The Road to Woodstock (3 page)

After about two months, Pauline said she thought I was falling in love with her and that our thing wasn’t meant to last. Pegging me for the innocent I was, she didn’t want me to get too attached. It hurt, but she let me down with a lot of kindness. I never saw Pauline again, but the summer we spent together changed me. She opened doors that have never closed.

During my senior year of high school, thanks to Mr. Bonham, my student advisor, I was given the opportunity to start college early. New
York University accepted me to begin in January, as long as I finished high school at night. As 1962 started, I was heading back to the Village.

My parents were delighted about this series of events: College was always the objective for them, and in those days, NYU wasn’t very expensive, and I could commute from Brooklyn. That summer I got a job at a funky boutique on Bleecker Street called the Village Cobbler. We sold oddball earrings, leather goods, crafts, and all kinds of other trappings. I liked being in the middle of the Village’s unfolding folk scene. The music had really taken off, with a whole new generation of singer-songwriters testing the waters in Village clubs. Bob Dylan’s first album had come out on Columbia, but he still sometimes performed around the neighborhood. I’d go to the coffeehouses and clubs that dotted Bleecker and MacDougal streets—the Café Wha?, the Bitter End, Gerde’s Folk City, the Gaslight—and check out artists like Bob Gibson, Phil Ochs, Jack Elliott, Fred Neil, Dave Van Ronk. Washington Square Park was filled with pickers and bongo players, artists of all kinds and dealers galore. You could score grass around the clock.

In a tiny coffeehouse on MacDougal Street called Rienzi’s, I would sit by the window and watch crazy, colorful characters walk by—not hippies yet, but some early freaks. I’d gotten a Super 8 camera and decided to make a documentary of Village street life. I started filming what was to be called
A View from Rienzi’s
but never finished it.

Before turning eighteen in December, I got my notice to register for the draft. In 1962, Vietnam was still an undeclared war, but the situation there was escalating. In my opinion, the U.S. had no reason to get involved in a conflict that had been going on in Southeast Asia for forty years. I had nothing against the Vietnamese. I saw a psychiatrist for three weeks in the hopes of getting a medical note recommending
a deferment. The doctor could see I had no respect for authority and that I would never fire on another human being simply because I was ordered to do so. He wrote a letter of assessment saying I was not a good candidate for the military. I thought everything was set for me to get a pass, but instead I received a notice to show up for my physical at Borough Hall, in Brooklyn.

Going through the whole process and undergoing tests and assorted examinations, I kept waiting for them to pull me out of line and say, “You’re not what we’re looking for.” But that didn’t happen. Finally, despite the uniformed officers trying to usher us along, I ducked out of formation. I ran downstairs to look for the psych’s office. I walked in and blurted out, “Listen, I don’t know if you looked at my paperwork, but you really don’t want me in the army.” I sat down with the shrink and we talked it through. I told him I was against the war on moral grounds, that I didn’t believe in killing. This was still so early in the Vietnam conflict that the U.S. military wasn’t desperate for troops. They would be in four or five years, when getting drafted was nearly inescapable. After a long discussion, the doctor gave me a deferment.

That was the last I heard from the selective service. I’d avoided being forced to fight in a war I didn’t believe in. I had no idea that by the end of the decade, there would be millions of like-minded kids at Woodstock taking the same stand for peace.

As rain pelts the roofless stage, the crowd is turning ugly, with tempers rising as high as Miami’s humidity. A few jerks start lobbing Coke bottles and rocks, and angry demands for music ring out. I can’t put any of the electric acts onstage, though a madman British vocalist announces that his band, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, would like to perform and hopefully experience electrocution. “It would be beautiful!” he insists. I’m thinking the sight of Arthur frying would not be beautiful.

What we need is a powerful acoustic act.

Just as the rain subsides and the crew starts clearing water from the stage—a pair of flatbed trailers—I spot John Lee Hooker, cool as ever, smoking a cigarette, sitting backstage waiting for his slot. He’s my man.

