Harriet Fiers, 67; former Rolling Stone managing editor

The landmark rock concert Woodstock was billed as “Three Days of Peace and Music,” but Harriet Fier stayed for four.

“I was such a little Girl Scout,” she recalled in a video remembrance of the event for The New York Times. “At the end of the thing, they said . . . this guy’s farm and everything is a big muddy mess . . . and could some people stay and pick up garbage? So I spent the whole next morning picking up garbage because I felt bad about leaving a big mess.”

Her role on the little-heralded Woodstock cleanup crew seemed, at times, to presage her career in the 1970s as an editor at Rolling Stone, whose atmosphere she said resembled “a circus” filled with famous and famously difficult writers. The co-founder Jann Wenner, a visionary of mercurial temperament, was often absent or preoccupied and found her a steady helmsman for his ship – “assertive and savvy.”

She catapulted in six years from the magazine’s night switchboard operator to second-in-command. “Jann liked her style, her looks,” Wenner biographer Robert Draper wrote. “Fier was a rock & roller and feminist who comported herself like a classy New York editor.”

Fier, who as managing editor from 1978 to 1980 helped lead the magazine as it evolved from a bible of youth culture to a gener- al-interest, celebrity-centric periodical, died Feb. 21 at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 67.

The cause was complications from breast cancer, a disease she battled for 18 years, said her daughter, Laura Mantell.

Fier was a Brooklyn-bred graduate of Smith College who took a road trip West in 1971 after receiving her degree. Down to her last few dollars, she accepted a job answering phones at night at what was then the San Francisco headquarters of Rolling Stone, which had debuted several years earlier.