by Bob Spitz
Morris chatted with the singer for a few minutes and learned that Sebastian had spent a considerable portion of his time in retirement writing new material for a solo album. “That’s wonderful, man. But, tell me—are you willing to play?”
“No thanks. I just came to hang out with some friends.” Sebastian smiled politely.
“C’mon, man. If those kids knew you were back here and holding out on them, they’d be snorting fire. How about doing a few numbers and letting everyone know what you’ve been up to these last two years?”
Morris took him firmly by the arm and led Sebastian toward the elevator. The whole way across the rickety footbridge and onto the lift, Sebastian repeated with staunch conviction his reluctance to perform as a solo artist. It was too soon, he said, standing his ground. He had to rehearse for several months, pick up a few sidemen perhaps. He wasn’t even sure that he knew all the words to his new songs.
As they disembarked at stage level, Sebastian’s protests became more vehement. And then Chip was at the microphone announcing the special visit of “an old friend” and it was as if he had never been away. Something magical transformed the stage when John Sebastian ambled out, waving at his fans, and it was at that moment, Morris thought, that the Woodstock Music and Art Fair truly became a festival.
4
John Roberts spent the early evening hours in a corner of the Bethel security office talking, long distance, to newspapers, radio stations, television commentators, and community leaders across the nation, urging kids not to come to Woodstock, to turn back “if they have any common sense at all.”
Roberts had watched the growing colonization of Yasgur’s farm with terrifying concern. There was truth in numbers, and the statistics he had been quoted by the police and state agencies concerning movement in the direction of Sullivan County foretold his personal undoing. He was about to rival the New York Social Services Department of Welfare as the state’s most prominent charity. As the corporation’s sole financier, not only would he be obliged to pick up the admission for each festival goer, but, once they were inside the ravaged gates, he’d be responsible to provide for their well-being, which was starting to approach the luxury accommodation rates at the Plaza. None of the kids were coming to White Lake prepared. They weren’t carrying any money. Nor had the latecomers packed food or brought along changes of clothing. Their cars had run out of gas and needed servicing. Many had no way of returning home. It was madness that he stared in the face, and there seemed no way out of it without bringing about the total suffocation of his assets.
Independent contractors had begun stopping by Roberts’s desk during the late afternoon demanding full or partial payment for their services. Some, whose functions were required throughout the weekend and who were essential to the very life-sustaining systems that had, so far, proved effective, threatened to walk off the job unless they received cash in advance of their forthcoming shifts. No one would accept a check drawn on the Woodstock Ventures account. The implications had become all too clear. The promoters were in an insurmountable pinch, and tomorrow their checks wouldn’t be worth the paper they were written on. They’d take cash, they said, or a personal IOU from John Roberts—but only from Roberts, no one else would do.
Late Friday night, the worsening situation began to overwhelm Roberts. His complexion had developed an unearthly pallor, which distressed many of his co-workers. “Keep an eye on John,” they cautioned one another, “he may go over the edge.” But he held fast through the heavy sledding, meeting each successive crisis with a predictable moan and a gesture of nightmarish distress.
Around 11:00, he slipped away unnoticed, ducking into a vacant room in the back of the building while Joel, Don Ganoung, Lee Mackler, and an assistant manned the continuously ringing phones. Roberts picked up the phone and dialed Paul Marshall at his home in Harrison, a man whose evenhanded counsel and experience he regarded with confidence. Marshall treated Roberts as an adult, a professional, and John liked that. He’d fill him in on what had transpired since they last communicated and see if Marshall could offer him guidance.
There is some discrepancy about what was said during that phone call. Roberts admits to a faint recollection of speaking to Marshall that night, but cannot, for the life of him, remember a word of their conversation. The lawyer, on the other hand, remembers what was said as if it were an important piece of evidence in a case.
“He called up and began to cry,” Marshall said pensively. “John said he’d gone through everything. There was no money, and they were asking him to sign bad checks. I told him, ‘You can’t do that. You know there’s no money, and that’s a potential criminal liability.’ But he said he had signed them anyway, knowing the consequences. I asked him, ‘Why? What did you go and do that for before consulting me?’ I had warned him about signing his name to anything without the advice of counsel. But it was apparently too late for that. He cried more uncontrollably now, and said: ‘All these people here, Paul, they’re like my guests.’ And he hung up the phone without another word.”
• • •
At about the same time, Lee Mackler decided it was time she was spelled by a replacement before succumbing to weakness. “I’ve gotta get something to eat before I die,” she told Don Ganoung, slumping across her littered desk. “Anybody up for trying to reach civilization?”
A bearded man in a staff T-shirt whom she had never seen before volunteered to guide her through traffic, and together, they slipped through the congestion and roadblocks to the Holiday Inn in Liberty where Woodstock Ventures had put up many of the performers.