Twenty minutes later, the fifty-year-old blues veteran has them eating out of his hand. He’s probably performed under worse conditions. Porkpie hat pulled low, shades still on, he growls his signature “Boogie Chillun” and pounds out the beat on his guitar. He follows that with an improvised talking blues about playing in the rain. The audience is mesmerized. I’m
struck by the power of music to reach into people and change them. At the end of the set, a girl climbs onstage and lays a bouquet of flowers at John Lee’s feet.

I
n the spring of 1964, I transferred to the University of Tampa, which turned out to be a town full of astronauts and not much else. I lasted only six months. It was just too straight, too uptight. I moved back to New York and returned to NYU, but continued to make trips to Florida. A friend from Bensonhurst, Bob West, and I would drive south to Miami. Traveling through the South with New York plates could be scary back then. Freedom Riders journeying from the North to help register black voters and fight for civil rights often ran into trouble. My sister was among the activists: When Iris got her law degree, she and her attorney husband, Paul Brest, spent nearly two years in Mississippi, working for the Legal Defense Fund to help enable school desegregation.

Down South, most Northerners—especially longhairs—were looked upon with suspicion. On one trip, when Bob and I were driving a Corvette to Florida, we stopped in South Carolina at a luncheonette. Our hair was pretty long at that point. We sat down at the counter, and while ordering coffee, we noticed a sign on the milk machine that read:
THE EYES OF THE KU KLUX KLAN ARE UPON YOU
. Not really thinking about where we were, we cracked up, which caught the attention of some of the customers. The place heated up quickly, and like in a movie, we ran to our car, a bunch of local boys at our heels. They jumped in a pickup and gave chase, but our Vette easily outran them.

During one of those trips, Bob and I ended up in Coconut Grove, a lazy tropical community just south of Miami. Close to the University of Miami campus, it had an artsy, laid-back vibe, the kind of place where dogs lie down and sleep in the middle of the road. Coconut
Grove was a great revelation to me—it seemed like the perfect place to live.

In late 1965, during my fall semester at NYU, I realized I was done with school. I decided to move to Miami and open a head shop. Having seen my parents take on new businesses, whether they knew that particular line or not, I thought, Why not? I could learn on my feet, like they had. “School is not happening for me,” I told them. “I want to get out into the world.” As usual, they were wary but supportive. I left NYU that semester and spent the spring developing ideas, making contacts, and figuring out just what the head shop was going to be. I sold a little pot to get by, and I had a bank account with four or five thousand dollars in it, mostly made up of my bar mitzvah money and earnings from odd jobs. That gave me enough to buy merchandise, rent a space, and set up a shop.

During my last semester at NYU, I’d reconnected with Ellen Lemisch; we’d originally met as kids at her father’s optometrist shop. Ellen and her identical twin lived in a huge Upper West Side apartment. They rented out rooms, and the place became a crossroads of ideas, with interesting people constantly coming and going. A kind of countercultural salon, there the energy was nonstop. Ellen and I fell in love, and she decided to move to Florida with me. She knew lots of artisans and craftsmen who were creating little stash boxes and all sorts of beautiful things for heads. We started collecting them for the shop.

In the East Village, Jeff Glick, a very hip entrepreneur, had opened the Headshop. Located on East Ninth Street, it was the first of its kind, selling rolling papers, pipes, and other things for heads. Jeff stocked his store with Peter Max’s early posters and other psychedelic art. Peter’s art was famous as a pop phenomenon. A very generous guy, Jeff showed me the ropes of the business and also introduced me to Peter. When I told Peter my plans, he invited me to his Upper West Side apartment to pick out posters for my own store. I guess he was
expecting a big order and rolled out dozens of posters. But, with my minuscule budget, I chose only six. It didn’t faze him, thankfully, and we immediately became close friends—a friendship that’s lasted to this day.

