down on yasgur’s farm ~ part four

 

Today marks the final day of the the 53^rd Anniversary of the Woodstock Music And Art Fair. To commemorate this legendary event, I have been re-posting the blog posts I first published in 2014 and 2019. That I was lucky enough at the age of 19 not only to attend the festival, but work there, I felt that it might be enjoyable to share my memories again. It has been said “that if you remember what went on at Woodstock you probably weren’t really there.” I beg to differ. I really do recall quite a lot of what I experienced there. I was kept very busy during the 50th Anniversary commemoration in 2019 doing various newspaper, radio and television interviews. Something I could never have imagined at the time. As I write this today I am 72 years old and am often asked what has stayed with me from Woodstock over the past 53 years. That is easy. Along with the music, the most important thing was the spirit of Woodstock, that feeling of “WE,” the togetherness of mind, energy and brotherhood that defined my generation. We were all there for each other and to show the world we were a force to be reckoned with. The music of Woodstock was the soundtrack of my generation. And within me there still lives the free spirited, politically and environmentally active 19 year old rebel that I was back then. It always will…

 

 

The gray dawn broke slowly over Yasgur’s farm. It was Monday morning and the once beautiful green pasture now was a field of mud that looked like a huge bomb filled with garbage had exploded and scattered refuse over the site as far as the eye could see. As I picked my way down towards the stage, carefully stepping over discarded plastic sheets, mud soaked sleeping bags, bottles, cardboard, clothes and thousands of other discarded items, I watched a slow but steady stream of people straggling away from the site. Henry Dilz, the official Woodstock stills photographer perhaps remembered it best when he said, “It was just a soggy, muddy field, with piles of wet, soggy sleeping bags. It kind of reminded me of one of those Matthew Brady Civil War photos, a battlefield filled with dead horses and dead soldiers. The wet sleeping bags on this barren landscape looked like they had dead blobs of humanity on them.” I stopped when I got about fifty feet from the front of the stage. Here the crowd was more concentrated, with most of the people standing. A frizzy haired fellow next to me fired up a fat joint and smiling turned and offered it to me. It was Monday morning, August 18th at around 8:30 a.m. and Jimi Hendrix had just walked out onto the stage with a group of musicians. He was about to send the Woodstock festival into history with one of his most memorable performances.

One year earlier I had had the fortunate luck to work helping to set up the equipment for two of Hendrix’s shows in Virginia Beach, the first in April 1968, the night Martin Luther King was assassinated and the second on August 15th. On the first occasion I just helped carry those huge Marshall speaker cabinets and amps onto the stage before and after the concert, but watched the show from out in the audience. In August though, after unloading and setting up that wall of Marshalls along with Mitch Mitchell’s drum kit, and then going with Hendrix’s road manager out to the nearest convenience store and buying up all the beer we could find, I stayed backstage and watched the performance from there. I needn’t elaborate on those shows, other than to say it was an incredible experience seeing him perform up close. Of course today, some 54 years after the fact, I could kick myself for not asking Jimi for his autograph, but he had walked into the venue and then after the show back out with a beautiful blond on each arm, so I’m sure he had other more important things on his mind than being bothered by me. As a band The Jimi Hendrix Experience was at their peak in 1967 and 1968 and the energy and the vibe of their music was unbelievable. Things had changed somewhat by the time he showed up at Woodstock though and he was going through some heavy changes following the breakup of the Experience. But as I stood there in the mud and the garbage at Woodstock I knew that despite “them changes” Jimi was going to blow the lid off these final moments of the festival.

Introduced as The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jimi corrected the announcer saying that the name of the band was Gypsy, Sun And Rainbows. Later on, when he reintroduced the band, he called them Sky Church. The audience didn’t care. Call the band whatever you want, it was Hendrix. Opening with “Message To Love” he moved through a typical Hendrix set, rapping between the songs, playing “Hear My Train A Comin’,” “Spanish Castle Magic,” and smoking rendition of “Red House” before he let Larry Lee take over on vocals on “Mastermind,” the first of two songs Larry would get to sing. Continuing with “Lover Man” and “Foxy Lady” he then did “Jam Back At The House” and “Izabella” before Larry took over on vocals again for a medley of “Gypsy Woman” and a Curtis Mayfield number titled “Aware Of Love.” At this point there were only about 25,000 people left on the site watching him play. Next up was his classic “Fire” and then he jammed on a medley of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” and “Stepping Stone.” After performing those numbers Hendrix and the band launched into a brief bit of improvisation. And then, on that gray muddy morning, another iconic moment in rock history was created. He played an unbelievable version of “The Star Spangled Banner” and blew the crowd away. “You can leave if you want to. We’re just jammin’, that’s all,” Hendrix told the crowd. After another minute or so of free-form musical expression, it happened: Hendrix launched into his own interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “It was the most riveting moment,” Diltz recalled. “Just that single guitar, so piercing and so pure. At the time, there was just a knot of people on the hill. Those huge speakers bouncing sound off the hillsides, and an eerie, silent, pre-dawn, misty kind of silence. The notes reflected back again.” Going straight into “Purple Haze” after that he then did two improvisations and closed the show with a song that he had begun his career with, “Hey Joe.” And suddenly, it was over. The applause faded and people trudged slowly back to their lives. Three Days Of Peace And Music had finally come to an end.

I turned around and walked back up to the trailer still trying to absorb what I had just seen. For me though, the festival wasn’t over yet. With everyone splitting the management of Food For Love asked me if I would be willing to stay for a few more days to help straighten out their mountains of paperwork and tidy up their area of the site. Since I’d still be getting paid I figured, why not? So I stayed at the site until Friday. The festival had ended but Food For Love’s real problems were just beginning. The New York State Board of health was taking legal action against them for building their concession stands in a cow pasture supposedly filled with manure. That violated public heath laws. For a few years after the festival had ended I would get letters asking me to describe what I saw and did for them as the whole process moved through the legal system. I always took the time to answer those requests and did my best to defend them because they were so kind to me by giving me the job in the first place and keeping me on afterward. I forgave them for their blatant raising of prices because I knew they had all lost their investment and a lot more. I spent the next few days dividing my time between working in the office trailer and helping to clean up the huge mess left behind, stacking the garbage in piles so it could be collected and hauled away.

