August 15, 2009 – A special section – Woodstock Nation. Third of a three-part series. Part 1 | Part 2

08/14/1989
BY SHEILA LENNON
Journal-Bulletin Lifestyles Editor
Despite two days of uncomfortable conditions, peace and music are both holding out. Sunday is the acid test.

The storm bore down on us, all hard rain and whipping wind, just after Joe Cocker ended the set that opened Woodstock, Day 3. “The ground was slippery red clay, and then it really looked like Baghdad,” remembers Dottie Clark, one of the many from southeastern New England who were there. “People selling the junk of the time were packing up, my friends were crying, and I was laughing. I thought it was funny. I said, ‘Someday you’ll see that this was something.’ ”

Cocker had finished his set with what may have been the best live performance ever given: With a Little Help From My Friends.

“I ran into a friend from school standing at the stage when Joe Cocker was performing,” says Stephen Schechtman, “and I just remember tears in his eyes, this guy just standing there crying. He was really moved by it.”

The storm that followed, with clouds straight out of a Hollywood epic, “was almost like a test from some god,” says Kathleen McDevitt. “That was really hard to get through. But I remember being exhilarated. People on stage were saying ‘hang in there,’ and everybody did.”

These people had been too long wet, hungry, hot and cold. Spontaneously, the rain chant began – “No rain, no rain, no rain . . .” When the hour-long deluge stopped, the field was a giant mud puddle. But the Woodstock attitude held: Another bad situation was turned around. With a slight shift of perspective, any kid could see a perfect hill for sliding. The long coast to the stage was fun.

“It looked like a picture from the World War II archives, the refugees after a town had been blitzed or invaded,” says John Haerry. “Here were all these people, cold, wet, miserable, hungry, thirsty, but still keeping it together.

“I remember people walking around quietly asking, ‘Do you have any spare food, or anything to drink?’ At the same time, if people had anything, it was ‘Well, we’ve got a bag of potato chips, here, have some of our potato chips.’ ”

“To the media it was a catastrophe, but to us, it was the very best life,” says Carmino Scaglione.

“There were enormous garbage bags and people sitting all around them,” remembers Dottie Clark. “It was Felliniesque.”

“It stunk on Sunday,” Rico Topazio recalls. “People were burning clothes to keep warm. Then a helicopter came over the field and started dropping things. It was scary, people freaked out, until they saw they were flowers.

“It was like a reward for just being there, and staying,” says Kathleen McDevitt. “There was someone somewhere concerned about us.”

Lee Blumer, assistant to the security director then, said last week that the gesture had been arranged by Michael Lang, the man who thought up the whole idea of a festival that would bring together the counterculture so we could see how many of us there really were.

A recent reminder

Dawn Jabari-Zhou, who was forced to leave China last month after teaching there two years, said the students in Tiananmen Square in June reminded her of Woodstock. “In Beijing, people did make that analogy: They hadn’t seen these many people since Woodstock. People were orderly, friendly, and shared food and shelter. There was a tent city at Tiananmen.”

Woodstock also had shadows.

Two deaths were reported.

Without checking underneath, a farmer moved his tractor out of a field dotted with sleeping people. A 17-year-old who slept Friday night under a tractor was killed when the farmer started it up and ran over him.

Another young man died, but it is not clear whether it was from a heroin overdose or a heart attack.

I suspect that Margaret Chevian speaks for many when she says, “At the time people were sucked into being liberal; what you were then and are now is not the same. We went along with the crowd. I don’t know why we didn’t die from bad sanitation.”

And others would agree with Ed Dalton’s statement that ” Woodstock was a promise unfulfilled because I don’t think my generation accomplished what they set out to accomplish: change the world. When we saw all of us, we knew we had force and power.

“I think the whole generation has sold out, and I hope the kids turn out better than we did.”

Most of us who were at Woodstock also know somebody who tried to stay there no matter where they were later, and became casualties of drugs and alcohol.

Tom of Providence was 14 at Woodstock, doing drugs. “I regret that Woodstock set me on this path. I wish I’d spent more time studying, learning a trade. Because I was so young and doing drugs, I didn’t have a chance to have a real adolescence, to grow up.” He’s been in AA two years.

One caller from North Kingstown wouldn’t identify herself but wanted to say that her parents didn’t let her go to Woodstock, and her friends who did all developed serious addiction problems.

Three births and four miscarriages were reported at the festival, but, so far, no one has come forward waving a birth certificate to prove, “I was born at Woodstock.”

