A Long Strange Trip (46 page)

28

Bethel to Sears Point (8/16/69–12/4/69)

Sometime near midnight on Saturday, August 16, 1969, the Grateful Dead made their way onstage to play to about 400,000 people in Max Yasgur’s back pasture in Bethel, New York. Their performance at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair would rank in their memory as one of their worst ever. The circumstances were not ideal; to begin with, their set began late, for two reasons. One was that the stage design was based on a rotating turntable, so that the upcoming act could set up on the concealed rear half of the turntable during the current group’s performance. In Bear’s account, he and Ram Rod warned the stage manager that their equipment was too heavy for the staging, but they were ignored. So the turntable turned a few degrees—and squished to a stop. Second, there was a major problem with the electrical grounding of the stage, and Bear insisted on fixing it before the Dead went on, which created a substantial delay. His efforts were not entirely successful. When the vocalists approached their mikes, they received shocks, and not small ones. Weir’s lover, Frankie, saw him start to sing, “and I saw a blue arc go from the mike to his top lip and—you know how he gets on one leg and he jumps back— he did that except
he
didn’t do it—he just got his ass knocked back there. He had a huge blister, awful, when the song was over.”

It was pouring rain, and the wind was blowing hard enough that it turned the light show screen into a sail, threatening to take the stage off its foundations until people hauled out knives and slashed holes in the screen. In the process, the Dead could hear people from behind their amps passing pleasantries like, “The stage is collapsing.”

There were other distractions. The Dead were scared spitless. They still saw themselves, Mickey said later, as a fairly “humble, small-time band,” happy lunatics playing music as well as possible, and surely not stars. They never had nor would operate well under stress, and the 400,000 invisible people out there on the other side of the blinding, nightmarish lights made for an incredible amount of pressure, as did the continuous stream of helicopters, the knowledge that the show had become a national event, and the imposing lineup of other bands. Yet the event was “a sort of culmination of our trip,” thought Mickey, “free in the park. So we felt on one hand it was our party.” Perhaps they were a tad excessively ripped on whatever LSD was around, which Phil recalled as being speckled tablets from Czechoslovakia. Finally, the festival structure, which allocated only an hour or so to any given band, guaranteed problems for the Dead. They were not showmen, and they rarely had a show that launched itself with all thrusters roaring. They built from a start, and after a while
. . . boom.

So they made a big mistake. Knowing all this, they went for a knockout punch and threw “St. Stephen” at the audience as an opener. Hart looked over at Garcia as they were about to begin, and saw fear in his eyes. Mickey thought to himself, “ ‘Oh, man, we’re in trouble.’ His eyes were
wide
open.” Mickey was right. They hadn’t warmed up enough to play it brilliantly, and in fact barely played it at all, going to another song after the first verse. Over the years, they would “train a generation of audiences,” said Jorma Kaukonen, “how to respond to their music.” But that time was not yet here, and this mass audience did not really get off on the free-form aspects of “Dark Star.” It was not the “total disaster” that Garcia and the rest of the band would claim, but in context, it was not surprising that Garcia turned to Jon McIntire as he left the stage and said, “It’s nice to know that you can blow the most important gig of your career and it doesn’t really matter.” As usual, he was right.

Woodstock would come to signify an entire generation, and up until the time they went onstage, the Dead had as good a time there as anyone. It began as the vision of Michael Lang, a Florida head-shop owner, and Artie Kornfeld, a low-level music business wheeler-dealer and associate of the Cowsills, a successful, fluffy pop recording group. The two of them found John Roberts, a reporter and heir, and Joel Rosenman, an attorney, who’d run an ad reading, “Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting and legitimate business enterprises.” There gradually evolved the notion of a three-day music festival at Woodstock, an Avalonesque town that had symbolized hip separation from conventional mores at least since the American Communist Party had been founded there in 1919, and even more so since Bob Dylan had moved there to be part of its art-colony ambience in the 1960s. When the town rejected the idea, the festival moved to Max Yasgur’s farm.