On Friday morning I got paid something over two hundred dollars for my 10 official days on the job. Cool. That meant I didn’t have to hitchhike back home and could take a bus to Virginia Beach. I gathered up my belongings late in the afternoon, said my goodbyes and got a lift into White Lake where I bought a bus ticket. The bus would leave in the evening, so I had some time to kill in White Lake. It seemed strange being back in the normal world. The first thing on my agenda was to get something decent to eat. I had been living on pre-packaged ham and baloney sandwiches and cheap soda pop for what seemed like forever. The bus trip was divided into three parts, from White Lake to New York City, from there to Washington D.C and then down to Norfolk and Virginia Beach. I’m pretty sure I presented a rather grubby appearance. Leaving White Lake that evening I arrived at the New York City Port Authority Bus Terminal and discovered that I had to wait until 2:30 a.m. before the next bus would leave for D.C. Great. Have you ever spent the night in the New York City Port Authority Bus Terminal? Don’t. As I sat there trying my best to look inconspicuous and catch some sleep, I got hassled by all sorts of characters. The two I remember most distinctly were real zingers. First this short greasy Italian looking dude slides up on the bench next to me and says. “Hey Mon, my Man wants to talk to you.” It took no little amount of talking to convince him that I didn’t want to talk to “his Man.” After finally getting rid of him an old Black man came and sat down beside me, put his hand on my knee and spent an hour trying to convince me that I should go out to New Jersey with him. “I’ll give you money, I’ll treat you real good boy. Just come home with me. Please.” I felt really sorry for this guy, but managed to finally convince him that there was no way I was going anywhere but to D.C. Finally the bus arrived and I got the hell out of Dodge. I did manage to catch some sleep on the way down to D.C.

I arrived in Washington early on Saturday morning and had a few hours of layover there. I called up my girlfriend and chatted for a while, relating some of my adventure and then I went down the street from the bus station and bought three newly released LPs with my hard earned cash, Ars Nova’s “Sunshine And Shadows,” Soft Machine’s “Second Album” and I swear the third was “Clear” by Spirit although Wikipedia is telling me that it wasn’t released until October 1969. Bullshit. I’m sticking to my story. I know what I bought. I finally got back to Virginia Beach and a long overdue hot shower late Saturday afternoon, much to my mother’s relief. She had been convinced that I was the poor kid who was run over by the tractor and killed at the festival. So convinced that she somehow managed to call the festival site on Saturday and have them announce my name from the stage with the message that I should call home. Of course, I didn’t hear it when it was announced. On Sunday afternoon I ran into a friend from college named Michael at the site and he said to me, “Hey, did you hear that they made an announcement yesterday afternoon from the stage with your name and that you should call home?” I sighed, “No I didn’t. That’s so typical of my Mom.” So I had to tramp off to find a phone and call home to let her know that I was fine. Roll of eyes. Somewhere on the miles of audio tape recorded during the concert that announcement probably still exists. Thanks Mom…

Postscript

Woodstock was a once in a lifetime event. It touched all our lives at the time, for it really was three days of love, peace and music. It could have been a disaster and turned out something like the Woodstock ’99 festival, which was attended by a generation that had little comprehension of what real love, peace or music really were. For those of us who were lucky enough to have been at the first festival in 1969, I would hope that the spirit, the soul and the beauty of what the Woodstock Music And Arts Fair really was has stayed with us all our lives. I know it has with mine. Thank you for sharing in these reminisces. See you at the 60th Anniversary…

Addendum

When I purchased the humongous complete box set of all the Woodstock performances in the summer of 2019 and worked my way through listening to all the concerts, sure enough, at the beginning of Keef Hartley’s set an announcement comes over the stage sound system where, mispronouncing my last name, a request is made for me to “call home.” Never underestimate the power of a mother’s love and concern…

The Woodstock Back To The Garden Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive

Some of the sources referred to in writing these four posts in 2014.

© 2022 nightpoet – all rights reserved

down on yasgur’s farm ~ part one

 

Today marks the 53^rd Anniversary of the Woodstock Music And Art Fair. To commemorate this legendary event, over the next four days I am re-posting the blog posts I first published in 2014 and 2019. That I was lucky enough at the age of 19 not only to attend the festival, but work there, I felt that it might be enjoyable to share my memories again. It has been said “that if you remember what went on at Woodstock you probably weren’t really there.” I beg to differ. I really do recall quite a lot of what I experienced there. I was kept very busy during the 50th Anniversary commemoration in 2019 doing various newspaper, radio and television interviews. Something I could never have imagined at the time. As I write this today I am 72 years old and am often asked what has stayed with me from Woodstock over the past 53 years. That is easy. Along with the music, the most important thing was the spirit of Woodstock, that feeling of “WE,” the togetherness of mind, energy and brotherhood that defined my generation. We were all there for each other and to show the world we were a force to be reckoned with. The music of Woodstock was the soundtrack of my generation. And within me there still lives the free spirited, politically and environmentally active 19 year old rebel that I was back then. It always will…

 

 

I had awakened early, the consciousness slowly crawling through my brain’s neuron connections shaking the opiated cobwebs from the night before aside. Outside the trailer a chilly morning mist had settled over the rolling hills and dales and wove its damp fingers through the still dark groves of trees that dotted the surrounding farm fields. It was Friday. Once the mist would burn away in the early morning sun, the countryside would begin waking up. I already heard a cacophony of birds, roosters and cows tuning up in the distance. As my mind slowly shifted into gear I began to think about my schedule for the day, my fifth day here. First off I’d stop by the office trailer and grab a couple of sandwiches. And then I’d report for my work shift and see what the bosses had dreamed up for us to do today. The trailer was a long affair, divided into three sections, a small entrance room followed by two large empty rooms separated by a wall but without a door that you could close. A number of other people were scattered on the floor still sleeping as I picked my way carefully between them. I was still in a lingering opiated haze as I made my way to the entrance and stood in the doorway looking out across the field. When I had first arrived four days ago it was a sloping green pasture with small groups of people settling in here and there. At the bottom end of the slope a large wooden stage, built over the last two weeks, dominated the field. Two large towers rose some distance in front of it on either side. What had been a cow pasture dominated by scurrying carpenters and construction workers on Monday now began to resemble a colourful gypsy encampment. It was Friday. I still had the sweet taste of rich black opium in my mouth and I was happy. Things were about to begin. As the world began to awaken on Yasgur’s farm, you could feel the electricity in the air.

