Chapter 4

Day 1 of Woodstock

Friday, Aug 15, 1969

I tossed and turned all night, but I still was up at 6am and feeling pretty good. Today was D-Day! The first Day of Woodstock! The Festival was to officially start at 4pm. I was determined to maximize as much time, as we could, before the rains came. And I know they are coming!

Since Richie Havens, Phil Ochs, Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez were already on site, only a few day 1 performers needed to arrive. Yet to show up were Ravi Shankar, Swami Satchidananda, Iron Butterfly, Eric Clapton’s Blind Faith and Joni Mitchell. Most were staying at the Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson’s in nearby Liberty, NY. They would be choppered in well before their scheduled time.

Mimi Yasgar insisted that all of us come over for a good country breakfast. I think she and Max were as excited as the rest of us for the show to begin. After breakfast most of us trooped over to the Festival Grounds. The vibe was fantastic, as the crowd was eagerly waiting for the music to start.

Ali and Michael’s parents, Roger Lang, and his wife Katy, had driven up to the Festival in their own Winnebago. They’d been on site since Thursday morning. They had volunteered to run the pay office. That was where each band manager would go just before each band took the stage. I had decided to just bite-the-bullet and pay each band in cash before their set. Usually, bands were paid at the end of the night, but a lot of bands had threatened to pull out if they weren’t paid before, they played. I think they had been screwed more than once by promoters of these types of events. I had the money. So, I had no worries.

Roger and Katy were a godsend. They stayed the whole weekend, just sleeping in the motorhome. We spelled them often, so they could wander around. Roger, being a lawyer, was the perfect person to interact with the band managers. He was especially helpful the ones refusing to being filmed. He compromised with those bands by promising that the cameramen wouldn’t get too close to them. Also, they would only use long distance shots. At least they let us include them! I was called in to deal with Neil Young. I admit, I stooped to using my new skill of mind bending to nudge him into seeing how he and all the others were about to be sensations when the film came out the next March.

Michael had Ticia call the different crew managers together behind the stage for a meeting at 8am. On Thursday, someone had dropped off a pound of coke, which was on an outside table. These guys had been up for 48 Hours, getting the stage built, etc ... They periodically would come over and snort a line to keep them going.

As the meeting started, the first rainstorm of Woodstock came up. Before anyone thought of it, all of the coke melted. It started to run off the table onto the ground! When someone realized what was happening, we all ran over and scooped up as much of it as we could. Soon it was just goo in a bowl, but folks would still eat some throughout the weekend. It was like an edible, just with coke, instead of pot.

After the meeting, Michael got Chip Monck off to the side, and told him that he wanted chip to be the main Master of Ceremonies. Chip didn’t have much to do, now that his lighting duties were complete. His crew could handle the lighting during the concert. Chip had invented a crude automated system of different lighting modes, such as strobe ... This was pre-computer remember, so at that time, it was cool. The best mode was the one that was patched in to the sound system that would have the lights dance to the music. Michael knew that Chip would be great at doing the announcements. His relaxed style would help keep the crowd calm. Chip tried to talk his way out of it, saying he was scared shitless to talk to hundreds of thousands of people at once. Michael just gave Chip his famous smile and slapped him on his back, saying he’d be awesome. He was too, in Ralf’s time.

There were 200,000 kids already there that first morning. And, thousands more were frantically trying to weave through the masses. I knew more than a million hippies would try, but never make it inside the Festival grounds! I had already asked Michael to start calling radio stations in NYC, Boston and Philly, begging them to make announcements to all of their listeners to not come to the Festival. I know that they would never make it in. Also, Michael asked Ticia make the calls. Ali and I volunteered to help her.

After Chip came to grips with his role as emcee, he set up a command center to the right and behind the stage. Michael, Ticia, Ali and I would spend most of the Festival there. We stayed under a tarp, which kept us protected from the sun, but even more important, the rain!

I remember as Ralf that the Festival was delayed over an hour because the opening act, Sweetwater, was stuck in the quagmire of traffic. When Sweetwater didn’t show, Michael begged Richie Havens to open the show. For over an hour Richie refused. There was no way he wanted to be the first to play for such a huge crowd. He finally relented and went on at 5:15pm. He did a set and tried to come off the stage, but Michael pushed him back out there. This happened about four times and Richie was running out of songs to play. His famous song Freedom, that everyone knows from the movie, was made up on the spot. As the day progressed, Richie felt more and more the freedom that Woodstock had inspired in all those present. He was strumming his guitar while frantically trying to remember another song to play. All of a sudden, the word formed in his mind, “Freedom.” He started to sing it, but he drug it out to, “Free-dom, Free-dom.” Then he combined it with a song his grandmother used to sing to him when he was growing up in Brooklyn. It was, Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child. It would turn out to be his masterpiece!

But, with my reworking of Woodstock, I had a dilemma. Now, there would be no delays due to bands being stuck in traffic. How then could I persuade Richie to go on early and stay on stage for so long that he had to make up “Freedom?” I came to the conclusion that I’d have to resort to planting thoughts in his head as the day went on. After Leif had joined me in Pug, he had been noticing that I could influence people by planting thoughts in their minds. Looking back on it, it did seem that Michael, Agnes Nixon, Howard Minsky, Bill Graham, David Geffen, etc, had agreed to work with me very easily. It was kinda scary to have those abilities, but I’d only use them when it was for the best.

I tried to spend as much time with Richie as I could. Most of the day 1 performers were hanging out backstage in the artist’s pavilion. (aka Green Room). There was plenty of healthy food and drinks, along with chairs and bean bags. Most artists were just jamming until the show started. As the afternoon progressed, I finally convinced Richie that he, and only he, could open up the Woodstock Festival.

Richie went on at the scheduled time of 4pm, and he put on a great performance. I especially liked the Beatles’ covers he did. All through his show, I kept putting the word Free-dom in his head. As he was about to come off the stage, I met him and begged him for 1 more. Didn’t he have a song that expressed his feelings from being around so many happy people? That’s how I got him to do it. Whew! Changing history was good in some ways, but I didn’t want to screw up the great things that I remembered from Ralf’s time.