From the time the organizers got to Max Yasgur, dozens of details worked out instead of failing, and it became clear that the Woodstock festival was somehow meant to be. Yasgur was an important fellow in Bethel, and the town went along with him. The underground press was suspicious, but Wes Pomeroy, former San Mateo County sheriff and head of security, met with them late in June at the Village Gate in New York City and charmed their socks off. The festival began with one helicopter pad marked with Christmas tree lights; it ended with fifteen choppers coming in and out. It took a remarkable maneuver to get sufficient telephones put in, but it happened. John Roberts could and should have backed out of his financial commitments, but instead bankrupted himself by staying in. New York City police officers were told by their superiors that they could not work security, but they showed up anyway, incognito, and there was no significant violence. The Fillmore East was closed for the summer, and most of the critical details of staging and ticketing were handled by vacationing professionals Chip Monck and John Morris. Early on, the producers decided they needed the Who, but Pete Townshend was dead set against playing. Lang and Pete’s agent, Frank Barsalona, worked on him all night, and by dawn he cracked and agreed to do the gig. Frequent and considerable advertising gave the show massive impetus. That Bethel was within a hundred miles of an enormous population had something to do with it, but there was more at work. Woodstock became a pilgrimage.

By Thursday the fourteenth, there were already 20,000 people on the field. A “cash register guy” turned to the Dead’s friend, Prankster and Hog Farmer Hugh Romney, and said it was time to clear the field. Said Hugh, “You wanna good movie or a bad movie?” As Hugh added later, the promoters were neither stupid nor piggish, and so it became a free concert. By 7 A.M. on Friday, 175,000 people had arrived on-site, the roads had congealed, and people began to desert their cars, first at the side of the road, then in the road, and walk. Among them were Mickey Hart and Sue Swanson, who had come early to visit Mickey’s mother, Leah, and grandmother Ethel Tessel, staying at Leah’s summer place eight miles from Yasgur’s farm. Rock Scully tried to get to the show in a limo, got stuck in traffic, and wound up trying to direct it, the rain melting the LSD in his pocket into an orange streak. The police estimated that 1 million people tried to get to Bethel on Friday. “No one honks,” wrote Gail Sheehy. “No one shouts. No one shoves. It’s unnatural.”

The world of rock gathered at the Holiday Inn in the town of Liberty, New York, near Grossinger’s Resort, which made for odd juxtapositions. T.C. took a walk and found himself being stared at by ultra-orthodox Hasid youth, who thought he was from the moon. Bill Thompson, the Airplane’s road manager, got room 1. Dale Franklin, then Graham’s secretary at the Fillmore East, ran the motel lobby. Joan Baez, Sly Stone, Ravi Shankar, and Janis Joplin joined the Grateful Dead in the waiting line for room keys. In the bar, as the day passed, Spencer Dryden, Thompson’s assistant Jacky Watts, Keith Moon, and Janis Joplin played poker. Bear prowled around giving out samples of the finest LSD. At various times, Garcia would share his room with Rock Scully’s new lover, Ken Goldfinger’s ex-wife, Nicki Rudolph, Bert Kanegson and his girlfriend, and Paul Williams of the rock magazine
Crawdaddy!
With the scheduled first act stuck in traffic, stage manager John Morris smooth-talked Richie Havens into a solo spot, then John Sebastian, then Country Joe. Then came the rain. But at Woodstock the rain turned out to be a good thing, a mild test that bonded 400,000 youth in good-natured loving joy. They were the chosen children, and they seemingly knew it.

On Saturday the Airplane’s Bill Thompson ran into Lang and Kornfeld backstage, barefoot and loaded, babbling about love and beauty and peace. Being a road manager, he had other worries, and he proceeded to gather up the road manager of the Who, and Rock Scully and Jon McIntire from the Dead, among others. They sat down with the money guy, Joel Rosenman. Once again, signing the movie release became an issue, and neither the Dead nor the Airplane did so (although the Airplane would like their footage and later change their mind). Then the road managers demanded their money up front. Rosenman moaned, but found the cash.

As Saturday passed, Woodstock entered American history, dodging disasters and justifying everyone’s faith in the special joy of rock and roll. “You could feel,” Garcia said, “the presence of invisible time travelers from the future who had come back to see it, a swollen historicity—a truly pregnant moment . . . as a human being, I had a wonderful time.” The new San Francisco band Santana was there only because Bill Graham had played hardball with the bookers, and Carlos jump-started a lifetime career with an electrifying set. Backstage, Garcia poked his head into a tent where John Sebastian, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and CS&N’s drummer, Dallas Taylor, sat with a comatose fourteen-year-old, commenting, “Wow, man! Hippie rock stars! Will you autograph my butt?” Stills grumbled, “Fucking Canned Heat is making more than we are.” For Taylor, the show was the highlight of what would be a fifteen-year nightmare of depression, drug addiction, and the full-blown screaming horrors. Out in the medical tent, William Abruzzi handled things brilliantly. A veteran of demonstrations and civil rights marches, he had eighteen doctors, thirty-six nurses, twenty-seven EMTs, and what he called the “superb paraprofessionals” of the Hog Farm, who would gather up someone coming unglued and tell him or her softly, “Guess what—it’s going to wear off.” When people came down, the Hog Farmer would point to the newest casualty and say, “That was you four hours ago. Now you’re the doctor. Take over.” They got by. Paul Krassner and Abbie Hoffman arrived with political leaflets, were duly ignored, and ended up working hard at the hospital tent. As Abbie later put it, “Hog Farm politics” was stronger than left-wing politics, because the Hog Farm was about survival.