Ellen and I got a roomy drive-away car, packed everything up, and took off for Miami. In the fall of ’66, after searching in vain for a space in Coconut Grove, we found a vacant store in South Miami near the University of Miami. The Head Shop South opened on Sunset Boulevard with rock and roll in the streets. I booked a local band to play and the place was mobbed. The kids in South Florida still looked pretty straight—not a lot of longhairs like in New York and San Francisco—but they were eager to check us out. Unfortunately, so were the chief of police and Wackenhut agents—a notorious private security force that operated like the DEA. On opening day, they showed up, looked around, and the next day shut us down for operating without a license. It was a very conservative right-wing community and we were not exactly their cup of tea.

I took my case to court. During the packed hearing, filled with hostile citizens and a few freaks, a professor from the University of Miami got up to speak in support of my rights. He got carried away and consequently completely buried me. My application for a license was turned down flat. Before I had a chance to appeal, the police chief—originally from the Bronx—called, and we had a very direct off-the-record conversation. “Look,” he said, “this is not New York. This is the conservative South, and they’ll never let you open in a place like this.”

I took his advice and looked again in the Grove to see if a location had opened up. Ellen and I moved into a motel on Bayshore Drive and eventually rented an old wooden bungalow on Twenty-seventh Avenue from a saxophone player named Twig. The Grove was a fascinating mix of tycoons living on gorgeous estates in South Grove and outsiders—artists, craftsmen, musicians, fishermen, smugglers, and a
sprinkling of hippies. Folk music could be heard at the Gaslight, opened by Sam Hood, son of the owner of New York’s Gaslight. The reclusive genius Fred Neil, a native Floridian, had returned to the Grove after living in New York and making a stir in the Village. He was a magnet to singer-songwriters like David Crosby, who often traveled to the Grove to play the Gaslight and hang out with Fred.

Situated on Biscayne Bay, the Grove was as relaxed as South Miami was uptight. In the heart of the Grove, I found a large whitewashed cottage with a porch surrounded by windows where we could display posters. Among my neighbors were Adam Turtle’s woodworking shop, the Ludicios Leather Shop, the studios of sculptors Lester Sperling, Michael “Michelangelo” Alocca, David Dowes, and Grail Douglas and painter Tony Scornavacca. The Grove was also home to Dr. John Lilly’s Dolphin Research Center, set up in an old bank building in the center of town. Lilly’s early research on communicating with dolphins included giving them LSD. He eventually began tripping with them in a saltwater tank built into the main vault of the building.

Having lost my deposit and rent on the South Miami shop, I had expended all my funds. I called my parents and told them I needed a loan, and they agreed with no questions asked. My father arranged for my uncle Sam, my mother’s brother who lived in Miami, to give me $3,500, which my father would reimburse. Sam was beside himself—he could not believe my father was doing this: “What are you, crazy? A
head shop
?”

This time, before opening, I applied for and received a license to operate a “gift shop.” Bob West helped Ellen and me with the store in the beginning. The shop had five rooms, where we displayed our merchandise: glass cases filled with all kinds of smoking paraphernalia, including a variety of rolling papers, Turkish hookahs, and exotic pipes. The poster market had exploded in 1966 and we plastered the walls and ceilings with black-and-white posters of pop-culture icons like the Marx Brothers, Marlon Brando in
The Wild One,
Allen
Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Lenny Bruce. In addition to Peter Max’s posters, we carried the San Francisco artists who created the fantastic handbills for the Fillmore and Family Dog shows. Beaded curtains hung in front of open doorways, and in some rooms strobe lights flickered and black lights glowed, adding a purple hue. We played records nonstop—the Beatles, the Stones, the Mothers of Invention, Dylan, the Byrds. On weekends we did great business. Friday nights were party time, and we’d stay open until midnight. The shop became the gathering place for a growing counterculture in Miami.

