In this inaugural episode of The Theme Machine, John Carney shares conversations of with people who were pivotal in the event back in 1969.
These are the things that you hardly ever hear about – NOT the iconic performances from the big names you know – most of them weren’t big names yet – these are some of the things that went wrong at Woodstock.
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Speaker 1: I did music festivals on my lawn of record music. I didn’t have any money. Then only one person came and that was Max Yaskin, my milkman. The entire sound system was wrong and proceeded to relash it up in some bizarre and Frankensteinian way. The body of the helicopter started to spin in opposition to the rotation and he had to slam it into the ground. But we made it, you know.
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Speaker 2: It was the concert to beat all concerts.
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Speaker 3: and it also ushered out an era of peace and love. It was the summer of 1969, and little did people know that Woodstock would become historic. Hi, I’m John Carney, and this is The Theme Machine.
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Speaker 4: On this episode, we hear from some of the people that were at Woodstock and remember the experience. Arvault has so many chats with musicians that performed at the festival that we had to narrow things down a bit. Now this time around, we’ll look at some of the problems they had from electrical shock, faulty helicopters, and powerful drugs.
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Speaker 5: Well, I had my motel, the Almonico, which is a pulling down dump, and a theater, a barn, a theater, and 33 actors. And I did music festivals of my lawn, of record music. I didn’t have any money. And I put out 10 chairs. And only one person came, and that was Max Yazgur, my milkman. And he gave cheese and eggs and milk to all the actors. And then for nine years, I had a permit for a music festival. Why?
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Speaker 6: showing a redneck shooting the guitar and the bird, and it’s a headline saying, “We don’t want 10,000 hippies “and drug addicts, homosexuals coming to our town “to rape the cows,” I’m quoting them. And why cows, I don’t know. And so then I saw that, and I grabbed my permit and my hot little hands, and I called Mike Lang, and I said the three magic words, “I have a permit, “and I have 15 acres.” He got there in 15 minutes in a helicopter,
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Speaker 7: freezer too, and that money was gone. So I took them on the grounds and there was, it was all swamped from the cesspools and was unusable. They were about to leave them, wanted the money back, and Mother said, “What money?” So I said, “Wait a minute, my neighbor Max Yasca has a farm up the road, about 800 acres or so, and it’s all grass, just cows who have legs that can walk away.” We went to Max and he thought it was funny because he thought
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Speaker 8: 20 people and he said sure you could rent the farm. It’ll cost you $50 a day for the three days that you have to clean up afterwards.
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Speaker 6: They paid him cash, but an hour later the local radio said that 25,000 tickets had been sold. And so the price went up to 50,000. And then more and more as we found out. In fact, a day later I found out they sold 100,000 tickets already. But no one thought there’d be a half million people there and a half million on the highways. Nobody. permit? I know I sold it for one dollar. I could have asked them twenty thousand. Did they ever go back and say hey you know. No, no they were lovely to me. I paid off my mortgage. They hired me to be the liaison for big bucks in those days. The most I made as a designer in New York was five thousand a year. It was a lot of money in ’69 maybe eight thousand. The motel took in two thousand a year if we were lucky. So they paid big bucks. The rents
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Speaker 5: which wasn’t nice. You go to your milk man and ask him if you could use his land for this little party, which turns out to be over 300,000 people. 500,000. 500,000. Talk about the aftermath of it. Were people in the area kind to you for bringing revenue in? Hell no. The town took in $10 million and they were broke. $10
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Speaker 8: said what mafia they said yeah you were seen hanging around with Steve Ross and
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Speaker 5: of Warner Brothers in your place for four weeks, drinking with him, doing grass with him. I said, “Steve Ross? What do you mean? He’s a pal.” They said, “He’s the CEO of Warner Brothers.” I didn’t know. that the more about the sport the movie rights and uh… the papers were
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Speaker 7: Warner Brothers was mafia. So I got in my car and I said to my dad I’m going to Hollywood to design sets because I was a designer and I drove away and I called my dad that evening and he said oh the police came here stay four hours they asked where you were and we said you disappeared in the crowd of people in the mud we never saw you and they
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Speaker 8: but that was the ending of it. – I’m a farmer.
