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Promoters decided early on that it was crucial to crowd control for
the music to be endless, especially after dark. The music was
supposed to start at 7pm on Saturday and continue until
midnight. But after the crowd swarmed the site on Friday, the
promoters' strategy changed. They needed more music and
deemed that acts should start later and play until dawn. Saturday's
bill included loud, tough rock'n'roll: The Who, the Jefferson
Airplane, Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful
Dead, Canned Heat, Mountain and Santana. The promoters
worried that as the music got louder, the crowd could get wilder.
But if they weren't entertained well, several hundred thousand
bored fans could do some damage. Lang and the other organizers
pleaded with Saturday's acts to play twice as long. Most were
willing. It was the biggest audience in history; the attendance was
estimated at 250,000 that morning.

The mud smelled like hashish, two inches deep. Sodden sleeping
bags were churned up with cellophane, cigarette butts and
discarded clothes. Standing rainwater was steaming skyward,
blanketing thousands of sleeping kids with an eerie fog. Gery
Krewson saw the tractor rumbling over the hill, plowing through a
pile of soaked garbage and sleeping bags. The tractor was towing a
tank trailer to haul away sewage from the portable toilets. But
under that mass slept a 17-year-old from South Jersey named
Raymond Mizak. His sleeping bag was over his head to ward off
the rain. The tractor slowly ran over him. Krewson and five others
raced up the hill and helped carry Mizak to an ambulance. By the
time the helicopter arrived, Mizak was dead. "I don't think he ever
felt anything. He was asleep," Krewson said. Richard Barley was
walking up the hill seconds after the accident. "He had a blanket
over him," Barley said. "A couple of girls were standing there
crying."

Eileen Fuentes, a 17-year-old Forest Hills High School student,
had been recruited to run an independent concession stand at the
festival. She sold the accouterments of the counterculture -
posters, roach clips and buttons. But Fuentes discovered Saturday
that the real market was in raincoats. She ventured into the
crowds, found a spot by the stage and sold the raincoats her boss
had packed, just in case. Within an hour, hundreds of coats had
been snatched up at $5 a pop. "I went back to get more, but we
didn't have any more," she said.

"SPI-DERS!" the guy was screaming. The Freak-Out Tent had its
first patient. Nurse Sanderson wasn't sure what to do about
psychic spider infestations. The Hog Farmers treated bad acid trips
with physical stroking and soft words. She decided to do the same.
"You learned in a gosh-darn fast way," she said. "You have to
give them some touch with reality. You had to speak softly." Mrs.
Sanderson wanted to work the festival to learn how to treat the
new sicknesses associated with the drug culture. Woodstock
Ventures had offered to help train medical personnel, and
Ventures was offering big bucks - $50 a day - for nurses. But there
weren't many takers. Local people in medicine were skittish about
being associated with the controversial event, Mrs. Sanderson said.

The medics had brought a bottle of Thorazine, an anti-psychotic
drug, to chemically counteract bad trips. But the tripsters reported
that Thorazine would send a drug user crashing immediately,
leading to long-term psychological problems. The consensus at the
Hog Farm was that Thorazine was a very bad trip indeed. "We
stuck the Thorazine under the table, and I think somebody stole
it," Mrs. Sanderson said. She divided the circus tent into three
wards to cover the incoming casualties. The most famous was the
ward for those experiencing the imaginary symptoms of bad trips.
A second, the largest, was for people with cut feet. Broken glass
and pop-tops slashed hundreds. "Their feet were cut to ribbons,"
she said. "We sat them down, put their feet in a bowl of clean
water and disinfectant." The third area was for people with a
malady peculiar to Woodstock. "They had burned their eyes
staring at the sun," Mrs. Sanderson said. "If they were tripping,
they'd lie down on their backs and just stare. There were five or six
or seven at a time. That was something."

The shiny piece of foil glistened next to the black rubber tire of the
state police car. Leo O'Mara, 18, of Clintondale, figured there was
hashish in the foil, snatched it up and continued walking past the
cop as he followed the abandoned cars along Route 17, for what
was probably 20 miles. O'Mara opened the foil and found 29 tabs
of acid. "They were pinkish, kind of," O'Mara said. "So I took
one and folded the rest up and kept walking." But O'Mara's
evening was about to turn strange. "I get there and everyone's
saying, 'Look out for the purple acid! Look out for the purple
acid!'" he said. "I go,'Hey, that stuff was kind of purple. Uh-oh.'"

Bethel Town Justice Stanley Liese ran a quiet court from his
house. But in August 1969, Liese suddenly acquired 18 months'
worth of work - 177 cases. The most common charge: possession
of implements to administer narcotics. If the cases were not simply
dismissed, the average find was $25. Liese remembered one
16-year-old who was charged with selling marijuana (for $6 an
ounce) and possessing six pounds of the stuff with intent to sell.
Irate customers followed the troopers into Liese's house when they
brought the suspected marijuana dealer in. The customers
demanded that the judge throw the book at the teen because the
grass was awful. Liese ordered him locked up in the Sullivan
County Jail and sent a sample of the grass to the police lab in
Albany for analysis.

