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Phil Ciganer's buddy was Grateful Dead guitar guru Jerry Garcia,
who used to pop into Ciganer's hippie boutique in Brooklyn. But,
friendship aside, Ciganer had to be honest about the Grateful

Dead's performance at Woodstock. The band members were
standing in water, their electric guitars were shocking their fingers.
"It was the worst show of theirs I'd ever seen," he said.

The Who had released their first rock opera, "Tommy," in June.
Now, just after midnight, the English hard-rockers were
performing the three-record set's theme song, "See Me, Feel Me."
"Listening to you, I get the music," sang the fringe-shirted Roger
Daltrey, "gazing at you, I get the heat..." Head Yippie Abbie
Hoffman sat on the stage with Lang during The Who's set.
Hoffman had been working the medical tent since the festival's
opening act, gobbling down tabs of acid to stay awake. Lang and
Hoffman had been looking for an imaginary guy with a knife
under the stage. Lang decided it was time to calm Hoffman down.
He had become increasingly obsessed with publicizing the case of
John Sinclair, a Michigan teen-ager busted for possession of two
marijuana cigarettes.

So he jumped up and grabbed the mike, spitting out a few words
about Sinclair, who had gotten a 10-year jail sentence. Who lead
guitarist Pete Townsend didn't recognize Hoffman and figured he
was just another whacked-out festival-goer rushing the stage.
Townsend bonked Hoffman on the head with his guitar. Hoffman
wandered away. " Abbie was being Abbie," Kornfeld said. "He
was very out of his head at Woodstock. He didn't have contact
with reality."

At sunup Sunday, Grace Slick's voice wafted out of the festival
bowl to a pasture above: "One pill makes you larger, and one pill
makes you small..." "Some (jerk) was out there making eggs over
a campfire, going, 'Hey man, it's the Airplane! Hey, man, it's the
Airplane!'" recalled Jerome O'Connell, the hippie from Rome,
NY.

Judge Liese heard a commotion out on the lawn. Hippies were
camped all over the grounds of the Waldheim Hotel bungalow
colony in Smallwood, which the judge owned. But Liese couldn't
explain this banging. At 5:30am, the judge got up to investigate in
the grayish morning light. "I saw a longhaired man wandering
around all the bungalows, trying to open the doors," he said. "I
asked the fellow what he was looking for. "He said, 'A doctor.' "I
told him Dr. (Stuart) Dombeck was three-quarters of a mile away,
but it would be impossible to get there because of the roads. He
kept raising his voice louder and louder. I finally told him to
leave. "But I guess I made a mistake, standing too close behind
him. The next thing I knew, I woke up. He'd punched me in the
mouth and knocked me out. I was down maybe 20 or 30 minutes."
The blow also knocked out most of Liese's teeth. "The newspaper
headline read, 'Hippie slugs judge,'" Liese said.

Abe Wagner wasn't fond of freaks. Years later, he recalled the
hungry kids, the lost kids, the kids with nowhere to sleep, nowhere
to relieve themselves. The kids using and selling drugs. There were
"rabble-rousers, " as Wagner called them, but he emphasized that
they were a small minority. "I felt sorry for the kids lying by the
roadside," Wagner said. "Hungry. Dirty. I remember a Belgian
couple; she was crying. They had lost their kids. What could I
do?" Wagner said he and his neighbors fed them. "Most of us
here had two or three weeks of food on hand. We put a plank
across our driveway and put the food on it and fed the kids. And
we took cans of soup and set up a soup kitchen for the kids in an
old building on Lake Shore Road." But there was also a handful
of nasties among Wagner's neighbors. Wagner remembered one
Bethel resident who charged $10 to tow a car out of a muddy ditch
and onto the road. When one kid didn't have the money, the
neighbor towed the car right back into the mud.

Wavy Gravy called it "Breakfast in Bed for 400,000." The recipe:
Rolled oats or bulgur wheat (often both). Cook until mush. Add
peanuts for taste. Cook until the texture of goulash. For a side
dish, stir-fry any vegetables that can be scraped together. Scoop
the mixtures onto paper plates. "These people were feeding
literally hundreds of thousands of people with nothing," Krewson
said. "They were taking what they could get and feeding people
with it." Gravy told the audience that it was no miracle. "We're all
feeding each other, man," he said.

The Hog Farm had become the Greater Hog Farm. Gravy was now
leading thousands of volunteers, sort of. Many newly recruited
Hog Farmers had red polyester rags, each stenciled with a winged
pig, tied around their arms. " It got hard to tell the Hog Farm
really responsible people from the casual hang-around Hog Farm
people," Goldstein said. "Suddenly, the only credential was the
Hog Farm. There were so many people doing so many things that
the Hog Farm brassard (arm band) became an all-areas pass. A
vegetable chopper wanted to participate, and three hours later,
he'd be running a crew. Gravy's idea was simply that eventually,
everyone in the whole crowd would have a brassard.

By noon, the sun was beating down on Bethel. Heatstroke became
the biggest worry, even some fans were showing signs of
pneumonia from being drenched for two days. The promoters
considered turning the fire hoses on to mist the crowd, but didn't.
It started to rain again in the afternoon. Sunday's lineup again was
packed with rockers: The Band, Joe Cocker, Crosby, Stills &
Nash, Ten Years After, Johnny Winter and Jimi Hendrix. Iron
Butterfly, which pioneered heavy metal rock'n'roll, was also
scheduled to play. The group arrived in New York from a
seven-week, nationwide tour and called for a helicopter to bring it
to the festival. But Lang and the other organizers worried that
Iron Butterfly's brand of hippie/heavy-metal music might be
dangerous under the circumstances. Emcee John Morris
dispatched a nasty telegram to the group at the airport. It was
designed to provoke the members into deciding not to play. But
Lee Dorman, Iron Butterfly's bassist, remembers it differently.
Woodstock organizers, he said, were supposed to send a helicopter
and didn't.