It was summer. I was 19 and had just finished my first year of college. It had been quite a year. Although I had managed to get most of the required work done for my two semesters of courses, the majority of my time was spent in other pursuits. Socializing, smoking, drinking, balling, listening to and making music, attending demos and anti war rallies and marches and generally raising hell seemed so much more of an invigorating curriculum than Freshman English, Beginning German, Physical Education or English History. I had already had a couple of girlfriends and my hair was starting to reach my shoulders. Life was good. When I returned to Virginia Beach and my parent’s house at the end of May I had other plans for my summer vacation than what they thought I should be doing, which was to find some sort of summer job and be productive. I gave the obligatory expressions of intent, but I already had my job all lined up and it involved hanging out on the boardwalk, making music, staying as stoned as possible and writing my poetry. I was convinced that such an agenda was my profession and that it was certainly in the realm of being productive. I’d been having fun all through the fall, the winter and the spring so I had no intention of stopping now. By early August I was well immersed in hanging out on the boardwalk jamming with friends and had a good tan to take back with me to college in the fall, along with a sheaf of poems and songs.

A few weeks earlier I had, along with millions of other Americans and the rest of the world, watched as Neil Armstrong descended from the Apollo 11 lander and took those first fledgling steps on the surface of the moon, followed by Buzz Aldrin. For the occasion I had dropped a 12 hour Black Beauty and was speeding right along with Collins in the orbiting capsule looking down as the whole event was unfolding. Shortly thereafter the Atlantic City Pop Festival took place on August 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Hanging out with a crowd of friends two weeks after the moon landing on the beach one evening, the talk turned to music and bands when someone mentioned an upcoming music festival that was going to take place in Woodstock, New York, where apparently one hell of a lot of really good groups were planning to perform. In the fall of 1968 an album had come out called “Music From Big Pink” by The Band, who had been backing up Bob Dylan on his recordings and at his concerts. The album was a masterpiece and quickly became one of my favourites. It still is today. As we were discussing the Woodstock Festival while sitting on the beach, someone mentioned that The Band would be performing there. Suddenly a light went on in my head. The Band? I was thinking, man, I’d love to see them in concert and they’ll probably never get down here to Virginia. As the wine and the numbers were being passed around I began to seriously consider the idea of going to the festival, but then New York was a long way from Virginia and when I took stock of my finances things were looking rather bleak. I only had about twenty-five dollars and I had been considering blowing twenty of it on an ounce of weed, since my stash box was down to seeds and stems again. It was Friday, August 11th. Now there was a young fellow named David and his sister Susie hanging out with us who were from Washington D.C. They were planning to hitchhike up to D.C. the next morning, spend the weekend with their Mom and then head out for Woodstock on Monday morning bright and early. They wanted to know if anyone else was interested in going along. That sounded good enough for me. We agreed to meet the next morning. So I went home, packed a duffel bag with a couple of t-shirts, another pair of jeans, underwear, my old army jacket, some toiletries and my sleeping bag. I hit my parents up for another ten dollars as I was informing them of my plans. They did not share my enthusiasm.

The next morning we met up and quickly got a lift up to D.C. Their mother picked us up and took us to their apartment in Arlington. She was apparently a very liberal Mom, because she gave her kids the freedom to undertake the journey and didn’t seem the least bit worried. I was, mainly because her son was 18, but the daughter was only 16. I had visions of the cops stopping us for hitchhiking somewhere and throwing me in jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. So I asked their mother to write a letter of permission for the girl to be traveling with her brother and myself, which she did. The kids were cool, but their Mom was really with it. I had a girlfriend at that time who lived with her parents in Alexandria, so I called her up and we met the next day, Sunday afternoon, and spent a few hours together. I was bubbling about going to see The Band and adding that there was even a rumour that Dylan himself might make an appearance. And of course there were going to be a lot, an awful lot of other great groups over the three days. I got back to David and Susie’s apartment in time for dinner and we all sacked out shortly thereafter, intending to get out on the Interstate ramp real early to beat the Monday morning rush hour traffic. It was going to be a long haul from D.C. to upstate New York and we were hoping to cover it in one day.  I had one last quick shower, and after breakfast David and Susie’s Mom drove us out to the Interstate ramp and wished us good luck. It wasn’t long before someone stopped and picked us up, giving us a lift to a truck stop about half the way to Baltimore. Ah, Baltimore. Visions of my childhood came into my head as I remembered living in Aberdeen and driving with my parents down old route 40 into Baltimore to the Farmer’s Market in the late 1950’s. A really strange bloke stopped and picked us up at the truck stop exit and drove us to Baltimore. All the way into deep, dark Baltimore. For whatever reason this asshole ended up dumping us out in the middle of one of the city’s worst ghettos. So there we stood three white faces in a sea of African-Americans and the longer we stood there pathetically trying to thumb a ride the more heavy the vibe became. We were getting really bad looks from an ever larger crowd that seemed to be gathering around us. At the last possible moment some kind soul stopped and we jumped into his car with audible sighs of relief. Mean looks followed us as we drove off down the street. He wondered how the hell we had ended up in that particular place and once we explained how we had gotten there and where we were heading he took us back out of the city and to the Interstate heading north. We thanked him for the timely rescue and stuck our thumbs out again. After that we had a succession of good rides up to New Jersey and then into New York State without further incident. Once we got closer to our destination I made a sign that said “Woodstock N.Y. Pop…” which seemed to help us get rides.

It was mid-afternoon by the time we reached White Lake and began to notice that we weren’t the only ones headed for Bethel, which was the nearest town to where the festival was located. As we stood on the outskirts of White Lake trying to catch a ride holding our sign and not having much luck, all of a sudden a big police cruiser comes rolling down the street, pulls over and stops. I looked at David, he looked at me and we both looked at Susie, who was grinning like the cat that ate the mouse. Wouldn’t it just be our luck, I was thinking, to almost make it to the festival and now get hassled by the heat? Inside the car sat the local sheriff, complete with his Smokey the Bear hat. He rolled down the window and asked us if we are headed to the festival. I answered in the affirmative and a large smile brightened up his face. “Well, I’ll give you kids a ride there. Hop in,” he said. The three of us looked at each other. Unreal. So we got a ride from White Lake to Bethel and out to Yasgur’s farm in the sheriff’s police cruiser. Now that was getting to the festival in style, almost like having a police escort. He explained to us as we were rolling along, past a lot of other kids trying to hitch or walking, that his daughter was hitchhiking somewhere and he figured it would be good karma for her if he helped someone to get to where they were going too. Unreal. We headed down a country road and then he pulled to a stop. “The farm is just down that road and over the hill,” he explained. “Now you be sure to be careful and have a good time,” he told us in his upstate New York accent as we climbed out of the car and he drove off.

