Barefoot in Babylon

by Bob Spitz

  He found the hippies’ reaction to the “travesty” at Yasgur’s farm exactly the opposite of his own. None of them had any idea of the financial straits the promoters were in, and his impression was that even had they known what was going down, they probably would not have cared. Nothing mattered as long as the People were happy. Their share-the-wealth philosophy, however praiseworthy as a platonic thought, was an economic illusion; their sense of political upheaval even more romantic. Any serious revolutionary knew that to change the system, one first had to cope with it, infiltrate its administration. But these kids didn’t care a damn about political evolution, Joel thought, as long as they could be part of this magnificent game called the Counterculture, rebels without a justifiable cause. Their morality was as sincere as the moment, as potent as their own pleasure. The whole generation had begun to offend him, and he drifted off to sleep in a lobby armchair as an effective way of keeping his distance from them before breakfast was served.

  When he woke up (for the second time that day) a half hour later, the hives had disappeared. Without waiting around for the second sitting of pancakes, he hopped back on his bike, zig-zagged through the anchored line of cars, and arrived back at the security office in time to witness his partner’s being served with a summons.

  “Are you Roberts?” a stout, balding man in a rumpled Eisenhower jacket and baggy pants asked John. Receiving an affirmative nod, the man pulled out an envelope and held it upright, just out of the boy’s reach. “Are you authorized to accept papers on behalf of Woodstock Ventures?” Again, Roberts said he was. “Then it is my duty to give you this.” He handed the envelope across to Roberts and walked out of the building without waiting for a response.

  “You want to let me in on it?” Joel asked, after a genteel amount of time had lapsed.

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry.” He shook his head in a way that could only be interpreted as pathetic. “I just never thought it would all come at us at once like this. We’re being sued, Joel. Monticello Raceway claims we’re into them for three hundred grand for failure to provide adequate access to the festival. As a result of our ‘negligence’ in allowing the roads to be blocked, most of their potential customers weren’t able to reach the betting windows last night. We’re going to have to make good on all those losing two-dollar tickets. Jesus Christ! Do you believe this? Everybody wants a piece of our action.”

  “Take it easy, man,” Joel said comfortingly. “It’s probably nothing. Give Marshall’s office a call, and ask someone there what we should do about it.”

  Instead, Roberts called Richard Gross at his home in Liberty, who advised him to put the complaints in his pocket along with all the others he would undoubtedly receive before the weekend was out. “I guess you’re going to need a pretty large pocket,” the attorney joked, and said that he’d follow up on the subpoenas on Monday, after the festival was over.

  Wes Pomeroy stopped by the office to pick up the neatly ribboned packets of cash so that he could pay the ten o’clock security detail, or, as he affectionately had taken to calling them, those thieves. “You’d think they’d at least work for this booty,” he grumbled, waving the money in the air, “but most of them are too busy dragging teen-age girls off to the barn for a quick lay.” Lee Mackler handed him a payroll sheet, which each cop was to sign before receiving his salary. “This isn’t going to do us a helluva lot of good. They’re all using those damned aliases, and there’s no telling one from the other.”

  Pomeroy said that after he paid the cops, he’d take a quick walk around the site, pay a visit to the Yasgur house, and then head back to his cottage for a short nap. Fabbri would be in touch with the office while he was away.

  “This has turned into a farce,” Roberts commented, after his chief of security left the building. “The cops are screwing the chicks, the local merchants are screwing the kids, the kids are screwing the residents, and everybody is screwing us. The kids, the cops, Michael and Artie, Food For Love, Monticello Racetrack—we’re not being screwed, we’re being riveted into the ground.”

  “Well, look on the brighter side,” Joel wisecracked, “it can’t get any worse.”

  Predictably, though, it could. Lawrence called a few minutes later with perhaps the most depressing news since the festival began. A seventeen-year-old boy named Raymond Miszik, from Trenton, New Jersey, had been asleep in his sleeping bag when a tractor rolled over him. Miszik was rushed to the helicopter where doctors, awaiting transportation for the boy to a local hospital, administered artificial respiration with a small hand pump. He died, however, before one of the helicopters landed. They were informed that the boy’s body had already been removed to a hospital in Monticello pending notification of the parents.