“It was like paradise,” she noted with amusement, “like a wonderful dream in which one’s friends and heroes were present. I remember sitting down with a few kids from the staff and ordering a banquet, seven courses, which we simply signed for. Janis Joplin was there, and so was Grace Slick and two or three of the Grateful Dead—the revolutionaries dining on T-bone steaks and French champagne. We were hysterical, because we knew damned well that come Saturday or Sunday night, these people would change into their oldest torn jeans and sing to ‘the people’ about poverty and starvation.
“It was absolutely decadent. We had heard about the pitiful conditions out at the site, how the food was low, and the medical tents were bursting with patients, like a modern-day Gettysburg. But nobody gave a shit. We were on an expense account, and that was really all that mattered to most of the people in that dining room. I knew what I wanted all along. I didn’t want to return to that godawful mess in the security building. I wanted the comforts of home. So when I was told there was no way I’d get back to White Lake that night, I submitted without a whimper. I spent the night in a room in the Holiday Inn with air-conditioning, a color television, and a Magic Fingers—which, after all, is what everyone knows peace, love, and life is all about.”
• • •
The $4,500 Joshua Light Show spectacular, which John Morris had insisted upon booking over his employer’s objections, lasted for a meteoric streak of brilliance before fizzling out over White Lake for good.
As soon as it had gotten dark enough to commence with the projection, right after Sebastian finished, Josh White hung his gigantic screen from the back of the stage and proceeded to flash a series of colorful, formless splotches behind the Incredible String Band’s silky performance. The crowd hailed the familiar exhibit, another “old friend” in this unusual, new environment. Most of them had experienced White’s famous show at the Filmore East or had witnessed several imitations of the psychedelic art form at one concert or another in their hometown. Its pageantry, coming in the middle of Friday night’s show, was taken for granted, much the same way one expects the “Star-Spangled Banner” to be sung before a sports event begins.
Something, however, was not working properly—the images were not lucid enough or as fluid as the artist wanted them to appear—and the temperamental White stomped off in the direction of th
e trailer compound in search of a new projector lamp.
Steve Cohen had had enough of both White and the light show and told two of his stagehands to keep an eye out for Josh while he had a look behind the stage. Maybe, he leered, there was some way he could give White a hand and locate the source of trouble.
With the help of a staff carpenter and one of the Bastard Sons, Cohen disengaged the backdrop from its flimsy frame and disappeared with it underneath the orange scaffolding.
Twenty minutes later, White returned, carrying a gunmetal tool box and a carton of tempera paint. He seemed more relaxed, more composed, than he had been previously. He had brought everything he needed along with him on this trip from the production area. Nothing else could give him cause to interrupt his show again.
As he ascended the steps to the stage, he knew, at once, that something was out of place. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he sensed that something had been tampered with, someone had intruded upon his territory. Then it dawned on him.
“Hey! My screen, man—what’s happened to the screen?” A stagehand shrugged his ignorance of the situation and went back to watching the show. “I can’t fuckin’ believe it!” He flexed his arms like a weightlifter and then brought them down with a hard slap against his thighs. No one paid his tirade any attention and White sensed a conspiracy among the production staff, which only infuriated him more. “My screen—who the fuck’s stolen my screen? I’m gonna nail someone to the wall if I don’t get my screen back!”
White ranted and searched for fifteen minutes without much luck. The Joshua Light Show had come to a spiteful, inconsiderate end. It was not until later that night that the show’s creator learned of the catastrophe which had befallen his curtain. One of the electricians had found it while replacing a cable beneath the stage. It had somehow come loose from its mooring, the man proposed, but he could not explain how it came to be wrapped neatly in a blanket—nor could he come up with a theory about how or why it had been slashed to ribbons.
• • •
The Incredible String Band was a traditional, folk-oriented ensemble who had miraculously hung on to their loyal audience during the Liverpool uprising of the mid-1960s. While the Beatles, the Stones, the Dave Clark Five, the Yardbirds, and the Who, among others, banished the folkies to life along the coffeehouse circuit, the String Band conformed to the flower-generation’s milieu, adapting their unique blend of exotic instrumentals to that of trendy experimental drug lore. Michael Lang had been quick to hire the English band, replete with their richly textured robes and transcendental stage paraphernalia. However, by the time the festival rolled around, the quaint duet had been expanded into an unwieldy five-piece pop band. Much of their esoteric veneer had been diluted by the group’s development, although their hour-and-twenty-minute set commanded a splendorous response from the crowd.