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Speaker 1: (audience applauding) – I don’t know how to speak to 20 people. on the crowd like this. This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place, but I think have proven something to the world that a half a million kids can get together and…
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Speaker 4: have three days of fun and music, and have nothing but fun and music. >> Milk band Max Yazger from the stage at Woodstock. Also words from Elliot Tybor, who wrote about the experience in a book called Taking Woodstock, which was later made into a book. with comedian Demetri Martin. This is the theme machine and this time around we turn to the garden and revisit the Woodstock Music Festival. We’ll have later episodes on the historic event as well, but this time we focus on the things that went wrong. The Grateful Dead was one of the bands on the bill, but you don’t see them in the movie as they weren’t terribly happy with their performance and didn’t sign off on being featured in the movie Founding guitarist, Bob Weir remembers.
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Speaker 1: That was apocalyptic for us because… and at the last minute decided that… The entire sound system was wrong. proceeded to relash it up. in some desire. Frankensteinian way. What we got was a ground situation. Anytime any of us touched our instruments, we got a shock. It was a mild shock, but it was irritating. But if you were playing your instrument, if you’re touching your instrument and you got anywhere near your microphone, then the sparks really flew. I got within a down an inch of my microphone when I was singing. a blinding blue. but… or back into my amp, my amp rack. and uh… i’ve sort of came to a little rest of the set that way again. microphone we were having a horrendous… Needless to say, it wasn’t one of our best sets, and it pretty much buried us for the next three or four years. A lot of bands sort of made their way through the year. their careers on their performances. We did the exact opposite.
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Speaker 2: I didn’t even… are you guys…
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Speaker 1: in the film? No, we uh, we uh, we mixed, we didn’t want…
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Speaker 2: in the film because it was a poor performance. Squeak anything out. – You know, I want to get to some triumphs, but I would think another thing that would have been very difficult, and I didn’t know this until today, when I was looking at the lineup at the Monterey Pop Fair. You guys were on right after Hendrix? I mean Jimmy had just done the performance of his life, lit things up. And you gotta follow that?
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Speaker 1: (laughing) It wasn’t an enviable position. We didn’t have the best of luck at those big early festivals. We just kept lugging away.
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Speaker 3: is the theme machine. Day three of the Woodstock Festival brought the long-awaited debut of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Not technically a debut as David Graham and Steve had played together before once in public, but it was the first time they had added Neil Young.
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Speaker 4: and according to Graham Nash, he almost didn’t get there. little button that said don’t ask me about Woodstock I don’t remember. Right. but I’m gonna go against your advice and ask you about Woodstock. may not remember a lot being the second time than the most of it but uh… i do Remember, you’re talking about your… copter ride that you never forget no because I nearly died and that was going into Woodstock and what’s funny is I was talking to Richie Havens one time
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Speaker 1: and he told me a similar story apparently they didn’t have a very good pilot. Well they had several pilots you know because they didn’t just have one one heli. What can you say? I mean the tail rotor stopped spinning and the body of the helicopter started to spin in opposition to the rotation and he had to slam it into the ground. But we made it, you know. met us with a couple of joints we went to.
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Speaker 4: wasted? No big deal. I can’t remember. other group whose second concert was a…
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Speaker 1: No. No, I don’t. That means… record right there. How do you deal with that? You don’t deal with it, you just do a show. All we were doing was standing up and playing our own music. him. The fact that he was off in the… He was a little nervous, you know, and he… You know, he busted that famous line, “We’re scared sh*tless.” But that was only him. big crowds. You know, I’d already been, you know, with the Hollys for seven years.
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Speaker 4: You didn’t know all that well at that point and you… music. Still kind of discovering your sound at that point. Absolutely. I’m John Carney and this is the Theme Machine. August 1969 brought us one of the most historic musical events ever was Woodstock. I had the chance over the years to visit with a number of the people involved with that festival and mostly we’ve heard from the artist but
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Speaker 1: perspective. Young David Grutter had a chance to attend. Well, I was 15 at the time and I was born and raised in the New York City area. And I was very involved in the performing arts growing up and my parents were kind enough to send me off to a
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Speaker 8: for the Performing Arts in the summertime up in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. And so the summer of ’69, before the summer began, the camp director sent a letter home to all of the parents saying, “We’re going to have an optional field trip to a music and arts festival in upstate New York this summer. Do you want to come?”
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Speaker 4: So, my parents actually sent me to Woodstock. So afterwards, when they got the news stories and heard about the festival, were they still happy with that particular choice? Oh, John, when they were watching the live news feeds about what was going on at Woodstock and what the event had turned in. He could have helicoptered in to pull me out of there, he would have.