  Roberts and Rosenman were distraught. The likelihood of death— a youngster’s death—was something they hadn’t even considered for a moment. Suddenly their responsibility had transcended the bounds of reality; they were plunged into a preposterous black comedy whose savage improprieties seemed to have no end.

  “I can’t believe this is happening to us,” Roberts grieved. “We’ve never fucked anybody in our lives. And now this. If I had not financed this festival, come to this site, done everything I had done, this person would not have died. I hold myself personally responsible for this boy’s death.” Tears welled up in John’s eyes and he appeared on the verge of nervous collapse.

  Joel led his friend into the back office and closed the door. “You can’t do this to yourself, man, and you’ve got to pull yourself out of it. Hell, I don’t like it any better than you do. Neither of us ever dreamed that we’d be linked to anybody’s death. But it happened, and we’ve got to deal with it until this thing is over.” He paused for a moment, and listened by the door in case someone was eavesdropping on their conversation. Satisfied what they were saying was confidential, he continued. “Look, John, there must be around 500,000 people out there—all around us. In any given group of 500,000, how many people do you think die over a three-day period? You know as well as I do that the answer to that is a lot more than one person. I think we’re ahead of the game.” He realized the callousness of his statement, and qualified it. “I’m blown away by it too, man, but we owe it to the rest of those kids to keep our heads and see they get out of here all right. You think Michael and Artie give a shit about their welfare? They’re vacationing on some other planet and my opinion is that we leave them there—forever, if possible.”

  Roberts laughed at Joel’s observation of their spaced-out partners and wiped at the corners of his eyes. “They’d have the whole crowd on a cosmic vacation if they could. Kalaparusha!” he mimicked, and they both broke up.

  “You got it, man,” Joel slapped him on the shoulder and stood up. “C’mon, we’d better get out there before they have Ticia or one of their other cronies selling tickets for seats on the first psychedelic space shuttle.”

  Roberts weakly pulled himself out of the chair, and, together, they went back into the main office prepared to fend off the further consequences of their first business venture.

  • • •

  Water pressure had been the most erratic of utilities since the festival opened on Wednesday. In any given span of time, the pumping gauges could read normal, dip to a trickle, and shoot up to near bursting to the utter horror of the county health inspector sent to monitor the supply.

  The plastic pipes had been breaking at a faster rate than the crews were able to repair them. The difficulty wasn’t so much in tying off the leaks as it was in locating them. Kids who stepped through a pipe, fearing they would be held responsible for a gross misdemeanor and sent home, ran the other way instead of notifying a festival official. Morris had made an announcement the night before begging people who had “accidentally” stepped on a pipe to report it as soon as possible, but guilt feelings obviously outweighed those of responsibility. No one heeded Morris’s advice.

  Langhart and his crew of engi
neers and college professors had been up all night following the water lines. Wherever a leak was spotted, they radioed for assistance and a backup unit was dispatched with the proper equipment to do the job. Mud had clogged some of the pipes preventing the water from being pumped uphill, and they had to be dismantled and cleaned out. Pumping mechanisms were inspected for wear and tear, and frayed parts were replaced. At one juncture, Langhart encountered two pipes, with sixty to seventy pounds of water in each, laid right over a rock. “That’s rather idiotic,” Langhart remarked to a friend as he climbed out of the jeep to reroute the duct. “If they get banged against the rock or someone drops something on them, they’ll split in two.” In another location, he came upon a tent pitched over the water line. Somebody had to have been unconscious to sleep on top of a plastic connecting joint holding seventy-five pounds of water in it. Again, Langhart stopped to untangle the pipes and move the tent off to the side. “If that pipe had gone off under the tent,” Langhart told his assistant, “it would have had the entire lake pumped up there in less than an hour.” He scratched the back of his head and looked at his work. “The problem is that nobody has any idea what’s going on here. They’re just in bliss, and it’s just wonderful. That’s the trouble with this generation—they’re so used to having things done for them, with everything being so rosy. Let’s just hope that nothing drastic goes wrong here this weekend. These kids wouldn’t know what to do if their life depended on it.”