As the night passed, the festival management confronted problem after problem, and managed to solve them. The most significant came when they realized that the rain had washed away the dirt covering the power cables. There was a real potential for mass electrocution if they didn’t turn off the power, but to do so would leave half a million people in dark silence. Rosenman told his chief electrician to shift power to other cables without turning anything off—and it worked. After that, minor ego problems were easy. Bill Belmont, once the Dead’s road manager, was helping with various aspects of the show, and reported to stage manager John Morris, “Sly is not ready to go on. Sly doesn’t feel the vibes.” Morris and Belmont looked at each other and said in unison, “Do a Bill Graham.” It worked, and Sly went out and shredded the crowd with a galvanic performance, probably the peak of his entire career. As the Who played, Abbie Hoffman decided that this would be a good time to interrupt the music for a lecture on John Sinclair’s legal problems. Townshend batted him away with a swipe from his guitar.

Then it was dawn and Hugh Romney went onstage to announce, “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000.” The
New York
Times
would initially be hostile, writing in a Monday editorial headlined “Nightmare in the Catskills” that the crowd had “little more sanity than the impulses that drive the lemmings . . . [a] nightmare of mud and stagnation . . . What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?” Yet even the
Times
had to concede, “the great bulk of the freakish-looking intruders behaved astonishingly well.” Or, as Max Yasgur pointed out from the stage, “I think you people have proven something to the world— that a half a million kids can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music [applause]! And I God bless you for it.”

Three died: one Viet vet with malaria, one person run over by a water truck, one of a burst appendix. Four hundred drug bummers, all of whom walked away. No violence. As the Dead choppered out on Sunday morning, thunderheads were lining up once again. They landed in Liberty, changed to cars, and were driving to Kennedy Airport when all around them exploded the wrath of God, a lightning bolt and thunderclap in perfect timing that stunned them. T.C. cracked, “Now that’s the P.A. we need.” For their labors, the Dead received $2,250. Jimi Hendrix topped the payment list at $18,000. Santana got $750.

There was one other thing the Dead got from Woodstock and the other festivals, though its worth was hard to measure in dollars. With all of the bands using more or less identical road cases, Bear had concluded that a simple, easily identified logo would be useful. He had envisioned a simple symbol that was a bolt of lightning in a red and blue circle with a white border, but his artist friend Bob Thomas delivered a more refined rendering in which a skull, the forehead cleaved by a lightning bolt, would fill a circle. The bolt had thirteen points, as in the number of stripes in the U.S. flag, and its colors were red, white, and blue. They may have been stoned, but they were still patriots. Variously called the Laughing Jap— the Dead were not ordinarily racist, but the skull’s eyes are vaguely Asiatic, and its expression is mirthful—the Cosmic Charley, or the Steal Your Face (from the later album of that name, the cover of which it graces), it would become one of the most recognizable logos in the world.

The Dead continued to play festivals, ranging from Oregon’s tiny Bullfrog Festival to the international Vancouver Pop Festival and then the heavyweight New Orleans Pop Festival, which included Janis Joplin, the Who, and the Jefferson Airplane. At the time, Louisiana law mandated a fiftyyear maximum sentence for selling pot, and the parish sheriff had 116 undercover officers on-site. The local underground newspaper was in a fight with the promoter, and ran a front-page item describing a mythical “People’s Park Annex Hardware Department Wire Cutting Sale.” It was not surprising that there was trouble. In Bear’s recollection the promoter refused to supply a truck to transport the band’s gear from the airport, and when their stage equipment was late, he told the promoter, “It’s your problem, mate.” In addition, Bear and the Dead wanted to use their own P.A., a naive thought in a festival.