Pittsburghers tell their stories of mud, hunger, heady jams at Woodstock
Fifty years ago this week, Jeff Hausman left Squirrel Hill to visit a friend in Connecticut and ended up at a three-day festival he’d never even heard of.
“We met at Penn Station,” he recalls, “and I was going to go to Gary’s house for a weekend. When I got there, he said, ‘I know you like music, we’re gonna go to a festival.’ I was thinking it was near his house. We never went to his house.”
Henry DeLuca, conversely, knewvery well where he was going and was hyper-prepared. Leading up to it, he and his friends gathered at Chief’s Bar for a planning meeting and packed the car with what sounds like a month’s worth of food and supplies. They even had a TripTik from AAA.
After being handed a flyer for Woodstock by a hippie on Walnut Street in Shadyside, Fred Leff and his friend made a sign that said “PA Turnpike” on one side and “New York” on the other, went to the nearest intersection and stuck out their thumbs. They got to the grounds just in time to hear Arlo Guthrie singing “Coming Into Los Angeles.”
Mary Jo Coll would have made it if the cops hadn’t tracked her down in Central Pennsylvania. That was a less happy outcome.
No two Woodstock stories are alike, and a lot of the details are fuzzy, because, as they say, if you remember the ’60s, you probably weren’t there.
A Woodstock Tailgate
Like a lot of young music heads, Mr.DeLuca, who went on to be a science teacher and promoter of the Roots of Rock and Roll series, had heard all the Monterey Pop Festival buzz that June and was on the lookoutfor the next big gathering.
Of course, it was Woodstock, and off they went, excited to see Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Jefferson Airplane and others.
“First of all, I’m usually prepared,” he says, “so my friend Charlie had a tent, and I had a
cooler with all kinds of food: steaks, chicken, canned soups, all sorts of things.”
They had a TripTik but for Woodstock, not Bethel, N.Y., the site of Max Yasgur’s farm, where the concert was taking place. That set them back a few hours, not to mention the miles of traffic on Route 17B and one of his friends getting frustrated and throwing the TripTik out the window. (One of the people in the car was Bill Isler, who went on to become executive director of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media and the president of Family Communications.)
On Friday evening, they parked their car on a grass field about a mile away and gave up on that first night, a heavy folk lineup that began with Richie Havens and included Guthrie, Ravi Shankar and Joan Baez. Instead, they set up camp, drank some wine in the rain and grilled a nice dinner, sharing it with the new friends they made.
They got to the concert site on Saturday morning, ready to buy tickets ($7 per day, $18 for the weekend), but of course, they didn’t have to. The stage had taken so long to build that little attention was paid to the gates, which didn’t last long. The expected crowd of 50,000 was swelling to an estimated 400,000.
“When we got there, the hillside was covered with blankets, just wall-to-wall blankets,” Mr. DeLuca says.
The early part of the day was highlighted by a littleknown Santana just shredding on mescaline as well as John Sebastian and Country Joe McDonald filling time, the latter with a memorable anti-war chant. The evening brought stomping blues from Canned Heat and Mountain and a notoriously drug- and equipment-impaired performance by the Grateful Dead that stretched past midnight to the dismay of one John Fogerty.
“Then, Creedence Clearwater Revival comes on,” Mr.DeLuca says, “and it was absolutely the best performance of all of Woodstock. Everyone on the hill was dancing to ‘Suzy Q.’”
You had to be there to know that because Creedence’s set was part of “lost” Woodstock, not captured for the documentary or the soundtrack. Although his friends went back to the car, Mr. DeLuca hung on into the wee hours: Janis at 2 a.m., followed by Sly and the Family Stone, The Who and Jefferson Airplane, ending at 9:40 Sunday morning. (He has no idea how he found his way back to camp in the dark.)
After Joe Cocker’s breakout performance opening the Sunday slate, the thunderstorm hit hard, halting the festival for three hours.
“We figured with all this electronic equipment and all that rain, they’re going to end everything,” Mr. DeLuca says. The group decided to drive in the light and head home. Never saw Hendrix.
‘This insane thing’
The first mention of Woodstock in the Pittsburgh papers was on Saturday, Aug. 16, in The Pittsburgh Press, describing the road to Woodstock being a parking lot and a security official warning, “Anybody who tries to come here is crazy.”