  2

  The music had resumed at 12:15 P.M. with an unknown group from Boston named Quill. The band’s manager was someone whom Lang had hung out with in Miami, and the two musical “movers” had cooked up a plan to introduce the group to a captive audience of 300,000 potential album buyers in hope of cashing in on it afterwards. Depending upon how the group went over, they, as Quill’s managers, could demand a heavy recording advance and bill them as the new band that had been invited to play at Woodstock before making it on the charts. It was a slot that had been originally reserved for the now defunct Train.

  Ironically, Lang’s formula for creating a rock legacy was more innovative than Quill’s ability as a band deserved. They were a mediocre talent at best, who would be hard pressed to captivate the most tepid pop-music listener, much less the connoisseurs of undiluted acid rock who at present sat in deliberation on the group’s future. In an attempt to ingratiate themselves from the opening chord, Quill took the stage and tossed maracas into the crowd. Failing to draw an energetic response with that weary device, they began flinging anything else they could get their hands on to help them knock out the audience. Nothing, however, improved their status. Following a less-than-respectable performance, they were demoted to the free stage where they were expected to earn their keep for the remainder of the weekend before lapsing into certain obscurity.

  Keef Hartley followed Quill with a hard-driving set of English blues, only to relinquish the spotlight to yet another newcomer on the rock scene. The Santana Blues Band had been the bright stars of the Atlantic City Pop Festival in June and were emerging as a vital musical force out of the Bay Area, a locale that had just about run its course as an international music capital. But, otherwise, their distinctive brand of Latin rock wasn’t widely known and they were regarded as intruders on a bill of established gods. The band’s Mexican-born leader, Carlos Santana, the son of a Mariachi musician, had been a standout on one of the year’s most heralded albums, The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, and was a noted session man on the San Francisco club circuit. When Santana formed his own band in 1969, he added a conga player named Mike Carrabello and Jose “Chepito” Areas—Central America’s poll-winning percussionist—to a standard rhythm section of friends he had worked with in the past, and their debut album on Columbia Records had been released a few weeks prior to the festival.

  Santana’s appearance at Woodstock proved to be one of the festival’s uncontested highlights. Their searing performance took the audience by complete surprise, and, some say, was responsible for keeping the event peaceful. By the time Quill had crept offstage, the temperature had climbed to ninety-two degrees with a ninety-seven percent relative-humidity chaser. The bowl had turned into a sauna, and emotions, fueled by the boredom emanating from the stage, began to heat up. Halfway through Keef Hartley’s set, the sauna evolved into a pressure cooker. Hartley, the former drummer for John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, had kicked around the hard-rock stratosphere for some time without finding his niche of commercial acceptance. Now, the crowd decided, wasn’t the right time for Hartley to make his move, and they tuned him out in favor of getting high. But they were still trapped in the amphitheatre, in the sweltering heat and mud, and one could sense the crowd’s growing discomfort swell into a human time bomb. Many hippies had woken up cranky from a restless night’s sleep, their clothing was damp and uncomfortable, and hunger pangs whipped impatience into a case of jangled nerves. It was an exact reenactment of a pricklish situation Pomeroy had described to the staff back in June, which they had striven to avoid. When Chip announced Santana, the staff held its breath. They knew that the next act would hold the key to the festival’s rocky future, and Santana wasn’t exactly a hands-down favorite to save the day.

  From the first drum roll, however, Santana disarmed the crowd and forced a breath of fresh air into that muggy bowl. Their sound was a novel approach to rock, and Carlos’s sassy guitar whistled at the crowd like a snake charmer sounding his Svengali-like tune. Santana brought the crowd to its feet, culminating in a frantic version of “Soul Sacrifice,” which became a focal point of festival gossip and catapulted the group to instant stardom—Bill Graham’s original prediction.