When the store was closed, we’d go sailing or hang out at various friends’ places, cook, listen to music, and get high. I’d bought an old VW van, which was perfect for cruising around the Grove. The safari front windows would open out, and we’d take midnight mystical excursions. We would drop acid, get really stoned, and head out to the water or the electric power plant and watch the lights.

I continued to use acid as a tool to explore. An educational experience, it expanded my awareness, and I found a very clear spiritual path. I liked taking people on trips and guiding them. I’d play certain records to create a musical journey. In the beginning, it was jazz albums; then it became the great Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

Eventually, things fell apart between Ellen and me, and she moved back to New York. After a few months, I started seeing Sonya Michael, a local artist. She was a beautiful blonde and in her late twenties. Sonya shared a painting studio with another artist and musician named Don Keider. DK, who played vibes and drums, eventually would be the link between me and my future Woodstock partner Artie Kornfeld. Sonya, DK, and I started a poster company together called Sodo (short for Sonya and Don) Posters. They created gorgeous artwork for black-light posters with names like “Speed,” “Lucy in the Sky,” “Mush
room Mountain,” and “The Trip.” They sold well and we began shipping them to other head shops around the country.

A real scene developed around the shop, and in 1967 an underground newspaper called the
Libertarian Watchdog
set up operations in the back of the store. It didn’t take long for the cops to come around. The police had been hassling me for a while, giving my customers tickets for the slightest things, like jaywalking. It got even worse after the shop and I were featured on a local TV news special called “Marijuana in Miami.” An exposé on youthful drug use in Dade County, it aired on June 13, 1967. They filmed at my shop, and, looking about sixteen on camera, I explained how some of our merchandise could help recreate a psychedelic experience. Some of the pot-smoking interviewees were darkly lit to protect their identities. But I felt we were spearheading a movement in the South, and I wanted to let people know about the shop and what we had to offer.

Soon the shop had a squad of motorcycle cops all its own. They would park on our corner every Friday and Saturday night, writing whatever tickets they could and, whenever possible, arresting me. This went on for several months and after a while I became pretty good friends with several of them. These were decent guys, about my age, and eventually their curiosity got the better of them and we began to talk. One of them, “Bob the Cop,” would later show up to work at Woodstock.

The local politicos became intent on putting a stop to the use of grass, and they hatched a plan for a massive bust all over Coconut Grove. Thanks to a friend who worked in the attorney general’s office, we found out about their plans well in advance, including a search-warrant list of about ninety names and addresses. My shop wasn’t on it, but it included my house on Twenty-seventh Avenue, where I’d hosted the occasional party.

At the time, I had already made plans to move into a house in the lushly tropical South Grove, where the air is heavy with the scent of
jasmine. I’d rented a beautiful Spanish-style adobe house there owned by an old Southern aristocrat named Mary Whitlock. By the time of the massive sweep, I’d moved everything into my new place, except for a few items I’d left behind to “entertain” the cops the night of the planned bust: When they arrived at my Twenty-seventh Avenue address, warrant in hand, they found a record player blasting music and strobe lights flashing nonstop.

We had gotten word to others on the warrant list too, so everyone’s houses were free of contraband, and no one was around to be served with a warrant. While dozens of cop cars bivouacked in the Florida Pharmacy parking lot to head out for a night of arrests, we were all cycling along the streets of Coconut Grove. It was the Keystone Cops rather than
Dragnet
: As a line of police cars raced through the Grove in one direction, an equal number of long-haired cyclists would whiz past them, going the opposite way. They managed to arrest only the two or three people who didn’t get the message.

With the Head Shop South becoming the hub of the Miami underground, I focused on bringing more music to the area. Everyone wanted to see the bands whose albums we were listening to. The first be-in, featuring the Grateful Dead, had taken place in January ’67 at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and soon be-ins were occurring in New York’s Central Park too. I organized a gathering of the tribes for our own little park in the Grove. Some local bands performed, and we got a good turnout. People with acoustic guitars sat around and played; incense and smoke filled the air.