“Word was spreading by mouth pretty fast that this insane thing was happening in upstate New York,” Ms. Coll notes. She’s pretty sure she heard about it at National Record Mart, Downtown, on Saturday morning. She was 14 and ready to go.
“We hatched a plan of lies to our parents, procuring someone old enough to drive and could get a car.”
Ms. Coll, who now books shows at Howlers in Bloomfield, made it 200 miles of the 340-mile trip. It ended when her stepfather, a city cop, found out — she thinks her sister snitched — and had that car pulled over near Harrisburg.
“I was detained. The rest were permitted to continue. They got there. I got a trip to the barracks,” where she waited hours for her parents to pick her up. “Till the day my mom died, I never forgave them for it. All I was told was, ‘You’d have gotten pregnant.’”
As for Mr. Leff, it took about 10 rides for him and his friend Gary to get there, and as they approached, he noted in an email, there were all kinds of warnings along the road.
“The concert is over, they canceled it,” one girl said.
“You can’t get in without a ticket,” some guy said.
But they pressed on, and around midnight Friday, “After hours and hours of rides in cars, and what seemed like days of walking in the dark, I heard a faint singing .... Hey it’s Arlo Guthrie I screamed!”
For the next three days, it was rain, mud, fantastic jams, starvation and long lines for food and pay phones to call home.
“Gary and I didn’t have much money on us. We went looking for food and came upon a makeshift wood hut with handwritten signs. Peanutbutter and Jelly $2. What? Can you believe it, two bucks for peanut butter and jelly? I only had a few dollars left from the $10 my mother had given me but I was starving, and there wasn’t much else to choose from. The peanut butter and jelly tasted more like steak and potatoes to me! My most vivid and exhilarating memory of Woodstock [was] sitting, eating the peanut butter and jelly sandwich while listening to Crosby, Stills & Nash singing, ‘It’s getting to thepoint ….’ ”
Not supposed to be here
Mr. Hausman, who was 17, had to throw a lot of caution to the wind. The first thing he remembers when he got there on Friday?
“Just the crowds, the massive amount of people,” he says. “And I’m thinking about food and bathrooms and never getting out of here. I’m thinking, ‘I’m supposed to get a bus on Tuesday or I’m in deep trouble at home,’ because I’m not supposed to be here.”
Worse yet, by Sunday, the media coverage bordered on hysteria. Woodstock was front page in The Press, with the lead graph, “More than 300,000 persons wandered about in a sea of mud, sickness and drugs at the hippiestyle Woodstock Music and Art Fair.”
How uncomfortable was three days at Woodstock?
“Very,” he says. “I’d camped out all my life, but this was different. It was weird, though. At some point, you just didn’t care anymore. And it wasn’t from drugs or anything. It was just so wet and so muddy, and everybody was that way, and sweaty. And I remember being hungry.”
And occasionally lost, because, of course, there were no cellphones, so people who got separated relied on announcements from the stage to reunite with friends. But the music … sublime. The Who, he says, “were phenomenal.” He was thrilled to see Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, even if it was 3 a.m. Monday morning. And he stayed till Hendrix played the last note of “Hey Joe” in his iconic set around 11 a.m. Monday.
Patience and peace
Traffic, rain, overcrowding, drugs, nudity and lack of food for more than three days and not a single violent episode.
“I grew up in Brookline, and there were a lot of fights,” Mr. DeLuca says. “It was a way of life. But there was none of that there. When you put that many people and there’s no food, there’s reason for fighting, but there was none of that.”
“People standing in line for food, for port-a-potties (if you didn’t go in the woods), everyone was incredibly patient,” Mr. Hausman says. “The only downside was, I saw a couple people on bad acid trips, and that was scary, and people would come and help them and take them to the medical tents, and that kept me from touching any chemicals.”
And Mr. and Mrs. Hausman? Till the day they died, they never knew their son went to Woodstock.
“Nope,” he says. “My parents never knew I went. I didn’t have the guts to tell them when I got home and then just never told them. It was one of those things where I never said, ‘This is what I did whenI went to Gary’s.’”