  When Santana turned the stage over to Mountain, the near-hysteria created by the rock neophytes mellowed into inextinguishable rapture. Leslie West, a New York favorite, fed the crowd’s rock and roll appetites until they were sated and set the tone for the rest of the day’s entertainment. The best, as the audience knew only too well, was yet to come.

  • • •

  Lee Mackler, who had been stranded at the Holiday Inn, called Roberts at the security office with a proposition. “Well, I’m in Liberty,” she said tamely. She knew they’d be swamped with work. “There’s no getting through anymore—not even on the back roads. If you want me back, you’re going to have to ransom me.”

  “Ah, that sounds remotely familiar,” Roberts kidded. “Let me see—you’re from the Hog Farm? No, that’s not it—wait, ransom . . . ransom. . . . You’ve got to be a friend of Lang’s. Okay—I’m licked,” he surrendered. “How much is it gonna cost me?”

  “C’mon, John! I’m serious. How am I going to get back there to help you guys?”

  He advised her to find a ride to Grossinger’s. The roads between the motel and the resort were clear, and they had a helicopter on the roof, which Jennie Grossinger had been kind enough to let Woodstock Ventures use for emergencies. “This is an emergency,” Roberts said. “I’ll send a helicopter for you.”

  An army jet helicopter was waiting when Lee arrived and whisked her back to White Lake. “It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life, seeing all those people from the air,” she recalled, describing the view of Bethel and its surrounding communities. “All one could see for miles, or so it seemed at the time, was bodies. I looked down at one point and felt that it was like Auschwitz. Everyone was crammed together, and they seemed to be holding each other. It sent a chill through me. And when we landed, it looked like the helicopter was swooping down on top of people. I remember thinking, well, we’re going to hit thirty or forty kids and nobody’ll know the difference.”

  Artie Kornfeld came in on a helicopter right behind Mackler’s. That morning he had concluded a deal for the movie rights with Fred Weintraub at Warner Brothers that gave the studio distribution for a token $1-million advance against royalties. The deal involved absolutely no risk for the movie company. The newspapers had set the festival’s attendanc
e (however incorrectly) at 500,000 people. If Warner’s did absolutely no advertising for the film and merely counted on those who had attended the festival to buy a $4 ticket to the movie, they’d double their investment. And that was without taking television rights into account. The deal was money in the bank for Warner’s. Of course, producer’s points had yet to be negotiated, and John and Joel would have to agree on the terms before the deal was valid, but that, as far as Artie cared, was a formality. He had already discussed the terms of the agreement with Paul Marshall who had given it his blessing. Roberts and Rosenman valued Marshall’s opinion as if it were the almighty word. On Monday, they’d bank a cool million, Artie surmised, and he’d be a wealthy man.

  • • •

  Food For Love spent most of Saturday afternoon in anguish as they watched their fortune being dissipated by disorganization and squalor.

  From the moment they opened for business, Joerger suspected that not everything was being handled aboveboard as far as their sales were concerned. To control the flow of money, they had set up two booths, manned by Pinkerton guards, where tickets were sold for refreshments. The tickets, in turn, could be used at any of Food For Love’s sixteen stands. That delivered his young vendors from the temptation of handling cash, but not necessarily from evil, as Joerger soon discovered. He had spotted tickets being turned in that were caked with mud or mustard or hot chocolate, which moved him to investigate their origin; it was inconceivable that his ticket salesmen managed to spill so much food in booths where no food was allowed. Of course, it didn’t take him long to catch on to what was happening. Instead of ripping the tickets in half and dropping the pieces into the slots of their aprons, his vendors were stuffing handfuls of whole tickets into their pockets and passing them on to their friends. Joerger estimated that about fifty percent of Food For Love’s sales were from tickets they had already redeemed. He fired the perpetrators whenever he caught one of them redhanded and hired replacements. But it didn’t take long before the new workers were up to the same thing. No one worried about the consequences. Being fired from concession work became a status symbol. They only had to depend on three days’ employment anyway, so they played it for what they could take, and if they were caught—so what?