No unknown garage band

Crosby, Stills and Nash had only played one concert, in Chicago, before Woodstock, but this was no unknown garage band.

David Crosby had been a founding member of the Byrds; Stephen Stills played in Buffalo Springfield with Neil Young, and Graham Nash was stolen from the Hollies. Their first album together, Crosby, Stills and Nash, would stay on the charts for 107 weeks. But that night at Woodstock, Graham Nash sheepishly greeted the crowd with, “We’d like to a do a medley of our hit.”

Several people named them as a favorite memory, but on Suite: Judy Blue Eyes the harmonies were so badly offkey that the tracks would be redubbed for the album. It didn’t matter, except to festivalgoers who swore later they were offkey but couldn’t prove it by the movie.

Neil Young joined CSN at Woodstock, and again two weeks later at the Big Sur Festival at the Esalen Institute, where Joni Mitchell first sang Woodstock, the anthem she wrote for the festival without ever having been there.

Mitchell was living with Graham Nash at the time, but spent the festival weekend in New York City with her manager, David Geffen. Geffen convinced her she might not be able to get out of Bethel, N. Y., the town 50 miles from Woodstock where the festival was being held, in time to make a TV appearance on the Dick Cavett Show.

Bulletin board of the air

The stage announcements were sometimes witty, often humorous, and excessive. The bulletin board of the air was full of lost people, headlines about what the world thought was happening to us, happy news, call your mother, come get your medicine, and colorful – if meaningless – warnings about specific colors of bad acid. There were probably fifty shades of green acid, and if anybody had just taken some, this was no time to hear it was polluted.

Cheryl Godek Curran knew people who had taken green acid. “They said, ‘Take us to the doctor,’ so we went to the bad trips tent. There they said ‘If you took it and you’re having a good trip, just go back and enjoy the festival.’ And they did.”

David DelBonis had helped build the children’s playground, the hospital tent (which Abbie Hoffman ran) and the kitchens. During the festival, he roamed the crowd, bringing people whose mental circuits had crossed back to the bad trips tent. Rick Danko of the Band and John Sebastian dropped in to play a sort of mellow rock for people who weren’t digesting mind-altering substances well.

Del Bonis explains a bad trip as “being with too many people and thinking you can party on LSD. Your brain can’t sort it quick enough. You feel scared and paranoid.” A good trip: “It’s searching; it’s kind of like looking for yourself. It’s a very spiritual thing.”

From his observations, “The drug thing was totally overblown. Certainly there was marijuana used, but not as many drugs as people imagine.”

“Not everybody at Woodstock used drugs,” Phil Kukielski says, “and people didn’t drink much. A little wine, maybe. But this was a place you could safely smoke grass.”

For some, the novelty of being able to take a social puff in public was the big thrill. A joint lit up in the crowd got passed all over. “It was nice not to feel worried about the police,” said one Rhode Islander. “That was very liberating.”

Although there were dealers, most people were wary of what they might be selling. Street drugs could be anything.

“LSD is more dangerous for anybody to experiment with now,” says Dennis Lemoine, now a Corrections Officer at the Rhode Island Training School for Youth. “Then it was made by chemists in universities and people with real knowledge of it. People now make it in cellars from a book in the library. They use strychnine (a favorite poison in old murder mysteries) to get a physical effect.

“Back then, the marijuana was less strong than what it is now. The grade has accelerated. People got stoned, laughed, sang and got happy. Now kids smoke it, sit back and nod and that’s it. The old Mexican was destroyed with Paraquat. This stuff they’re importing has a higher THC content. And they don’t stick with pot anymore.

“I know people who did heavy drugs for years on the streets, then crack and freebasing got them in a year. They’re chasing that first big high from then on.”

“We did drugs, but not the dangerous drugs. We were a whole different generation who cared for each other. We were against war, we had goals . . .”

Last week I asked Wavy Gravy, who ran the bad trips tent, what he thinks of drugs now.

“You need to differentiate between smack, crack and smoking flowers,” Wavy said. “Cocaine is horrible. It’s nature’s way of telling people they have too much money. It makes them mean to their friends and their kids.

“Psychotropic stuff in moderation can lead to extraordinary results. I like to say, ‘My father’s mush has many rooms.’ ”

Wiring repairs halt show

There was music through the night, but the sound system was shut off during the storm, which soaked some dangerously tattered wiring. While repairs were made and new wires were laid, the show did not go on.

So the Sunday bands played too late to too few still awake. And the movie crew slept at night, which is why so many great sets are missing. Sha-Na-Na made it into the film only because the crews were getting up to shoot Jimi Hendrix.

