The Road to Woodstock by Michael Lang Read Free Book Online Page A

player, and Tim Hardin, a brilliant singer-songwriter. You would often see Rick Danko playing checkers at Café Espresso or Richard Manuel sipping red wine at Deanies. (All of them would be part of the festival a year later.) The Café Espresso, which had been a haunt of Dylan’s in the early sixties, was run by a kind of paternal Frenchman named Bernard Paturel.
    BERNARD PATUREL: There’s a magic here—an emanation. Lots of musicians, artists, and writers. A gifted person would feel the vibrations and get support from people like that living there. There is something in the air. You can visit someone who might have the same spirit, the same attitude.
    LEVON HELM: The people here are like the people down in the Ozark Mountains. They’re just as country in that good kind of solid citizen way as they are back home [in Arkansas]…Anyone who lives here is blessed.
    The town did seem like a shelter from the storm (as Dylan would later sing) in September ’68. As the Vietnam War escalated, America had gone haywire that year, with one horrible event after another: the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy; race riots in cities everywhere; antiwar demonstrators beaten up and jailed; students arrested for protesting on campus. In August, the cops clobbered and gassed protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Abbie Hoffman, the Yippies, the Black Panthers, and other activists known as the Chicago Eight were indicted on trumped-up charges; Abbie, by then, seemed to get busted every other week.
    In Woodstock, the Soundouts were in direct contrast to the national climate. They had a joyous, healing feel to them—a result of that bucolic setting—with little kids running around, people sharing joints and lazing around on blankets as the sun set. Since 1967, the concerts took place every summer weekend at Peter Pan Farm, a property on the winding Glasco Turnpike between Woodstock and Saugerties. It was owned by Pan Copeland, a feisty woman who ran the Corner Deli in town. Three or four artists would perform on a makeshift stage, about six inches off the ground, in what had been a cornfield. There were local acts like Ellen McElwaine and Fear Itself, Chrysalis, Cat Mother, and the Caldwell Winfeld Blues Band, and later national artists who’d moved to town, such as Van Morrison and Tim Hardin. Between sets, we were serenaded by cicadas and birds. People pitched tents or parked campers in the adjoining cow pasture. “Wouldn’t it be cool to put on a big concert where people could camp out like this and make a weekend of it?” I asked Sonya. The Soundouts reignited the idea that had first struck me in Miami. But here I began to see the pieces of something even larger coming together.
    On a trip into the city, I reconnected with Don Keider, who’d moved up from the Grove to New York to play vibes with a band called Mandor Beekman. Don and some guys from his Miami jazz quartet—drummer Abby Rader and keyboardist Bob Lenox—hooked up with some Brooklyn rockers and changed their name to Train. DK asked me to manage the band, and though I’d not yet heard the music, I said, “Sure, I’ll check it out.” He needed the help, and I would get to learn something new.
    Train was transitioning from straight-ahead jazz to a more rock-fusion sound. I introduced them to Garland Jeffreys, a talented singerand guitarist. Garland owned a lighting company in the East Village called Intergalactic. I’d gotten to know him when I bought his strobe lights for the Head Shop South. Garland was writing some great songs and performing in the Village, and DK and the guys liked his poetic lyrics. Once Garland joined, the band’s sound started to jell.
    DON KEIDER: We were staying in this bombed-out building over by the railroad tracks on the West Side. Up over a sweatshop, it was also our rehearsal space. It was sick! I don’t know how we survived that. But I had a lot of faith in Michael that he could help us get