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Speaker 8: Talk about the first thing you remember of it, the first impression. My first impression, oh my gosh. So here is this bus, this is a long-distance charter bus, Peter Pan lines, if you can believe this, Peter Pan bus lines with a bathroom and reclining seats and we get there a day before the festival begins. So
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Speaker 1: order to avoid a riot, they were just going to stop charging admission and make it a free event. As a 15-year-old, you’re probably…
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Speaker 4: about your safety and welfare because we’re all indestructible at that age, yes? Well I was a little bit scared. I mean I was a pretty naive 15 year old. I arrived at Woodstock, a drug-free virgin, and that’s how I left Woodstock. So this was a very…
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Speaker 8: experience for me to be surrounded by a whole different kind of attitude to life than the one that certainly existed in my own family. There were couples making love, there were
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Speaker 1: uh… pot and hash being smoked uh… quite freely uh… all around me uh… it It was just a mind-boggling experience for me as a 15-year-old.
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Speaker 4: At 15, I think my biggest thrill to date had been studying for my driver’s license.
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Speaker 2: But takes a pretty good guess as to why Woodstock was more than organizers could handle. to go here in…
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Speaker 1: atlantic city on the fourth of july with many of the pain act period at Woodstock and it attracted a crowd of about 70 to 100 people. people. So I think that that is actually what the promoters were expecting. and had prepared for and of course they were completely… overwhelmed when the numbers were six times that. I think the audience was… These were the baby boomers. The baby boomers are always new. that they were different, always new. huge always knew that… special if I can use that word and yet I don’t think until that weekend that they realized exactly how exactly how much power they had to potentially change the course of the world. of history and in some ways they did. I mean there were… a lot of unfulfilled promises about Woodstock, but I think the things that remain are, you know, the attention to the environment. There are some who will tell you that. Earth Day in April of 1970 was a direct outgrowth of Woodstock. know the end of a war had something to do with that group. the elimination of the draft. something to do with that event and that group. I think that might even have been the sense of… camaraderie that… to all of this good. of circumstances. had prepared for 70,000 and six times that show up the food was gone.
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Speaker 5:
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Speaker 1: We don’t even want to talk about the sanitary.
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Speaker 6: that was a near disaster.
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Speaker 1: and Woodstock teetered on the brink. of being a disaster many times that weekend, but it was always the behavior of the crowd that held it back.
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Speaker 3: from that and in dead turned it into the cultural. Water shed more that it has come. That’s Peter fortune Ali who chronicles his Woodstock experiences in a book called back to the garden. This is the theme machine and this time we
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Speaker 4: back to August of 1969 to Bethel, New York, site of the Woodstock Music Festival. Those of us not old enough to remember it have been treated to the festival through the film of the same name. Director Michael Watley was the man who was tasked with chronicling the event. Talk about what it was like for you to set up a show.
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Speaker 1: that proportion and capture in such a way that you did what became the documentary Woodstock. we were going through that. After all, I did have 15 cameramen and 100 persons. We were well prepared. I dreamed up the future. images and done the experiments. ahead of time. I just come from doing a mountain climbing film so that there was a lot of preparation in terms of the team and how we would do it. And yet, along came the storm that you see. all of our plans went out the window and people could have been killed it was such a violent storm. The stage went live. There were electricity, bone, and the sound of the sound of the sound leaping out of everywhere. The super troopers nearly fell off the towers, could have killed. lot of people. I’ve been covering Darfur recently. Woodstock was like a war zone in the sense that there was so much tension and so much fear that people might die. What about dealing with all the different artists and different…
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Speaker 4: not happy with their performance and that’s why they’re…
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Speaker 2: the original film because they didn’t want to be. Every group were they were so…
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Speaker 1: with me if they were not in the movie. Well, you had a super famous event. was on the headlines all over the world. Many people say what you’re saying, but it was absolutely the opposite. The Grateful Dead were very angry, very disappointed, I would say disappointed. So I dragged Jerry in, I said, “Look, Jerry, I’m going to tell you something.” What did you guys were so wasted? your performance was terrible. Well, we have rescued, by the way, for the Ultimate Collector’s Edition. We did work really hard to put together a grateful dead piece. Why? Because I’m a super dead fan. And Creedence Clearwater, you know, they’re really good new performances by far. group that are not at all embarrassing. They are hardly second-rate. Were you able to enjoy the show or were you busy making your movie? I was busy making my movie. I didn’t enjoy it until later and then of course I could see through the eyes of 15th Tammerman while I was doing it.
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Speaker 4: was the principal stage camera so I really had a myopic view of the piece and all the worries that were coming down. I’m John Carney and this is The Theme Machine and this time around we took a look at Woodstock from the perspective of things that went a bit south. Now don’t get me wrong there were dozens of magical moments that came out of that festival but as we set out to do something for the theme machine provided by…