We stood there for a few minutes and watched his car recede down the road and then, along with other kids slowly trickling towards the site, we walked up the hill and gazed down at the pasture and the stage, upon and around which there was a lot of activity. Behind the stage we could see a pond. I thanked them for their hospitality and their companionship along the way and parted with a promise to meet up again at some point over the next few days. I never saw David or Susie again. I wandered around a bit checking things out and then looked for a good spot to bed down for the evening, preferably where some serious smoking was going on. After that long trip I need a good buzz. I joined a group of kids at the edge of the pasture who were passing a few joints around and settled down for the evening. Stories were exchanged, dope and drink were shared and at some point, under the stars, I unrolled my sleeping bag and crawled in for the night. It had been a long day.

It was mid August and the nights in upstate New York were beginning to get a bit chilly. I woke up on Tuesday morning and, although my old army surplus sleeping bag had kept me warm, when I crawled out the air was fresh and crisp. As the world around me slowly came to life again, the reality of my present situation began to dawn on me. Here I was at a rock festival without a ticket and with a rather limited amount of financial resources. I hadn’t seen any evidence yet of any serious fences or crowd control, so I figured that I’d play it by ear and see what developed. But it was obvious to me that I’d have to do something to keep myself fed and stoned. As I wandered around the site getting my bearings I realised that it might be possible to make a bit of money by finding some work at the site. When I asked about jobs down at the stage one long haired fellow told me to go up to one of the trailers at the top of the slope and ask there. And that is exactly what I did. I ended up getting hired by a company called Food For Love, who were going to run the concession stands at the event. They were going to pay me $2.00 an hour to basically do manual labour. Plus I was given the most valuable thing one could possess, a Staff Pass for the festival. That wasn’t bad at all. Plus I got to sleep in one of their trailers at the top of the hill with a bird’s eye view of the whole area and the stage. So for the next three days I helped put up fences around their supply trailers to keep people from sleeping under them, which was dangerous because some of them were tilting and threatening to fall over in the soft ground of the pasture, and then I basically helped finish building their hamburger and drink stands. Now Food For Love would have been more aptly named Food For Cold Hard Cash and their story I will go into in more detail later on, but for now I was happy. I had a job, free food, a trailer to sleep in and…I was at The Woodstock Music & Art Fair. I spent the next three days working eight-hour shifts and my nights getting loaded and generally having fun.

And now it was Friday morning and the festival was about to begin at some point in the afternoon. All sorts of rumours were being passed around about how entrance to the festival would be controlled but by Thursday it was obvious that with the masses of people flowing in that there wasn’t going to be much anyone could do to control the entry to the grounds. Because they had to move from the site that was originally intended for the festival the promoters had made the decision to put all their efforts into getting the stage ready in time and gave up on building the fences. What fences existed were taken down on Thursday night. At that point they knew that they were going to take a massive financial hit. On Friday afternoon as the festival was getting underway it was announced that it had been declared a free festival and no one gave any more thought to the issue of collecting tickets. My job too was morphing from being a hired hand and gofer into having to work security, first specifically for Food For Love, but as the festival progressed, just generally making sure that people were safe and not putting themselves into dangerous situations. I went from working a normal eight hour shift to working eighteen hour stretches. But I am getting ahead of myself.

At around 5:00 PM that afternoon it was obvious to the folks putting on the music that Sweetwater, the first group scheduled to perform weren’t going to make it on stage on time. They had been delayed. So they asked Richie Havens to go out and play the first set. When he went out and opened the festival no one, least of all Richie himself, had any inkling that when he got to the end of his set list and went on to improvise a version of “Motherless Child” turning it into the incredible rendition of “Freedom,” it would become one of the defining moments, not only of the festival, but of rock music itself. I had the evening shift, my job now being to keep an eye on Food For Love’s complex of stands and truck trailers so I was watching his performance while making my rounds. He was followed by Swami Satchidananda who gave a ten minute invocation for the festival. In rather rapid succession Sweetwater played a 40 minute set, followed by Bert Sommer and then the amazing Tim Hardin who did a quick 25 minute set. By the time Ravi Shankar got on stage to do a 35 minute set it had started to rain. And I had my first serious problem. We had a bloke flipping out on some bad acid flailing wildly and requiring restraint. It was imperative that we get him over to the first aid tent, which, unfortunately, was clear across the area in front of the stage where everyone was sitting. Since he wouldn’t or couldn’t walk someone decided to pack his ass in one of the cars the company had up on the hill and drive him slowly straight through that audience. Along with another colleague it was my job to clear a path through that mass of people to get this guy to the doctors. In the rain. Now, I don’t know what poor Ravi Shankar might have thought, but throughout his performance, as we worked our way through the spectators, people in front of our procession were rising, clearing out of the way and then sitting back down behind us after we had passed. That in itself was noisy and then added to that we had to shout at them to get them to move, so I think that he might have noticed the disturbance. At any rate, we got the poor fellow to the first aid tent and trudged back through the crowd. The rain eventually let up and Melanie came on around 10:50 PM and was followed by Arlo Guthrie who lauded the crowd telling them “That’s far out man…lotta freaks!” Joan Baez took the stage at around 1:00 AM and did an hour long set wrapping up what had been an amazing day of music. My shift over, I had wandered down to the side of the stage and saw her do the last few songs up close and even got to listen to her talking to a small group of people and exchanged a few words with her as she was leaving. I had always liked her music, but listening to her talk about her anti-war efforts impressed me even more. She was, and still is one fine performer and human being.

Now I don’t recall exactly when he started, but some time earlier, on Wednesday or Thursday, a long haired bearded fellow wearing a knee-length leather coat started to show up about once an hour, making the rounds of our trailers with a huge pipe, always filled with opium and proceed to get everyone really ripped. He wasn’t selling it, although he would hand out little white speckled pieces of this sticky black opium and continuously fill his pipe. He maintained this hourly routine each evening for the duration of the festival. Bless his sweet opiated soul. He had come by late on Thursday night and got me righteously zonkered before I crashed. And, after I wandered back up to my trailer following Joan’s set, he showed up and once again I blissfully collapsed into a peaceful opium induced sleep.

To be continued…

My Woodstock Staff Pass. My name has been blurred out to maintain my privacy.