Tim Hardin finally took a turn on stage after the Incredible String Band. It was a few minutes past nine o’clock, a logical transition in the show—the String Band, a stunning orange sunset, then Hardin’s sauntering to the mike—and the crowd’s well-timed composure helped cushion the songwriter’s stage fright. Tim was a familiar face to the Woodstock musical community; his friends included John Sebastian, Eric Andersen, and the Band. He was a descendant of outlaw John Wesley Hardin and it is believed that his ancestry inspired Dylan to build an album around the desperado’s turbulant mystique. Tim, however, had a mystique all his own, a lush, silky voice that fluttered over jazz/blues compositions such as “If I Were A Carpenter,” “Reason to Believe,” “Lady Came From Baltimore,” and “Misty Roses.” For nearly an hour, Hardin spun gentle, convincing renditions of his classics. One could almost see his fear melt away as the set progressed, and by the time Tim Hardin returned to the performers’ pavilion, he was but a vestige of his former nerve-wracked self.
• • •
Food For Love was holding its own on the hill overlooking the stage. Despite the estimated 300,000 people in attendance—nearly three times the number for whom they had planned—and an inexperienced labor force working the stands, no one had to wait more than ten or twenty minutes in line to be served. In contrast to their business tactics, Food For Love’s organization seemed conscientious and well mannered.
Some of the pressure of feeding so many people had been taken off their shoulders, of course, by the Hog Farm’s Free Kitchen. Word of their existence spread quickly, and before long the campground facility was swamped with requests for meals far in excess of their ability to dish them out. Volunteers offered their assistance behind the counters ungrudgingly, where they chopped vegetables, stirred the boiling vats or carried pails of festering slop to the garbage-disposal area without demur.
The electricians had given up all hope of wiring the performers’ pavilion for refrigeration, and an aggravated David Levine reluctantly donated his mountain of beefsteak to the Hog Farm’s stew before it putrified. Only four weeks before, the commune had demanded the strict observance by everyone on the staff of their vegetarianism. Now, they disavowed any allegiance to their meat-free diets. As one Hog Farmer so aptly put it: “How can anyone in their right mind turn down a gift of great-looking steaks, man? It’s just not human.”
The only post on the verge of becoming a critical juncture for the promoters was the medical operation that, on inspection, proved to be a churning vortex of disorderliness.
“It’s not an emergency situation yet,” Dr. Abruzzi argued with a reporter from the New York Post just after the sun had gone down, “but we’re almost at the breaking point. We simply can’t cope with the medical needs of what amounts to a large city packed into a field.”
Abruzzi’s chief concern was that the promoters had only contracted for a medical staff until eight o’clock each night, resuming again at ten the next morning. “We’re understaffed,” he mentioned to another newspaperman. “Wait a minute—did I say understaffed? I meant under siege.”
By the time Tim Hardin was finally coaxed on stage for his set, Abruzzi’s short-handed team of physicians and nurses had already treated close to 400 people for minor injuries—most conspicuously cut feet (as very few kids came to White Lake with anything on their feet) and broken toes and fingers resulting from falls in the playground. A few teen-agers bounded into the trailer screaming that they were being attacked by bug-eyed monsters or God, and they were immediately chaperoned to the Hog Farm’s waystation on the other side of the woods, where someone sat by their side and talked them down from the bad trip. Otherwise, Abruzzi took down their vital statistics, provided them with a thorough examination, tended their injuries, and steered them back into battle.
The more complicated cases were airlifted to one of the local hospitals that, along with the state police, cooperated in evacuating and caring for the seriously ill patients. Abruzzi, or one of the eighteen residents who had reported for duty, diagnosed two ruptured appendixes, five incomplete abortions, three cases of noncommunicable hepatitis, and three of ulcers of the eye as a result of excessive contact lens use, as well as a dozen or more instances of food poisoning.
As of late Friday afternoon, Liberty and Monticello hospitals were filled to capacity, and Middletown hospital was admitting ten to fifteen patients from the festival per hour.
That afternoon, the Red Cross had telephoned Charles Rudiger, the superintendent of schools for the Monticello district, requesting that the Rutherford School, an elementary school a mile down the road from Community General Hospital, be opened as a field medical center for “the festival wounded.” Rudiger had already received permission from the building’s administrators to provide it as a dormitory for the National Guard if the situation required that troops be sent in, but, as Rudiger remembered, “I could see that wasn’t going to be necessary, so we just bent the rules a bit.”
One hundred fifty cots and mattresses were set up in the gym, which became the school’s main treatment center, and a pair of ar
my helicopters set down in the blacktopped play area behind the parking lot. The temporary hospital’s operation was spontaneous; whatever needed to be done was performed without the least subjection to carelessness or argument. And, for a while, it looked like the Rutherford School would be enough to handle the load.
5
Ravi Shankar was in the middle of his instrumental set when the storm hit. No one had been forewarned of its approach. The moonless sky was a raven-black curtain of darkness until bolts of lightning set the night ablaze, revealing a cloud-capped firmament. By then, it was too late to lay the necessary groundwork to offset the rain.
At 10:35, Shankar and his accompanist were ushered offstage to one of the adjoining trailers as eight shirtless hippies worked furiously to unravel the ball of plastic that was draped over the equipment. Two others scampered across the platform on their haunches pulling plugs out of amplifiers and tucking musical instruments under the covering.