“We tried to book Roy Rogers to sing Happy Trails as the closing number for the festival,” Michael Lang told Joel Makower in The Oral History of Woodstock. “His agent declined.”

Instead, Hendrix insisted on closing the show with the national anthem.

“Obviously, he got the meaning of this thing sufficiently enough to know to play the Star Spangled Banner at the very end,” Lee Blumer told Rockfax, a small music paper published in Norwich, Conn. “. . . He saw Woodstock come from out of dust to a nation and he played an anthem.”

But not before he tossed off what was probably the strangest line of that long strange weekend: “Maybe the new day might give us a chance, blah-blah, woof-woof.”

It was 8:30 Monday morning when Hendrix started to play. He was in lavender fringe with a head band, “letting his freak flag fly,” as one member of the group would write.

There were fewer than half a hundred thousand left when he did it. Most people had gone.

Hendrix played in the early morning sun with garbage all over, and he was loud. Too loud, I remember, for my frazzled nerve endings. His guitar seemed to frizz my brain, but I was finally next to the stage, 10 feet from Jimi, and I had to watch his face. It seemed illuminated from within.

I could hear Vietnam in this anthem, bombs bursting on guitar. It flew and dived and made brand new a song that had always seemed to me a war chant. The anthem of Woodstock Nation was the anthem of America loosened, freed of its rigid measures. It was okay to be different.

The song ended at 10 a.m., 65 hours after Richie Havens began it.

We had pulled it off. It was over, and we left on whatever roads have brought us to where we are now.

An invitation to dinner

“On the way home,” remembers Tom Mulligan, “we were slogging to the car and noticed some people standing around a house. We walked over and they invited us to dinner. They were making a huge meal for anybody who wanted to come by.”

Phil Kukielski and David DelBonis both remember being handed flyers as they left. They read, “Come to Chicago” for the radical Weathermen’s Days of Rage.

People stayed for weeks, reluctant to leave, cleaning up Yasgur’s Farm.

“On the way back I was bummed out and didn’t know why, because I’d had a good time,” says Jim Edwards. “At first I thought, ‘Every high has a crash,’ but then I really felt like I had just attended an Irish wake.”

Woodstock’s promoters flew to New York to explain to the bankers and lawyers why they threw a free festival and spent the bank’s money to drop flowers on the crowd.

So what came out of all that mud and music 20 years ago?

Joe Landry, a Providence native who at 29 was one of the oldest people at the festival, seemed to sum it up: “That it’s no good for me if it’s not good for everybody.” Source.

A special section – Woodstock Nation. Second of a three-part series. Part 1 | Part 3

August 16, 2009 – The first of the “3 days of peace and music” – and mud – had been just a prelude to Rock ‘n’ Roll Survival Weekend.

BY THE TIME CARLOS Santana finished playing Soul Sacrifice Saturday afternoon at Woodstock, he was a major star.

“Every band changed the vibes,” recalls Dena Quilici, one of the many there from southeastern New England. And the crowd came alive for Santana. The by-now broiling sun, the hunger and thirst and mud, the Army helicopters intermittently turning fire hoses on us full-force to cool us off – “all those troubles kind of went away once you just settled down and started listening to the music,” says Ty Davis.

Santana was a salsa band without a contract, who came at the Dead’s insistence. “Santana came out and just blew everyone away,” says Ron Gamache. “We kept saying, ‘Who are these guys?’ We’d never heard such rhythms.”

Quill had opened Saturday’s show about noon. Only Ty Davis seems to remember them, “as one of the totally unimportant bands. But they were one of the first Boston bands to get any notice.”

Michele Keir had a tremendous time at Woodstock, even though she heard only one band and doesn’t recall which one.

Many of us who were there don’t individually remember much of the music for which Woodstock has become a synonym.

The quality of the sound was fantastic near the stage, deteriorating to terrible at about half the depth of the crowd and beyond. And the bands were faraway specks to many, competing with the human kaleidoscope around us.

Musicians had to touch and amplify some powerful human chord just to get our attention.

“You knew you were there more for the experience than for the music,” says Dennis Lemoine.

There were bubbles and banners and weirdly dressed people. Many of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters were evolving into the Hog Farmers, members of a New Mexico commune who cooked, and counseled and taught survival skills. Both groups were at Woodstock.

Mel Ash didn’t know who the Pranksters were then, but he later read Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of their bus trip across America playing theatrical cosmic jokes, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. “The next year, I said, ‘These are famous people.’ ”

The experience was intensely visual. The Hell’s Angels arrived, and started ferrying medical supplies.