"Two or three times, we checked out of our hotel and went to the
heliport on 33rd Street," Dorman said. "It never came. I guess it
had more important things to do, like feed people." The band
went home to California and, at first, members didn't mind
missing the festival. "When we... heard how big it was, we thought,
'Damn, we missed it,'" Dorman said. "It would have been great to
play 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' or even to just say 'Hi.' "

Ben Leon ran the boat rental business on Filippini's Pond,
popularly known as "Leon's Lake." The 90-year old kept watch
on the boats from the porch of a shanty perched on the hillside
above the largest of Woodstock's skinny-dipping spots. On
Woodstock weekend, Leon wasn't renting boats, but he was still
watching. "He sat on the veranda, the old fool, and you could
hear him 50 feel away: 'Heee-heee-heee. Haw-haww-haww,'"
Feldman said. " He had a gigantic pair of binoculars. Must have
been Navy submarine spotters or something. The funny thing was
that 10 days after the festival, he dropped dead. I talked to the
undertaker, and he said he never could wipe the smile off the guy's
face. That's the way to go, I guess."

He was 17. She was 15. Sometime during the weekend, they came
to banker Charlie Prince with a problem. Their parents didn't
know where they were. They had another problem. The boy had
taken his father's week-old 1969 Oldsmobile out for a drive.
Somehow, they'd ended up at Woodstock. They had one more
problem. They couldn't find the car.

Attendance estimates kept rising. By Sunday, the state police
figure was 450,000, and others rounded it off to an even
half-million. But Record editor Al Romm, who coordinated
coverage from a trailer behind the stage, believed the estimates
were all wrong. Citing aerial photos, Romm swore that Woodstock
drew maybe 150,000 people. "There were 100,000, 150,000 there,"
Romm said. "It was to everyone's advantage - the police, the
promoters and the reporters - to say there were more. It was to
nobody's advantage to say there were less. The biggest concert
before it had 20,000 people. (Woodstock) was still a big deal; there
were just not as many people."

Bert Feldman, Bethel's historian, also maintained that the
attendance figures were wrong. But he thought the figures were
low. "There were 700,000 people there," he said. "The attendance
estimate is based on aerial photos, and there were thousands of
people under trees."

The motorcycle roared up to the El Monaco Hotel on Sunday
afternoon. Behind the handlebars was a bearded hippie. On the
back was a woman screaming that she was having a baby. Resort
owner Elliott Tiber raced in. He said he was the only one on the lot
who wasn't stoned, and he relied on his instincts to help deliver the
baby. Then he watched as Army medica flew mother and child
away in a helicopter. "She must have been stoned," Tiber said. "
Either that, or Janis Joplin was quite a draw. The mother 'had
olive skin and big black eyes. Her English was kind of broken. A
French accent, I think.'"

Ralph Corwin pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one and started
trucking down Hurd Road. The 26-year-old biker from Winterton
met up Sunday afternoon with a young couple. The girl wore an
Army fatigue shirt and a pair of black jeans. The guy begged a
smoke; Corwin flipped him three or four. The couple walked away.
Corwin looked over his shoulder. The girl's black jeans were
missing on the back side. "Only the strip down the center,"
Corwin said. "No undies, and her cheeks were hanging out."

A short, violent thunderstorm struck around 5pm, triggering an
early exodus from the grounds. Leo O'Mara noticed a guy with a
red beard, wearing a vast muddy poncho and a huge smile.
O'Mara sat in the mud and wondered why this guy was so thrilled
in such miserable weather. "Then I noticed that there were three
other sets of legs under that poncho," O'Mara said.

Jerome O'Connel started walking back to the car at sundown. The
rains had continued throughout much of the day, and O'Connel
felt whipped by the weather. He wasn't the only one who really
wanted to leave. "I remember that there was a whole line of cars
on both sides of the road," O'Connell said. "There wasn't enough
space in the middle for a car. But someone had driven down the
middle anyway. There was a 3-inch scrape on both sides all the
way down. Must have been 50 cars scratched."

All weekend, hippies had camped out on the Heller Dairy farm at
the intersection of Route 17B and Happy Avenue. The kids didn't
ask permission before pitching camp. And they left broken bottles
and bent cans behind. But the last straw was Sunday night. "The
last day, we had a car outside, with a hose next to it that we used
for washing the car," said Blanche Heller. "We woke up and found
that they had cut the hose and drained all the gas out of the tank.
Now, if only they had asked...."

In Jeffersonville, the local congregation was upset about a kid
who'd climbed into the basement of the church. He'd done no
damage, left no mess, but the locals were still bothered by the
intrusion. "They did find this young man in there, who had heated
himself a can of beans, ate it, and left money on the table for the
gas he used. " said Adelaide Schadt, wife of the Bethel town
attorney.

While other stars flitted in and out of the show aboard helicopters,
headliner Hendrix was roaming the crowd on foot. O'Mara
remembered Hendrix stopping to talk with many of the girls.
Others remember the star's turn in the Freak-Out Tent that day.
"We didn't know who he was," Nurse Sanderson said. "Just a
black man lying on the stretcher. Then everybody started saying,
'Hey, isn't that Jimi Hendrix?' There was a big stir about it. "
Hendrix lay on the stretcher for about 30 minutes before roadies
hauled him out.