Pilgrims of Woodstock

Never-Before-Seen Photos

John Kane

• Publisher: Red Lightning Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781684350834
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

Intimate portraits by photojournalist Richard F. Bellak of the musical festival's counterculture attendees celebrating peace, love, and rock and roll. In the summer of 1969, 400, 000 people from across the country came together and redefined the music scene forever. Though the legacy and lore of Woodstock lives on in the memory of its attendees, a new generation can experience the real and unedited festival through Richard Bellak's never-before-seen photographs and John Kane's incredible new interviews. Pilgrims of Woodstock offers a vivid and intimate portrait of the overlooked stars of the festival: the everyday people who made Woodstock unforgettable. The photographs and interviews capture attendees' profound personal moments across hundreds of acres of farmland, as they meditated, played music, cooked food at night, and congregated around campfires. For three days, they helped and relied on each other in peace and harmony. For most, it was a life-changing event. Now, after the 50th anniversary of the famed festival, relive their experiences firsthand in Pilgrims of Woodstock.

1 | EARLY ARRIVAL

Robert

AGE 20 | PAUL SMITHS, NEW YORK

My friend Steve and I were traveling around the Northeast in my Cadillac hearse. We both went to college in upstate New York. He went to Clarkson, and I went to Paul Smith’s. Steve had been up visiting one of his many girlfriends. We ended up going over to Saranac Lake, which was the nearest hot spot to my college. We both picked up a couple of girls. He stayed, and I went out and got laid. I went back to pick him up, and he was mad that I had a good time and he didn’t. At that point we left to go visit his girlfriend in Monticello, New York. I was driving at first, and then he decided to drive. He had picked up a six-pack of beer, and I went in the back of the car to sleep. When I woke we had arrived.

We were really broke. We got jobs at the Evans Hotel in Monticello washing the kitchen and dining room floors at night. We did that for a few days. Then Steve and his girlfriend decided to take off with a guy to go to California.

I heard about Woodstock through some advertising posters. I was only about ten miles from White Lake, and I thought it would be cool to go and perhaps get a job. All of this occurred about ten days before Woodstock. On my day off, I went over to the festival site. I ran into a friend of a friend of mine named Chris Langhart, from NYU. He did a lot of the design work for the festival. When I arrived they were putting the plywood on the stage and were starting to build the overhead trusses. The scaffolding had been all built for the stage by that point. They also started doing some of the cable work for the steel umbrella plates that sat on top of these eighty-foot telephone poles. I helped with all of this. Chris made sure I got paid. He was a great guy.

Not many audience people had arrived at the field yet. People were dribbling in, and those who wanted to work worked. For those who did not, they found places to hang and have a good time.

I was at the festival site for around three weeks or so. Woodstock Ventures had rented a hotel called the Diamond Horseshoe, and I crashed there for a bit. I also stayed at another place about two, three miles away from the festival site. I ended up parking my hearse at the hotel and getting rides into the work site. I was working ten, twelve hours a day. As it got closer to the opening day, it was like fighting your way upstream. The number of people on that road to the festival site was awesome.

Part of my job was to kind of float around. I filled in where I could fill in. Some of my time during the show was spent running the equipment lift, which was more like a freight elevator. It allowed us to get stuff on and off stage faster. The lift was upstage toward the road. I did this to get away from some of the chaos. I also drove a bulldozer there and became the designated forklift driver. I didn’t work on the towers at all. I had a great time!

We were running out of time, and the roof never got finished. By Thursday they were handing out shots of B12 to the crew and volunteers to try and get us to work faster and longer. Because of the crowds coming in, I couldn’t get back to my hotel to get my hearse. I don’t remember exactly where I slept. There were trailers, but they were mostly for the performers. I might have crashed on one of those floors.

I had interactions with the audience in a semiofficial capacity. But my main focus was the job. I worked both backstage and under. I policed below the stage area because people were trying to get in whatever way they could. There were some outhouses there that would have saved people from a long hike. I remember looking out from the Woodstock stage at night. There were all of these beads of light.

When it rained I helped cover the important electronics on stage. In many ways the rain was a gift from heaven. It was very warm, and even though it was raining, everyone was high in some way, whether on drugs, friendships, or whatever. It was good vibes. So nobody cared if you were wet or if you wanted to wear clothes or not. The rain was a distraction. Some even got zapped because of a bad ground wire, but no one got electrocuted. If that had happened, the cops would have shut the thing down.

I don’t remember eating ever being an issue, so food must have been available. People were sharing backstage also. The garbage wasn’t a real issue until people left. I looked out after the field was empty and saw little treasures, but more likely sleeping bags, backpacks, and clothing of all sorts. You could walk out there and find many Zippo lighters, pipes of different kinds. I didn’t see any needles or syringes, although I am sure there were some. I ended up taking one of the bulldozers and getting the garbage pushed into piles so they could come in and pick it up and take it away somewhere. People just walked away from a lot of important belongings.

After the rain came, the food that was left was rotting. It smelled like a dump. Around the stage area we got cleaned up really quickly because they had to take down the tower scaffolding. Then we had to start taking the stage apart and getting rid of the remaining scaffold. I was there for about two weeks after, just cleaning up the site. There were still some people left. They simply loved the experience so much that wanted to hang as much as possible. It’s not like concerts today where people hop in their cars and take off. It took time for the crowd to dwindle.

I think we were all exceedingly impressed at how many showed up at Woodstock. It was fun to be part of something that you felt was going to be historic. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience!