“I remember one guy with an American flag headband and a flag cape, going around with some sign about ‘If we all coordinate our energies, we can end the war this weekend’ – a very intense wired cat,” remembers John Haerry.

“We were next to a blanket containing a really huge guy dressed only in athletic shorts,” Tom Mulligan recalls, “getting his body painted by his girlfriend. That was my first exposure to body-painting.”

“I don’t remember the music so much as the people, but it was a background,” says Dena Quilici.

“It got so big the music was just a little part of it,” says Walter Williams.

Food lines

We seemed to be spending as much time searching for food as our ancestors had.

Joe Caffey lined up to buy overpriced tomatoes. “You knew you were gonna get ripped off, but you’re starving. And the guy had a 10-gallon can of tuna fish. Then a guy comes out of nowhere, naked, sticks his hand into the pot, grabs a handful and goes off into the woods.”

“Somebody came in with a soda truck and started selling cans for a buck,” David DelBonis recalls. “Everybody got really ticked off, and kind of confiscated the truck, passed out the soda. But they started handing the guy what he should have been selling it for – a quarter, at that time. They just starting throwing the money at him, saying ‘This is what the can’s worth, you got it.’ He tried to scalp everybody . . . but they didn’t steal it.”

I had a half-full bottle of Vin Rouge Superieur left from Friday night, and I desperately wished for a miracle that would turn the wine into water. When the water truck arrived, I dumped out the wine. For two days that empty bottle was my most precious possession.

“There was a premium on cold things,” Tom Mulligan remembers. “People with beer and soft drinks were held in high esteem. Someone nearby had a basket with raw carrots and shared it, but nothing went very far.”

Mel Ash of Providence, a vegetarian, had the foresight to bring about 2 1cans of sardines to barter with. “I hated fish, but they could be opened with keys, so they were convenient. We traded for watermelons.”

At the Hog Farm across a road from the music area, where street signs read High Way, Groovy Way, and Peaceful Way, Woodstock Stew was on the menu. It was a sticky vegetable and grain glop that tasted strange to those of us raised on canned soup casseroles, but was very filling. They served free brown rice and vegetables all weekend, and more.

When Ash went there looking for food, “They were handing out cones of granola, and Wavy Gravy (the commune’s leader) was saying some Zen saying, ‘A day without work is a day without eating.’ So we volunteered to clean the pots. Then we went closer to the crowd at the stage and said, ‘Free food this way, eat all you can, if you can’t eat it, give it away.’ Over and over again for a couple of hours.”

Demand for pay

We settled in to wait for Bob Dylan.

With every helicopter that landed behind the stage, rumors spread that it was Dylan, who lived in Woodstock – the town, not the nation – 50 miles away. He never came. He was playing the Isle of Wight on the English Channel for $87,000, a booking he had before Woodstock asked him to play.

Jimi Hendrix, the highest-paid act at Woodstock, got $18,000. Santana earned less than $2,500. The Who ($6,250) and the Grateful Dead got nervous about the free concert and refused to play unless they were paid in cash. A local banker was roused after midnight and whisked by helicopter to the bank in his pajamas to get $25,000 cash.

The performers didn’t share our physical hardships. Helicopters were delivering delicacies and champagne to the performers’ area. David’s Potbelly Restaurant from New York City catered and offered to ferry them back to the hotel and the party in the bar.

But they had to face the biggest, most distracted crowd in rock history and were looking at major flop sweats.

If other bands griped about facing a crowd too big to reach, Creedence had a different problem. They followed the Grateful Dead at 3:30 a.m. and the biggest crowd in rock history was dead asleep. John Fogerty has said he saw one guy flash his lighter, and played the whole set to that one person.

Power acts

Rock’s power lineup was on Saturday night’s bill, but by then many of us were exhausted. “The music was 24 hours, so you had to pick and choose,” says Mel Ash. “My friend and I took turns waking each other up. There was a lot of sharing of blankets and what not.”

Still, with all the distractions wrenching our attention from the music, among us we have a composite memory good enough to reconstruct most of the action.

To many, Janis Joplin was the only woman really out there on the edge alone. The reigning folk and rock women – Baez, Grace Slick, Joni Mitchell, Michelle Phillips of the Mama and Papas, Judy Collins – were romantic figures, and Mama Cass was a 300-pound hot ticket in a quartet. But Janis was beyond the pale, a brazen hussy singing her soul out as she swigged Southern Comfort. A lot of us were rooting for her, but the woman who wailed, “I’m gonna show you that a woman can be tough,” seemed born too soon and too alone.

