by Bob Spitz
“Everything. They’re really after everything, man.” The boy jumped back about six feet, and Goldmacher froze. “Don’t come any closer, man.”
“All right,” the doctor assured him. “Don’t get uptight. Look, I want to explain something to you. In this tent, nobody’s going to hurt you. You’re safe here. We’ll make sure of that. Do you trust me?”
The boy nodded, unsure of the situation but willing to listen.
“Okay—now, all these people that you see here are working with me. I know all of them, and they won’t hurt you. They’re our friends. I’m a doctor, and I’ll protect you from whoever is out there.” Goldmacher studied the weapon in the boy’s hand. “What do you want to do with that knife, man?”
“I gotta protect myself!” His attention was drawn back to the pocketknife open in his hand, and it seemed to startle him. “Uh, I better hang on to it for now.”
“Fine. You hold on to it. But go over to that cot and rest for a while. Keep the knife under your pillow and just let me know if you have any problems. If anybody’s hassling you, don’t hurt them, man. Just come and get me, and I’ll get them off your back. Okay?”
The boy nodded again and curled up on the stretcher while Goldmacher went back to work on others who were anxiously waiting to see him. There was a rash of upper respiratory infections throughout Saturday night—probably due to people’s sleeping on the wet ground—and several hundred head colds, which he treated with antibiotics and aspirin. By morning, patients were backed up for an hour’s wait and beds were a rarity.
Goldmacher’s knife-wielding tripper lay awake all night. Every so often, he’d dart outside to see if any of his enemies were in sight and then slink back onto the cot in abject depression. Goldmacher sat down with him from time to time, inquiring as to whether or not he had seen any of his tormentors. The boy’s answer was always the same: “They’re comin’, man, I know they’re comin’.” As the sun came up, however, he became more relaxed. Finally, he popped outside for a quick check of the premises and never came back. Goldmacher was a little concerned for his patient’s welfare, but knew that if the boy encountered any problems, he would streak back to the tent. It was safe there, so much so that the boy had left his knife under the pillow for safekeeping.
• • •
Joel had gotten ahold of a man named Charlie Prince, the branch manager of the Sullivan County National Bank where Woodstock Ventures had its account, at his home around eleven o’clock. With Canned Heat gone, Creedence halfway through their set, and the Dead scheduled to go on next, Rosenman didn’t have a minute to spare and therefore explained his predicament in the most abbreviated account possible. If Prince was a perceptive individual, he’d detect the panic in Joel’s voice and interpret it for himself.
Prince and his wife had been following the course of events at the festival on the radio, and the branch manager said he’d be glad to do anything in his power to help the promoters out. His hands were tied, however, when it came to putting up money as there wasn’t any cash in the bank for which the boys could write a check, and all other negotiable bonds—bank certified checks, security vouchers, stock—were stashed away in a time-lock vault set to reopen on Monday morning. Even if he had the combination, there was no way of getting inside until then.
Rosenman had all but given up hope of raising the cash to pay the Grateful Dead and was preparing to put out an alert for Wes Pomeroy when Prince called him back. There was an outside chance, Charlie said, that he had forgotten to put away a book of certified checks before leaving the bank on Friday. If that was the case—and it would be a fluke because he had never done that before in his entire career at Sullivan National—then the checks were still in his desk drawer.
Rosenman radioed the landing strip behind the stage and had them send a helicopter immediately over to pick up Prince at his home and take him to the bank. Then he waited. And waited. Ten minutes passed, and still there was no word from either Prince or his wife. Another five minutes passed, and nothing. Hadn’t Prince understood the life-and-death urgency of the situation? Had he misjudged the banker’s perspicacity? He hoped not, but then what in the hell was taking Prince so damned long in getting back to him?
As Rosenman pulled out the security directory to look up Pomeroy’s number, the phone rang.
It was Charlie Prince. “I’m in the bank, Joel,” he said. “Now, I haven’t even checked the drawer yet. Keep your fingers crossed.”