David

AGE 23 | SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

In 1969 my girlfriend and I were at Big Sur, going to see Ravi Shankar at Esalen. When we got back to our campsite, all of our stuff had been stolen. So we went up to San Francisco, where I had been living, to resupply ourselves at the army-navy store. While we were packing our new gear, we were listening to the radio. We heard them talking about this concert that was going to happen. We had been planning to hitchhike to Washington State, but right then we changed our plans and decided to go to Woodstock.

The next morning we started hitchhiking and made it to just outside Oakland. We got dropped off at an interchange on-ramp. In those days you couldn’t hitchhike on the interstate. It was a bad place, and nobody was picking us up. It was hot, and we were baking in the sun. So we went back to Oakland and got a room for the night. The next morning while we were walking, I had a sign that said Salt Lake City on the back of my backpack. I thought Woodstock was in Connecticut for some reason. I knew no one would pick us up if it said Connecticut! A station wagon pulling a trailer came up alongside of us. He passed us once already and went around the block. He asked us if he needed a ride and told us he was going to New York. We drove nonstop to his wife’s parents’ place, with all three of us taking turns driving. That’s how we got to upstate New York, in one ride across the country.

It was July, and when we were going through Iowa, I heard over the radio that we had just landed on the moon. We were all in amazement! We got to Woodstock a couple of weeks before the festival started and stayed with the Hog Farmers. We didn’t have a tent. I had a sleeping bag, some extra clothes, not much money, and not much food either. They had a large circular circus-like tent with a pole in the middle. It was just erected, and nobody was staying in it, so we did for the first couple of nights.

We knew rain was on its way, so we hitchhiked into Monticello. We spent the last of our money on a small Cub Scout canvas tent. It was just enough for the two of us and our stuff. We are lucky that Woodstock ended up free because we didn’t even have tickets! As soon as we made it back with our tent, we set it up next to the Hog Farm. There was a farm fence between us. When we woke in the mornings, we did yoga with the Hog Farmers. Tom Law would lead us into our breathing exercises. Tom was a charismatic, in-charge kind of guy.

We ate with them also. A lot of bulgur! For some reason they were fascinated with bulgur at that time. They ended up feeding a lot of the crowd this stuff. We dug pit trenches for toilets. They had been putting up the stage while we were there. I went to see if I could get work with the crew, but they already had enough people. I saw Michael Lang driving around on his motorcycle.

The week leading up to the festival, there was a steady stream of people arriving. The day before the concert, it really started to fill up. There was a couple that I frequently saw go between where we were camping and the main stage. She was beautiful and in a burlap dress. She was just eye catching. The music was going all night. I stayed in and around the bowl a way up from the sound towers. Each day this is where I would end up.

There were certain smells always going around. It was an era where men weren’t using aftershave and women weren’t using perfume. There really wasn’t a huge emphasis on personal cleanliness with the counterculture. The smell of marijuana was prevalent. The New Yorkers called it “tea.” That was a new term for me. It was interesting because you didn’t need to have any yourself. When somebody passed a joint, they passed it to the next, and that was the last time you saw that joint. It just kept on going! But you didn’t have to worry because there was another one coming over. No bogarting—just a toke and pass it on!

Saturday night was when a lot of the electric bands performed. My girlfriend went back to the tent. The field was a mess. It was just mud. A family had just arrived from New York City—a mom, a dad, and a couple of kids. They came over and sat really close to me. They put a clean blanket on the ground. One of the kids was a sixteen-year-old girl. She slipped me a hit of speed. I took it. That was the only drug I took, other than pot, all weekend. It was perfect. It woke me up and kept me awake that night. To be invited onto that clean blanket and have this underage girl slip me a tab of speed was strange. I don’t know how this family got there through all those crowds and with a clean blanket.

The Woodstock audience was peaceful. The whole time I was there, I didn’t hear a harsh word. I didn’t see any police. Everybody was taking care of each other. I am not religious, even though I grew up a Lutheran in Minnesota. However, I recall the story of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus fed the multitudes with five loaves of bread and two fish. Thinking about Woodstock years later, I realized how that miracle happened. It was one person being generous and creating an atmosphere where everybody would share. When everyone was sharing, there was enough food, and everybody was able to get fed. Nobody was hoarding at Woodstock. Everybody that I was camped around was sharing their food.

A lot of the announcements from the stage were unifying and full of encouragement. You know, “Take care of your brother and take care of your sister sitting next to you.” I never took any LSD, especially in large crowds. But for those people, the warnings from the stage were helpful. They really helped maintain that peaceful atmosphere.

People had blankets and sleeping bags near the stage, and it became a mud pit. Everything was caked in mud. I think people just gave up. For those who really cared about personal hygiene, it would have been tough. It was just terrible. What a mess! People just left everything behind. I found a pair of binoculars.

It was the last night leading into Monday morning. I imagined a lot of people had to get back home, and there weren’t too many people left. Jimi Hendrix was the last to perform. Before he came on, these guys with gold suits came running out on stage. It was Sha Na Na! The people that were left just rose up out of their muddy sleeping bags and headed toward the stage. The energy was so incredible—that 1950s rock and roll and a great stage show!

I didn’t know how big Woodstock was until I hitchhiked back to the West Coast. So many people had heard about it. I remember thinking about the East Coast people I had met at Woodstock. They seemed to carry a higher energy. West Coast people were a lot more laid-back.

After Woodstock I went to Altamont and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Early Arrival
• 2 Wednesday
• 3 Thursday
• 4 Friday
• 5 Saturday
• 6 Sunday