticia Bernuth, one of Michael’s Black Shirt heavies, and a sizeable gang of invited friends—anxiously held their breath in anticipation of the climactic moment of truth. No one was really sure how, or even if, all the elements they had labored over would jive together. But they’d find out in just a few short seconds.
A contingent of photographers and journalists was led into the cramped pit just below the bandstand. Cameras and pens were poised in an effort to capture the first notes of the festival they had written about months before when it was but an abstract idea.
Michael Lang leaned against a railing behind the communications board, grinning. This was it, he thought. The colossal party was about to begin. He had orchestrated its planning with fine-tuned syncopation, and now the Nation he first dreamed about in Coconut Grove with Ellen was about to experience its spiritual awakening. A minute before, while Chip was double-checking the equipment, Michael had passed among the crew, rewarding each man with a packet of cocaine as a personal expression of gratitude for their support. It would provide them with a well-deserved lift to keep them going for the next two and a half days.
Richie Havens stood behind the production crew as John Morris strode to the stage-front microphone. “Well, this is another one of those here-I-go-again opening ‘trips,’” he thought. “What am I going to do out there to make everybody happy, to put everyone at ease?”
He did not have a long time to arrive at a solution.
“Well, it’s time for the music to begin,” Morris’s voice surged over the marvelously accurate sound system. This time, he did not wait for the applause to die down. “Let’s welcome Mr. Richie Havens!”
Morris skipped off to the side of the stage, next to Michael, as the applause burst into 250,000 cheers of welcome. Havens, wearing a majestic ochre caftan and white bell-bottom pants, very calmly stalked forward carrying his nicked, oversized Guild guitar. He propped his foot on the ribbing of a wooden stool and began strumming in his patented, disjointed rhythm. “Thank you very much.” He nodded to the crowd. “I hope it was worth the wait.”