She is reported to have said, “Me, I was brought up in a middle-class family; I could have had anything. But you need something more in your gut, man.” Her emptiness seemed bottomless, and the more she battled the blues with hard liquor, heroin and one-night stands, the deeper she seemed to sink.

Woodstock isn’t generally considered one of her great performances. She seemed genuinely distraught as she wailed and sobbed in a skimpy dress with spangles instead of her customary feathers. Her band – neither Big Brother and the Holding Company nor Full Tilt Boogie but the Cosmic Blues Band with saxes and trombones – didn’t seem to work with her.

To some it didn’t matter.

“When Janis sang Ball and Chain . . . We all felt tied down like that,” says Carmino Scaglione.

David Weinrebe had plopped down in a ditch to sleep. “I woke up to Janis Joplin shrieking. She was a goddess. To be waking out of a dead sleep to Janis . . .”

When Sly Stone followed, he did something with I Want to Take You Higher, that had the entire crowd on its feet shouting “higher” for 45 minutes.

Dawn Jabari-Zhou remembers Sly for the “enthusiasm and energy it created in concert. Everybody was up, paying attention, shouting and clapping, Sly in a bright white outfit, an Indian jacket with tassels long the sleeves. He almost looked like he was a bird and like he was gonna take off and fly.”

The Who and Abbie

The Who played at 2 in the morning. What everybody remembers is Pete Townshend bashing Abbie Hoffman with his guitar.

Abbie had seized the mike to urge the crowd smoking flowers so freely to mobilize on behalf of John Sinclair, head of the White Panther Party, who was serving a 10-year sentence for having passed a joint to a narcotics officer. Somebody turned the mike off and Townshend made like a bayonet with the guitar and jabbed Abbie in the head and off the stage.

In Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, Abbie wrote, “Townshend, who had been tuning up, turned around and bumped me. A nonincident.”

But Townshend told Rolling Stone magazine, “I kicked him off the stage. I deeply regret that. If I was given that opportunity again I would stop the show. Because I don’t think rock and roll is that important. Then I did. The show had to go on.”

Rico Topazio of Bristol, who now plays in a band called the Pink Cadillacs in Los Angeles, says, “I liked Abbie, but it was the wrong time for Abbie to be on stage. As a guitar player, I knew that. Pete didn’t know who Abbie was. Woodstock wasn’t political in that way. It was as if Bob Hope were at a USO show, time to get away from all that, to see how many of us were together.”

The crowd seemed to agree with Pete that Abbie was out of line. There were no boos or shouts, and The Who continued playing. “The Who were in their prime, not like they are now,” Haerry recalls. “Roger Daltrey still had his voice, and Pete Townshend still had his voice, and they did a hell of a show.”

It’s unfair that Abbie is remembered for a stupid act at Woodstock. Abbie had organized the medical tent, worked in the bad trips tent, and been an extraordinarily competent man to have around. His death by suicide earlier this year, so close to this anniversary, seems to mark the end of yet another era. Wavy Gravy, the man on the record saying, “There’s a little bit of heaven in every disaster area,” suggested to me this week that if we cared, it would be fitting to “do something for the Yipper.”

Just as dawn broke, the Jefferson Airplane took the stage. They had been waiting to play since 10:30 the night before, and Grace Slick played with her eyes closed.

“I remember waking up at about 5 in the morning,” said Haerry, “and all of a sudden hearing Grace Slick out of nowhere, ‘Good morning, people, it’s time to wake up,’ ” BOINGGGGGGGG, Whoa, yeah] and going down to the stage, treading my way through what looked like the aftermath of a battlefield, all these bodies and getting right down to the front of the stage and there was Jefferson Airplane, 25 or 30 feet away.”

“I had to see Grace Slick,” Mel Ash says, “because I was in love with Grace Slick and I thought the Airplane represented at that moment everything the culture stood for.”

Grace Slick in a white fringed minidress in the blue dawn is an image burned in many brains.

“The sun was coming up over the hills,” recalls Carmino Scaglione, “over the campfires of the people who’d been up all night,” and she sang White Rabbit, the song that let the East know what the West had been up to in the summer of ’67.

Do You Want Somebody to Love? sent ripples up spines; hearing only Volunteers on the concert tape is one reason to have been at Woodstock.

It was Sunday morning. Time enough to sleep. BY SHEILA LENNON. Source.