The Free Kitchen was created to feed the hundreds of people who
would be outside the concert, just making the scene. Organizers
felt responsible for a horde of unprepared people, so they planned
to feed them. But by Saturday afternoon, the Hog Farm's Free
Kitchen was cooking for thousands after the Food for Love
operation turned into chaos. I bought truckloads of grain, barrels
of soy sauce," Goldstein said. "I bought a lot of vegetables from
all over. But after the roads shut down, Goldstein's problem
became how to move the food to the people. The helicopters
couldn't find a place to land. "The sandwiches were coming in a
National Guard helicopter to the Hog Farm compound, "
Goldstein said. "We had 200 people join hands to form a circle for
the helicopter.

A Woodstock acid trip wasn't always voluntary. "Outside (the
tent), they were giving out electric Kool-Aid laced with whatever,"
Nurse Sanderson said. "They said, 'Don't take the brown acid.'
They put it in watermelon. Now, when kids take a tab of acid, they
know what they're getting into. When you drink something that's
cold because you're thirsty, that's different. A lot of the kids hurt
with this stuff were just thirsty. They didn't have any choice. " But
while the kids were drinking and taking whatever was around,
Lang was being careful. Stationed in the headquarters trailer
backstage, Lang couldn't afford to hallucinate. He says he didn't
even smoke pot that weekend. "I didn't drink anything that didn't
come from a bottle I didn't wash or open myself," he said.

So far, so good for Leo O'Mara. The acid had kicked in, the sun
was shining, and he had no bummer symptoms yet. But he was
thirsty, yes thirsty. Four cans of cold beer were sweating next to
the stump on which he was sitting. In keeping with the code of the
counterculture, O'Mara didn't touch it for an hour, by his
reckoning. He even looked at his watch. By the time he says he
finally did flip one of the pop-tops, the sun would have baked
those beers, but O'Mara swore they were still ice-cold. The facts of
physics are clear. O'Mara was hallucinating either time or
temperature. "I couldn't believe it," he marveled. "I'm serious,
man. Really."

On Saturday evening, Lou Newman's ears pricked up when he
heard the murmuring on the sidewalk outside his gift shop in
Liberty. "The kids were going, 'Walla-walla-walla.' I couldn't
really hear what they were saying," Newman said. "Then I found
out why. This guy comes in and says, "We're with the Jefferson
Airplane, and this is Grace Slick.' I didn't know anything about a
Jefferson Airplane." Marty Balin, Jorma Kaukonen and Slick
were staying at the Holiday Inn down the road. All three signed
Newman's guest book.

The show wasn't going on. Janis Joplin, The Who and the Grateful
Dead refused to play Saturday night. Their managers wanted cash
in advance. Woodstock Ventures feared the fans would riot if the
stage was empty. The promoters pleaded with Charlie Prince, the
manager of the White Lake branch of Sullivan County National
Bank, to put up the money. Prince knew that Ventures President
John Roberts had a trust fund of more than $1 million. Late
Saturday night, Prince negotiated his way through the clogged
back roads from Liberty to White Lake, where he opened up the
bank. He discovered the night drop slot was overflowing with bags
of cash. Prince called Joe Fersch, the bank's president, who told
him to use his judgement. After Roberts gave Prince a personal
check that night for "50 or 100 thousand dollars," Price wrote the
cashier's checks. The performers were paid. The show went on. "I
felt that if I didn't give him the money for the show to go on, well,
what would a half-million kids do?" Prince said.

One festival-goer, who asked to be identified only as Andrew, had
decided that Janis Joplin was in love with him. Andrew knew that
he had a shot at instant on stage romance. "I knew that if I could
just make passionate love to her, everything would just be all right
and she would fall in love with me forever," Andrew recalled. "I
got about three feet on stage, and about 40 policemen disagreed.
They dragged me off. I wasn't the only one. That happened all the
time." Daniel Sanabria, the fence installer, who stayed for the
show, also remembered Joplin's set. He was 10 feet from the stage.
"I think we were under the influence of certain mind-altering
substances," Sanabria said. "We would tell the performers, 'Down
on stage.' She (Joplin) would sit down and let us see."

Thever was just back from 'Nam. Now, possessed with paranoia,
he cowered on a cot in the Freak-Out Tent. " He kept saying the
same thing over and over again," Mrs. Sanderson said. "He was
afraid of something. 'Don't come near me,' he said. 'Don't come
near me.' They tried to talk him down, but that time we did use
drugs. They gave him a shot of something, and an hour or so later,
he was down. We asked him, we always asked, what he had taken.
I'm not awfully sure that we got the right answers."