The Food For Love Logo.

The front side of my original hitchhiking sign.

The back side of my original hitchhiking sign.

Visiting a girlfriend on the way to Woodstock in August 1969.

 

© 2022 nightpoet – all rights reserved

DOWN ON YASGUR’S FARM ~ PART FOUR

 

Today marks last day of the 50^th Anniversary of the Woodstock Music And Art Fair. To commemorate this legendary event, over the past four days I have re-posted the blog posts I first published in 2014 with some updates and a new photo. That I was lucky enough at the age of 19 not only to attend the festival, but work there, I felt that it would be enjoyable to share my memories. It has been said “that if you remember what went on at Woodstock you probably weren’t really there.” I beg to differ. I recall quite a lot of what I experienced there, as you will see in these blog posts. As I write this I am 69 years old and have been kept busy over the last month doing a number of newspaper, radio and television interviews. Most often I am asked what has stayed with me from Woodstock over these 50 years. That is easy. Along with the music, the most important thing was the spirit of Woodstock, that feeling of “WE,” the togetherness of mind, energy and brotherhood that defined my generation. We were all there for each other and to show the world we were a force to be reckoned with. The music of Woodstock was the soundtrack of my generation. And within me there still lives the free spirited, politically and environmentally active 19 year old rebel that I was back then. It always will…

 

 

The gray dawn broke slowly over Yasgur’s farm. It was Monday morning and the once beautiful green pasture now was a field of mud that looked like a huge bomb filled with garbage had exploded and scattered refuse over the site as far as the eye could see. As I picked my way down towards the stage, carefully stepping over discarded plastic sheets, mud soaked sleeping bags, bottles, cardboard, clothes and thousands of other discarded items, I watched a slow but steady stream of people straggling away from the site. Henry Dilz, the official Woodstock stills photographer perhaps remembered it best when he said, “It was just a soggy, muddy field, with piles of wet, soggy sleeping bags. It kind of reminded me of one of those Matthew Brady Civil War photos, a battlefield filled with dead horses and dead soldiers. The wet sleeping bags on this barren landscape looked like they had dead blobs of humanity on them.” I stopped when I got about fifty feet from the front of the stage. Here the crowd was more concentrated, with most of the people standing. A frizzy haired fellow next to me fired up a fat joint and smiling turned and offered it to me. It was Monday morning, August 18th at around 8:30 a.m. and Jimi Hendrix had just walked out onto the stage with a group of musicians. He was about to send the Woodstock festival into history with one of his most memorable performances.

One year earlier I had had the fortunate luck to work helping to set up the equipment for two of Hendrix’s shows in Virginia Beach, the first in April 1968, the night Martin Luther King was assassinated and the second on August 15th. On the first occasion I just helped carry those huge Marshall speaker cabinets and amps onto the stage before and after the concert, but watched the show from out in the audience. In August though, after unloading and setting up that wall of Marshalls along with Mitch Mitchell’s drum kit, and then going with Hendrix’s road manager out to the nearest convenience store and buying up all the beer we could find, I stayed backstage and watched the performance from there. I needn’t elaborate on those shows, other than to say it was an incredible experience seeing him perform up close. Of course today, some 46 years after the fact, I could kick myself for not asking Jimi for his autograph, but he had walked into the venue and then after the show back out with a beautiful blond on each arm, so I’m sure he had other more important things on his mind than being bothered by me. As a band The Jimi Hendrix Experience was at their peak in 1967 and 1968 and the energy and the vibe of their music was unbelievable. Things had changed somewhat by the time he showed up at Woodstock though and he was going through some heavy changes following the breakup of the Experience. But as I stood there in the mud and the garbage at Woodstock I knew that despite “them changes” Jimi was going to blow the lid off these final moments of the festival.

Introduced as The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jimi corrected the announcer saying that the name of the band was Gypsy, Sun And Rainbows. Later on, when he reintroduced the band, he called them Sky Church. The audience didn’t care. Call the band whatever you want, it was Hendrix. Opening with “Message To Love” he moved through a typical Hendrix set, rapping between the songs, playing “Hear My Train A Comin’,” “Spanish Castle Magic,” and smoking rendition of “Red House” before he let Larry Lee take over on vocals on “Mastermind,” the first of two songs Larry would get to sing. Continuing with “Lover Man” and “Foxy Lady” he then did “Jam Back At The House” and “Izabella” before Larry took over on vocals again for a medley of “Gypsy Woman” and a Curtis Mayfield number titled “Aware Of Love.” At this point there were only about 25,000 people left on the site watching him play. Next up was his classic “Fire” and then he jammed on a medley of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” and “Stepping Stone.” After performing those numbers Hendrix and the band launched into a brief bit of improvisation. And then, on that gray muddy morning, another iconic moment in rock history was created. He played an unbelievable version of “The Star Spangled Banner” and blew the crowd away. “You can leave if you want to. We’re just jammin’, that’s all,” Hendrix told the crowd. After another minute or so of free-form musical expression, it happened: Hendrix launched into his own interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “It was the most riveting moment,” Diltz recalled. “Just that single guitar, so piercing and so pure. At the time, there was just a knot of people on the hill. Those huge speakers bouncing sound off the hillsides, and an eerie, silent, pre-dawn, misty kind of silence. The notes reflected back again.” Going straight into “Purple Haze” after that he then did two improvisations and closed the show with a song that he had begun his career with, “Hey Joe.” And suddenly, it was over. The applause faded and people trudged slowly back to their lives. Three Days Of Peace And Music had finally come to an end.

I turned around and walked back up to the trailer still trying to absorb what I had just seen. For me though, the festival wasn’t over yet. With everyone splitting the management of Food For Love asked me if I would be willing to stay for a few more days to help straighten out their mountains of paperwork and tidy up their area of the site. Since I’d still be getting paid I figured, why not? So I stayed at the site until Friday. The festival had ended but Food For Love’s real problems were just beginning. The New York State Board of health was taking legal action against them for building their concession stands in a cow pasture supposedly filled with manure. That violated public heath laws. For a few years after the festival had ended I would get letters asking me to describe what I saw and did for them as the whole process moved through the legal system. I always took the time to answer those requests and did my best to defend them because they were so kind to me by giving me the job in the first place and keeping me on afterward. I forgave them for their blatant raising of prices because I knew they had all lost their investment and a lot more. I spent the next few days dividing my time between working in the office trailer and helping to clean up the huge mess left behind, stacking the garbage in piles so it could be collected and hauled away.