Another agonizing minute passed during which Rosenman grappled with his own threshold for prayer. He was not a devoutly religious person, but there was no time like the present to come to terms with faith. In sixty seconds’ time, Joel made reparation with his Maker for past transgressions and promised to keep his nose clean from here on in if only those checks turned up in Charlie Prince’s drawer.
“They’re here, Joel! I’ve got them.”
Rosenman looked up at the ceiling and mouthed a silent thank you. “Don’t move a muscle, Charlie. Stay right where you are. I’m on my way over.”
3
The generation’s crown princes and heirs had been granted the daylight stage to make their bid for ascendancy, and, in most cases, their presentations had been well received. Now, however, the darkness caused the stage to radiate with the majesty of a crystal chandelier, and the loyal subjects hungrily awaited the appearance of their kings and queens. The names were pure magic to the audience—Grace Slick, Marty Balin, Roger Daltry, Peter Townshend, Sly Stone, and, of course, the beaded Persephone, Janis Joplin, who was expected to cast her spell over the crowd as soon as Jerry Garcia pranced the Dead offstage.
“Janis was in a very bad way at the festival as far as drugs were concerned,” recalled Myra Friedman, Joplin’s long-time friend and biographer. “And on top of that, she was freaked by the crowd. She stared out across that field and thought the audience at Woodstock was made up of too many people for her to reach. ‘Too abstract,’ Janis kept saying to me before she went on. ‘It’s just too abstract, Myra.’”
Janis and Grace Slick watched Canned Heat’s performance from the back of the stage with petrified intensity. Both women seemed more intent on what lay beyond the footlights, the hundreds of thousands of dancing heads, than Bob Hite’s gyroscopic performance only a few feet away from them. “Janis Joplin stood tensely motionless, her mouth set hard,” Rolling Stone reported, and, indeed, the description was an accurate portrait of her increasing dread of having to entertain the crowd.
From what is known about Janis’s movements preceding her segment of the concert, the crowd apparently had a demoralizing effect on her. (Judging from filmed footage of the Airplane’s performance, the same can probably be said about Grace Slick.) Janis retreated to the performers’ pavilion while the Dead were on stage where, according to John Morris, “she had bottles of vodka and tequila in each hand and was popping them off like crazy.”
Morris and Joplin had known each other from the Filmore, and it was John who had suggested she vacation at his house in St. Thomas earlier in the summer. They hadn’t seen each other since—John had been tied up with the festival and Janis had been on the road—and she walked over to him while waiting to go on to thank him for the use of the house.
“She was very drunk,” Morris remembered, “and very depressed. But she said something to me that night which made my hair stand on end. I hugged her and said, ‘How are you, honey? How was St. Thomas?’ To which Janis replied, ‘Oh yeah, man, thanks. But it was just like anywhere else—I fucked a lot of strangers.’”
Joplin’s performance reflected a combination of her blue funk and the misgivings she had about reaching the audience. She clearly lacked the raw enthusiasm for which she was so well known; her intoxicating voice was more liquored than whiskey-hoarse. About all that can be said of her contribution to the festival is that Janis sang her songs and got off quickly. The audience, not about to be patronized, was less th
an kind in its response.
Myra Friedman walked over to her afterwards as Janis came across the bridge, and informed her that a reporter from Life had requested a few minutes of her time for an interview.
“Fuck him, man,” Janis said, “and fuck the world.” After which she disappeared into an adjoining tent and shot her veins full of junk.
• • •
Throughout Janis Joplin’s performance, John Morris made a series of trips between the stage and a trailer situated behind the mess hall-cum-medical tent where Sly Stone was changing into his outfit. Sly was scheduled to follow Janis onstage, but Dave Kapralik, his manager, informed Morris that Sly wasn’t going on “until the spirit moves him.”
“What the hell kind of mumbo jumbo is that?” Morris asked, nervously checking his watch. “I’ve got to have him out there in ten minutes. Get him ready to go.”
