Fete on Friday: Freedom, Pot, Skinny-Dipping
FETE ON FRIDAY: FREEDOM, POT, SKINNY-DIPPING, read the local Times Herald-Record newspaper as the sun rose on Saturday. The festival was a scene unto itself, with an American Indian art exhibit, a “Movement City” pavilion where political groups distributed radical literature, a children’s playground, a food service tent provided by the California commune known as the Hog Farm. There was a free stage area for bands, jugglers, and other amateur performers—Baez had been performing there before being told it was time for her performance on the main stage—and several areas in the woods where dealers sold marijuana, mescaline, acid, and hash. At one point during the weekend, stage announcer Chip Monck uttered the famous PSA: “The warning that I’ve received, you may take it with however many grains of salt you wish, that the brown acid that they’re circulating around us is not specifically too good. It’s suggested that you do stay away from that. But it’s your own trip, so be my guest. But please be advised that there is a warning on that.” There were ad hoc head shops set up in the woods, and volunteers established “trip tents” where people on bad acid trips could go for assistance.
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ShareAnd there were the skinny-dippers. The sense of the normal rules having been suspended was established early on by the thousands upon thousands who had gotten onto the festival site without paying. Now, many attendees—those who lived outside of straight society, and those who were just leaving it behind for the weekend—reveled in the festival’s alternative decorum by disrobing entirely and swimming naked in the lake-sized Filippini’s Pond that ran northward along Hurd Road, or in one of the other two nearby bodies of water. Men and women swam together, baring breasts and behinds and pubic hair as if going au natural in public was, well, the most natural thing in the world. Woodstock town historian Bert Feldman became the unofficial censor, reminding the nude swimmers to cover up when they were in front of television cameras. As storms turned the festival site into a virtual mud bath, some of the Woodstock crowd even shed their clothes on land and walked around naked in the cleansing rain.
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The Grateful Dead was one of the most anticipated acts, their legend as a live band starting to build. In June, the Dead had released their third album, Aoxomoxoa, known just as much for its psychedelic-inspired, sun-and-skull cover design as it is for its transition from the group’s quasi-blues origins to acoustic-leaning jams, as evidenced in classic tracks like “St. Stephen,” “China Cat Sunflower,” and “Cosmic Charlie.” Surveying the scene in Max Yasgur’s pasture, Jerry Garcia said in awe, “It’s really amazing. It looks like some sort of biblical, epochal, unbelievable scene.” But the band’s four-jam performance of “St. Stephen,” “Mama Tried,” “Dark Star / High Time,” and “Turn on Your Lovelight” would be remembered as a lackluster one—too loose and free-form, years before the tribe of Deadheads would come to expect that of the band.
The main stage had been designed as a rotating platform to allow for the following act to set up on the rear half behind a screen while the current act was performing, but the Dead’s equipment was so heavy that the turntable sagged and stopped turning. The rain was pouring and the wind was so strong against the light-show screen that was fixed to the stage that stagehands feared it would lift the stage up off its foundations. Workers took knives to the screen and cut wind holes. Just as the band went into “St. Stephen,” percussionist Mickey Hart looked over at Garcia and saw how scared he looked, and thought, “Oh, man, we’re in trouble.”
Behind them, workers were warning that the stage was in the process of collapsing. Plus, the band was pretty tripped on LSD: “speckled tablets from Czechoslovakia,” remembers Phil Lesh. Plus, faulty grounding produced shocks when band members approached their mics. “Our sound man at the time decided he was gonna change the ground in the middle of the whole thing,” Weir recalled. “It was not done right or something. Every time I touched my instrument, I got a horrible shock and [Garcia] was getting the same thing.” As the band left the stage, Garcia said to someone, “It’s nice to know that you can blow the most important gig of your career and it doesn’t really matter.”
Following the Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival stepped onstage as perhaps the hottest band in the land. With three Top Ten albums released in 1969, Bayou Country (in January), Green River (August), and Willie and the Poor Boys (November), Creedence signing on to do the festival had added credibility to Woodstock Ventures as they looked to sign acts to the roster of talent. That CCR played Woodstock has been forgotten by many people, most likely due to the band’s absence from the documentary film and the initial soundtrack release. But the band’s “down home” rock made perfect sense in the festival’s bucolic setting, and they churned out a smoking set chock full of hits, including “Born on the Bayou,” “Green River,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Proud Mary,” “I Put a Spell on You,” “Night Time Is the Right Time,” and “Suzy Q.” Fogerty, though, would remember it with bitterness. The band was forced to go on way past midnight after a longish set by the Dead, and much of the crowd was—for one reason or another—unconscious. “We were ready to rock out and we waited and waited and finally it was our turn. My reaction was, ‘Wow, we get to follow the band that put half a million people to sleep. . . . These people were out. No matter what I did, they were gone. It was sort of like a painting of a Dante scene, just bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud.”
Janis Joplin performed next as one of the festival’s headliners. She had hooked up with a new backing group, the Kozmic Blues Band, in a move away from acid rock toward the tradition of the great Stax-Volt R&B records. Insecure since adolescence, Joplin had taken to a life of dope and sex. At Woodstock, she arrived with girlfriend Peggy Caserta in tow. “I can’t fix in the tent,” Joplin told Caserta during the several hours’ wait for her time to go onstage. “There’s too many people coming and going. There’s no privacy. Come on, let’s go find a place to fix.” According to Caserta, they shot up in one of the stench-ridden portable toilets on the site. When she came on to play, she was clearly on something—booze, dope, maybe both—and people called out to her, asking her if she was high.
Because of her incoherence, it’s gone down that her Woodstock performance was a poor one. But while it might have been an uneven one, footage of her set shows that it was, at the very least, heartfelt. Photographer Henry Diltz said, “She really screamed in agony in those songs. She really meant it. You could see that in the way she contorted her face and her body and everything.” Her renditions of “Work Me, Lord” and “Ball and Chain” show that she had progressed from 1967’s acid-rock leading lady to queen of down-and-out blues and boogie. By the end of the night she was waving her hands in the air, pumping her fists, and rolling her hips with the music like the female lead of a soul revue.
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Stay tuned for part two tomorrow.