On Friday morning I got paid something over two hundred dollars for my 10 official days on the job. Cool. That meant I didn’t have to hitchhike back home and could take a bus to Virginia Beach. I gathered up my belongings late in the afternoon, said my goodbyes and got a lift into White Lake and bought a bus ticket. The bus would leave in the evening, so I had some time to kill in White Lake. It seemed strange being back in the normal world. The first thing on my agenda was to get something decent to eat. I had been living on pre-packaged ham and baloney sandwiches and cheap soda pop for what seemed like forever. The bus trip was divided into three parts, from White Lake to New York City, from there to Washington D.C and then down to Norfolk and Virginia Beach. I’m pretty sure I presented a rather grubby appearance. Leaving White Lake that evening I arrived at the New York City Port Authority Bus Terminal and discovered that I had to wait until 2:30 a.m. before the next bus would leave for D.C. Great. Have you ever spent the night in the New York City Port Authority Bus Terminal? Don’t. As I sat there trying my best to look inconspicuous and catch some sleep, I got hassled by all sorts of characters. The two I remember most distinctly were real zingers. First this short greasy Italian looking dude slides up on the bench next to me and says. “Hey Mon, my Man wants to talk to you.” It took no little amount of talking to convince him that I didn’t want to talk to “his Man.” After finally getting rid of him an old Black man came and sat down beside me, put his hand on my knee and spent an hour trying to convince me that I should go out to New Jersey with him. “I’ll give you money, I’ll treat you real good boy. Just come home with me. Please.” I felt really sorry for this guy, but managed to finally convince him that there was no way I was going anywhere but to D.C. Finally the bus arrived and I got the hell out of Dodge. I did manage to catch some sleep on the way down to D.C.

I arrived in Washington early on Saturday morning and had a few hours of layover there. I called up my girlfriend and chatted for a while, relating some of my adventure and then I went down the street from the bus station and bought three newly released LPs with my hard earned cash, Ars Nova’s “Sunshine And Shadows,” Soft Machine’s “Second Album” and I swear the third was “Clear” by Spirit although Wikipedia is telling me that it wasn’t released until October 1969. Bullshit. I’m sticking to my story. I know what I bought. I finally got back to Virginia Beach and a long overdue hot shower late Saturday afternoon, much to my mother’s relief. She had been convinced that I was the poor kid who was run over by the tractor and killed at the festival. So convinced that she somehow managed to call the festival site on Saturday and have them announce my name from the stage with the message that I should call home. Of course, I didn’t hear it when it was announced. On Sunday afternoon I ran into a friend from college named Michael at the site and he said to me, “Hey, did you hear that they made an announcement yesterday afternoon from the stage with your name and that you should call home?” I sighed, “No I didn’t. That’s so typical of my Mom.” So I had to tramp off to find a phone and call home to let her know that I was fine. Roll of eyes. Somewhere on the miles of audio tape recorded during the concert that announcement probably still exists. Thanks Mom…

Postscript

Woodstock was a once in a lifetime event. It touched all our lives at the time, for it really was three days of love, peace and music. It could have been a disaster and turned out something like the Woodstock ’99 festival, which was attended by a generation that had little comprehension of what real love, peace or music really were. For those of us who were lucky enough to have been at the first festival in 1969, I would hope that the spirit, the soul and the beauty of what the Woodstock Music And Arts Fair really was has stayed with us all our lives. I know it has with mine. Thank you for sharing in these reminisces. See you at the 60th Anniversary…

Some of the sources referred to in writing these four posts.

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© 2019 nightpoet all rights reserved

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DOWN ON YASGUR’S FARM ~ PART ONE

 

Today marks the 50^th Anniversary of the Woodstock Music And Art Fair. To commemorate this legendary event, over the next four days I am re-posting the blog posts I first published in 2014 with some updates and a new photo. That I was lucky enough at the age of 19 not only to attend the festival, but work there, I felt that it would be enjoyable to share my memories. It has been said “that if you remember what went on at Woodstock you probably weren’t really there.” I beg to differ. I recall quite a lot of what I experienced there, as you will see in these blog posts. As I write this I am 69 years old and have been kept busy over the last month doing a number of newspaper, radio and television interviews. Most often I am asked what has stayed with me from Woodstock over these 50 years. That is easy. Along with the music, the most important thing was the spirit of Woodstock, that feeling of “WE,” the togetherness of mind, energy and brotherhood that defined my generation. We were all there for each other and to show the world we were a force to be reckoned with. The music of Woodstock was the soundtrack of my generation. And within me there still lives the free spirited, politically and environmentally active 19 year old rebel that I was back then. It always will…

 

 

I had awakened early, the consciousness slowly crawling through my brain’s neuron connections shaking the opiated cobwebs from the night before aside. Outside the trailer a chilly morning mist had settled over the rolling hills and dales and wove its damp fingers through the still dark groves of trees that dotted the surrounding farm fields. It was Friday. Once the mist would burn away in the early morning sun, the countryside would begin waking up. I already heard a cacophony of birds, roosters and cows tuning up in the distance. As my mind slowly shifted into gear I began to think about my schedule for the day, my fifth day here. First off I’d stop by the office trailer and grab a couple of sandwiches. And then I’d report for my work shift and see what the bosses had dreamed up for us to do today. The trailer was a long affair, divided into three sections, a small entrance room followed by two large empty rooms separated by a wall but without a door that you could close. A number of other people were scattered on the floor still sleeping as I picked my way carefully between them. I was still in a lingering opiated haze as I made my way to the entrance and stood in the doorway looking out across the field. When I had first arrived four days ago it was a sloping green pasture with small groups of people settling in here and there. At the bottom end of the slope a large wooden stage, built over the last two weeks, dominated the field. Two large towers rose some distance in front of it on either side. What had been a cow pasture dominated by scurrying carpenters and construction workers on Monday now began to resemble a colourful gypsy encampment. It was Friday. I still had the sweet taste of rich black opium in my mouth and I was happy. Things were about to begin. As the world began to awaken on Yasgur’s farm, you could feel the electricity in the air.