Kapralik replied that ten minutes should just about do it, but when Morris returned, there was still no sign of the star. “Sly’s not in the mood yet,” Kapralik said.
Morris began to understand Lang’s reluctance to sign Sly when the subject first came up. The black singer’s reputation as an extraordinary showman had been undermined by temper tantrums and what the rock periodicals referred to as “overdramatized star trips.” But Morris and Lang had been assured by associates close to the performer that Sly had turned over a new leaf. Some leaf, Morris thought; it was probably poison ivy.
“Okay, look—Janis is still on, but in fifteen minutes it’s going to be Sly’s turn. So, could you possibly get him ‘in the mood’ in fifteen minutes?”
Morris had a sneaking premonition that he hadn’t heard the last of Sly Stone’s impetuosity and, ten minutes later, sent a stagehand over to the trailer for a progress report. The boy returned in a flash with an instant replay of Morris’s previous encounters. “Kapralik met me outside the trailer, man, and said that Sly wasn’t in the mood. Do you believe this shit?” The stagehand gawked.
Morris believed it, all right. He had been warned about it occurring, waved it off, and was about to pay the price for his faith. He waited another ten minutes before stalking back to the trailer. Kapralik was outside, waiting for him.
“Get him on stage. Let’s go!” Morris barked, without waiting to hear the manager’s pretense.
“I told you, man, he can’t go on until the spirit moves him. Hey, listen—you can’t do this to him. He’s Sly Stone, man.”
“I don’t care if he’s a sly-fuckin’ fox,” Morris yelled. “Get that fucking act of yours onto the goddamn stage! There’s half a million people out there, and you, my friend, are in the minority!”
With that, the trailer door swung open, and the elusive Sylvester Stone poked his head outside.
“Hey—what’s this noise, man? Mah concentration’s bein’ disturbed. It ain’t happenin’ for me, baby!”
Sly jiggled down the steps to where Morris and Kapralik were squared off. If he was not acting the part of a star, he certainly looked like one. Dressed from head to toe in a white fringed and beaded jumpsuit, a thick gold chain around his neck, his smooth face covered by hawk-shaped glasses, Sly Stone was a lanky, ebony god in a state of irritation.
In his own distress, John Morris was no mortal match-up. “Are you ready to go on, Sly?”
“Hey man, I thought I told you.” He looked at Kapralik. “I can’t swing it until the vibes are right.”
Morris lost his temper. “Don’t give me that shit! Now I’ve got 400,000 people out there who think you’re a star—for now. If you’re not on that stage in five minutes, they’re going to think you’re a piece of shit, and it’s gonna be me that tells ’em that. Don’t fuck around with me, man. You’d better be out there and ready to do your show whether you’re in the spirit or not!”
No one can really say for sure what it was that motivated Sly Stone, but when he showed up on the stage just after 1:30 in the morning, he was in the mood and left little doubt that he intended to transmit some of that electric intensity with which he was charged to the audience.
Morris felt it too, and suddenly, bygones were bygones. Stepping to the mike, he said, “Sly’s about to come out and destroy your minds, but it’s so dark out there we can’t see you, and you can’t see each other. So when I say ‘three,’ I want every one of you to light a match. Okay? Everybody got your matches ready? One . . . two . . . three!”
In the fraction of an instant it takes for a spark to produce light, the amphitheatre was transformed from a dark, spacial infinity to a penumbra of human emotion. A mass consecration of 400,000 candles lit up the hillside in a hallowed oblation to the spirit of Woodstock. The energy, the anticipation, and the hope of a generation were manifest in the transcendental glow that welcomed Sly and the Family Stone onto the Aquarian stage. And Sly returned the love in kind. He turned in what eventually became known as the most outstanding performance of the entire festival, keeping his promise: “I want to take you higher.”
The Who followed Sly at 3:30 A.M., after John Wolff collected a certified check for $11,200 from Joel Rosenman. Michael Lang and Abbie Hoffman stood at the side of the stage and watched Roger Daltry leap through the air as the band did a medley from Tommy. Abbie had worked in the medical tent most of the night and, afterwards, had done some acid to “help him relax.” But as the Who incited the crowd with their specialized brand of theatrical fireworks, Abbie began frothing with political cogitation.