It was summer. I was 19 and had just finished my first year of college. It had been quite a year. Although I had managed to get most of the required work done for my two semesters of courses, the majority of my time was spent in other pursuits. Socializing, smoking, drinking, balling, listening to and making music, attending demos and anti war rallies and marches and generally raising hell seemed so much more of an invigorating curriculum than Freshman English, Beginning German, Physical Education or English History. I had already had a couple of girlfriends and my hair was starting to reach my shoulders. Life was good. When I returned to Virginia Beach and my parent’s house at the end of May I had other plans for my summer vacation than what they thought I should be doing, which was to find some sort of summer job and be productive. I gave the obligatory expressions of intent, but I already had my job all lined up and it involved hanging out on the boardwalk, making music, staying as stoned as possible and writing my poetry. I was convinced that such an agenda was my profession and that it was certainly in the realm of being productive. I’d been having fun all through the fall, the winter and the spring so I had no intention of stopping now. By early August I was well immersed in hanging out on the boardwalk jamming with friends and had a good tan to take back with me to college in the fall, along with a sheaf of poems and songs.

A few weeks earlier I had, along with millions of other Americans and the rest of the world, watched as Neil Armstrong descended from the Apollo 11 lander and took those first fledgling steps on the surface of the moon, followed by Buzz Aldrin. For the occasion I had dropped a 12 hour Black Beauty and was speeding right along with Collins in the orbiting capsule looking down as the whole event was unfolding. Shortly thereafter the Atlantic City Pop Festival took place on August 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Hanging out with a crowd of friends two weeks after the moon landing on the beach one evening, the talk turned to music and bands when someone mentioned an upcoming music festival that was going to take place in Woodstock, New York, where apparently one hell of a lot of really good groups were planning to perform. In the fall of 1968 an album had come out called “Music From Big Pink” by The Band, who had been backing up Bob Dylan on his recordings and at his concerts. The album was a masterpiece and quickly became one of my favourites. It still is today. As we were discussing the Woodstock Festival while sitting on the beach, someone mentioned that The Band would be performing there. Suddenly a light went on in my head. The Band? I was thinking, man, I’d love to see them in concert and they’ll probably never get down here to Virginia. As the wine and the numbers were being passed around I began to seriously consider the idea of going to the festival, but then New York was a long way from Virginia and when I took stock of my finances things were looking rather bleak. I only had about twenty-five dollars and I had been considering blowing twenty of it on an ounce of weed, since my stash box was down to seeds and stems again. It was Friday, August 11th. Now there was a young fellow named David and his sister Susie hanging out with us who were from Washington D.C. They were planning to hitchhike up to D.C. the next morning, spend the weekend with their Mom and then head out for Woodstock on Monday morning bright and early. They wanted to know if anyone else was interested in going along. That sounded good enough for me. We agreed to meet the next morning. So I went home, packed a duffel bag with a couple of t-shirts, another pair of jeans, underwear, my old army jacket, some toiletries and my sleeping bag. I hit my parents up for another ten dollars as I was informing them of my plans. They did not share my enthusiasm.

The next morning we met up and quickly got a lift up to D.C. Their mother picked us up and took us to their apartment in Arlington. She was apparently a very liberal Mom, because she gave her kids the freedom to undertake the journey and didn’t seem the least bit worried. I was, mainly because her son was 18, but the daughter was only 16. I had visions of the cops stopping us for hitchhiking somewhere and throwing me in jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. So I asked their mother to write a letter of permission for the girl to be traveling with her brother and myself, which she did. The kids were cool, but their Mom was really with it. I had a girlfriend at that time who lived with her parents in Alexandria, so I called her up and we met the next day, Sunday afternoon, and spent a few hours together. I was bubbling about going to see The Band and adding that there was even a rumour that Dylan himself might make an appearance. And of course there were going to be a lot, an awful lot of other great groups over the three days. I got back to David and Susie’s apartment in time for dinner and we all sacked out shortly thereafter, intending to get out on the Interstate ramp real early to beat the Monday morning rush hour traffic. It was going to be a long haul from D.C. to upstate New York and we were hoping to cover it in one day.  I had one last quick shower, and after breakfast David and Susie’s Mom drove us out to the Interstate ramp and wished us good luck. It wasn’t long before someone stopped and picked us up, giving us a lift to a truck stop about half the way to Baltimore. Ah, Baltimore. Visions of my childhood came into my head as I remembered living in Aberdeen and driving with my parents down old route 40 into Baltimore to the Farmer’s Market in the late 1950’s. A really strange bloke stopped and picked us up at the truck stop exit and drove us to Baltimore. All the way into deep, dark Baltimore. For whatever reason this asshole ended up dumping us out in the middle of one of the city’s worst ghettos. So there we stood three white faces in a sea of African-Americans and the longer we stood there pathetically trying to thumb a ride the more heavy the vibe became. We were getting really bad looks from an ever larger crowd that seemed to be gathering around us. At the last possible moment some kind soul stopped and we jumped into his car with audible sighs of relief. Mean looks followed us as we drove off down the street. He wondered how the hell we had ended up in that particular place and once we explained how we had gotten there and where we were heading he took us back out of the city and to the Interstate heading north. We thanked him for the timely rescue and stuck our thumbs out again. After that we had a succession of good rides up to New Jersey and then into New York State without further incident. Once we got closer to our destination I made a sign that said “Woodstock N.Y. Pop…” which seemed to help us get rides.

It was mid-afternoon by the time we reached White Lake and began to notice that we weren’t the only ones headed for Bethel, which was the nearest town to where the festival was located. As we stood on the outskirts of White Lake trying to catch a ride holding our sign and not having much luck, all of a sudden a big police cruiser comes rolling down the street, pulls over and stops. I looked at David, he looked at me and we both looked at Susie, who is grinning like the cat that ate the mouse. Wouldn’t it just be our luck, I was thinking, to almost make it to the festival and now get hassled by the heat? Inside the car sat the local sheriff, complete with his Smokey the Bear hat. He rolled down the window and asked us if we are headed to the festival. I answered in the affirmative and a large smile brightened up his face. “Well, I’ll give you kids a ride there. Hop in,” he said. The three of us looked at each other. Unreal. So we got a ride from White Lake to Bethel and out to Yasgur’s farm in the sheriff’s police cruiser. Now that was getting to the festival in style, almost like having a police escort. He explained to us as we were rolling along, past a lot of other kids trying to hitch or walking, that his daughter was hitchhiking somewhere and he figured it would be good karma for her if he helped someone to get to where they were going too. Unreal. We headed down a country road and then he pulled to a stop. “The farm is just down that road and over the hill,” he explained. “Now you be sure to be careful and have a good time,” he told us in his upstate New York accent as we climbed out of the car and he drove off.