“Oh, man, this is bullshit,” he complained to Lang. “I mean, we’re headed in the wrong direction again, man. I gotta go up there and make a speech.”
“Hey, cool it, man. Now’s not the time.”
“It’s never the time as far as you hippies are concerned,” Hoffman said, tormented and perspiring. “No, man, I gotta go up there. I gotta tell everybody about John Sinclair, man. We gotta fight for that cat.” Sinclair was the leader of the White Panther Party and manager of a Detroit-based rock group, the MC-5, who had been arrested and given a nine-year prison sentence for possession of two joints. “It’s too important, and it can’t wait.”
Before Lang could react, Abbie dashed across the stage. Stepping in front of Peter Townshend, he lowered the guitarist’s microphone. “This festival is meaningless as long as John Sinclair’s rotting in prison!” Abbie screamed. Townshend had no idea who the speaker was who had the audacity to interrupt the Who’s performance, but he wasn’t about to let him continue. He lifted his guitar in the air, wound up, and swatted Hoffman into the photographers’ pit—a revolutionary mosquito laid to rest.
Abbie picked himself up. He blasted Townshend with a torrent of obscenities and ran screaming up the side of the hill, never to return to White Lake.
The Who’s set lasted well into Sunday morning, and as the sun rose over the trees behind the stage, Townshend smashed his guitar to smithereens in a madcap finale to the evening’s musical mayhem.
At 8:30 A.M. the Jefferson Airplane took to the stage with a particularly dull and uninspired set of their well-worn songs. The group was visibly spent from having had to wait around backstage all night. Grace Slick’s voice, frail under the best of circumstances, cracked repeatedly as she strained to overcome the fear and exhaustion that had taken its toll on her stage presence. Nevertheless, she looked unusually ravishing in a tight-fitting fringed white dress revealingly laced up the front. Marty Balin and Jorma Kaukonen traded vocals on the opening few numbers, struggling to pick up the pace of their show, but it wasn’t until much later that Grace broke it open with “White Rabbit.” By then, however, it was too late. Two thirds of the audience had passed out on the ground, worn out from too much of a good thing. The hits kept on coming—“Somebody To Love” and “Volunteers” built toward a redeeming climax—but they attracted scant applause. By 10:00 Sunday morning, after the Airplane jetted into the sunrise, all anyone could think about was sleep. For many in the audience, the show was
already over.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sunday, August 17, 1969
And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “The Day Is Done”
1
“Good morning!” Hugh Romney screeched from the foot of the main stage, his hoarse voice barely audible, even over the ear-splitting sound system. It was fast approaching noon, and the music was slated to resume at 1:30. “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000.” About ten percent of the crowd had already set out in search of their cars, but those who decided to stick it out to the end responded with renewed vitality. “Now, it’s gonna be good food and we’re going to get it to you. It’s not just the Hog Farm, either. It’s everybody. We’re all feedin’ each other. We must be in heaven, man! There’s always a little bit of heaven in a disaster area.” A volley of whistles and exultant shouts drowned out Romney’s parched cough. “Now, there’s a guy up there—some hamburger guy—that had his stand burned down last night. But he’s still got a little stuff left, and for you people that still believe capitalism isn’t that weird, you might help him out and buy a couple hamburgers.” His voice trailed off as he leaned back and stole a quick glance behind the stage. There, from around the side of the production trailers, came a quartet of Hog Farm women, marching toward the stage with wagonloads of cold mush, three or four ladles, and a veritable forest of paper plates. “Okay,” Romney warned the crowd, “here it comes!”
A scantily clad young man jumped on the platform and blew an off-key mess call on a scrap-pile bugle. One of the stagehands remarked that it was a fortunate thing that Max’s cows didn’t stampede the amphitheatre. However, after getting a closer look at the “breakfast,” he retracted his statement.