We stood there for a few minutes and watched his car recede down the road and then, along with other kids slowly trickling towards the site, we walked up the hill and gazed down at the pasture and the stage, upon and around which there was a lot of activity. Behind the stage we could see a pond. I thanked them for their hospitality and their companionship along the way and parted with a promise to meet up again at some point over the next few days. I never saw David or Susie again. I wandered around a bit checking things out and then looked for a good spot to bed down for the evening, preferably where some serious smoking was going on. After that long trip I need a good buzz. I joined a group of kids at the edge of the pasture who were passing a few joints around and settled down for the evening. Stories were exchanged, dope and drink were shared and at some point, under the stars, I unrolled my sleeping bag and crawled in for the night. It had been a long day.

It was mid August and the nights in upstate New York were beginning to get a bit chilly. I woke up on Tuesday morning and, although my old army surplus sleeping bag had kept me warm, when I crawled out the air was fresh and crisp. As the world around me slowly came to life again, the reality of my present situation began to dawn on me. Here I was at a rock festival without a ticket and with a rather limited amount of financial resources. I hadn’t seen any evidence yet of any serious fences or crowd control, so I figured that I’d play it by ear and see what developed. But it was obvious to me that I’d have to do something to keep myself fed and stoned. As I wandered around the site getting my bearings I realised that it might be possible to make a bit of money by finding some work at the site. When I asked about jobs down at the stage one long haired fellow told me to go up to one of the trailers at the top of the slope and ask there. And that is exactly what I did. I ended up getting hired by a company called Food For Love, who were going to run the concession stands at the event. They were going to pay me $2.00 an hour to basically do manual labour. Plus I was given the most valuable thing one could possess, a Staff Pass for the festival. That wasn’t bad at all. Plus I got to sleep in one of their trailers at the top of the hill with a bird’s eye view of the whole area and the stage. So for the next three days I helped put up fences around their supply trailers to keep people from sleeping under them, which was dangerous because some of them were tilting and threatening to fall over in the soft ground of the pasture, and then I basically helped finish building their hamburger and drink stands. Now Food For Love would have been more aptly named Food For Cold Hard Cash and their story I will go into in more detail later on, but for now I was happy. I had a job, free food, a trailer to sleep in and…I was at The Woodstock Music & Art Fair. I spent the next three days working eight-hour shifts and my nights getting loaded and generally having fun.

And now it was Friday morning and the festival was about to begin at some point in the afternoon. All sorts of rumours were being passed around about how entrance to the festival would be controlled but by Thursday it was obvious that with the masses of people flowing in that there wasn’t going to be much anyone could do to control the entry to the grounds. Because they had to move from the site that was originally intended for the festival the promoters had made the decision to put all their efforts into getting the stage ready in time and gave up on building the fences. What fences existed were taken down on Thursday night. At that point they knew that they were going to take a massive financial hit. On Friday afternoon as the festival was getting underway it was announced that it had been declared a free festival and no one gave any more thought to the issue of collecting tickets. My job too was morphing from being a hired hand and gofer into having to work security, first specifically for Food For Love, but as the festival progressed, just generally making sure that people were safe and not putting themselves into dangerous situations. I went from working a normal eight hour shift to working eighteen hour stretches. But I am getting ahead of myself.

At around 5:00 PM that afternoon it was obvious to the folks putting on the music that Sweetwater, the first group scheduled to perform weren’t going to make it on stage on time. They had been delayed. So they asked Richie Havens to go out and play the first set. When he went out and opened the festival no one, least of all Richie himself, had any inkling that when he got to the end of his set list and went on to improvise a version of “Motherless Child” turning it into the incredible rendition of “Freedom,” it would become one of the defining moments, not only of the festival, but of rock music itself. I had the evening shift, my job now being to keep an eye on Food For Love’s complex of stands and truck trailers so I was watching his performance while making my rounds. He was followed by Swami Satchidananda who gave a ten minute invocation for the festival. In rather rapid succession Sweetwater played a 40 minute set, followed by Bert Sommer and then the amazing Tim Hardin who did a quick 25 minute set. By the time Ravi Shankar got on stage to do a 35 minute set it had started to rain. And I had my first serious problem. We had a bloke flipping out on some bad acid flailing wildly and requiring restraint. It was imperative that we get him over to the first aid tent, which, unfortunately, was clear across the area in front of the stage where everyone was sitting. Since he wouldn’t or couldn’t walk someone decided to pack his ass in one of the cars the company had up on the hill and drive him slowly straight through that audience. Along with another colleague it was my job to clear a path through that mass of people to get this guy to the doctors. In the rain. Now, I don’t know what poor Ravi Shankar might have thought, but throughout his performance, as we worked our way through the spectators, people in front of our procession were rising, clearing out of the way and then sitting back down behind us after we had passed. That in itself was noisy and then added to that we had to shout at them to get them to move, so I think that he might have noticed the disturbance. At any rate, we got the poor fellow to the first aid tent and trudged back through the crowd. The rain eventually let up and Melanie came on around 10:50 PM and was followed by Arlo Guthrie who lauded the crowd telling them “That’s far out man…lotta freaks!” Joan Baez took the stage at around 1:00 AM and did an hour long set wrapping up what had been an amazing day of music. My shift over, I had wandered down to the side of the stage and saw her do the last few songs up close and even got to listen to her talking to a small group of people and exchanged a few words with her as she was leaving. I had always liked her music, but listening to her talk about her anti-war efforts impressed me even more. She was, and still is one fine performer and human being.

Now I don’t recall exactly when he started, but some time earlier, on Wednesday or Thursday, a long haired bearded fellow wearing a knee-length leather coat started to show up about once an hour, making the rounds of our trailers with a huge pipe, always filled with opium and proceed to get everyone really ripped. He wasn’t selling it, although he would hand out little white speckled pieces of this sticky black opium and continuously fill his pipe. He maintained this hourly routine each evening for the duration of the festival. Bless his sweet opiated soul. He had come by late on Thursday night and got me righteously zonkered before I crashed. And, after I wandered back up to my trailer following Joan’s set, he showed up and once again I blissfully collapsed into a peaceful opium induced sleep.

To be continued…

My Woodstock Staff Pass. I have blurred out my name to maintain my privacy.

The Food For Love Logo.

The front side of my original hitchhiking sign.

The back side of my original hitchhiking sign.

On the way to Woodstock in August 1969.

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© 2019 nightpoet all rights reserved

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