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"Back To The
Garden" by Pete Fornatale; Touchstone (303 pages,
$24.99)
"The Road To
Woodstock" by Michael Lang with Holly
George-Warren; Ecco/Harper Collins (304 pages, $29.99)
———
If you think the media
saturation on Michael Jackson's death is outre, you
should prepare for the gates of pop culture to burst in
mid-August as the 40th anniversary of Woodstock arrives.
Everyone who was there
— or thinks he was — will tell of dropping acid for
a ride with the Jefferson Airplane, skinny-dipping in
communal baths with 400,000 nubile neighbors and waking
up to Jimi Hendrix strangling "The Star Spangled
Banner" out of his electric guitar for the finale
of the three-day festival of music, mud and bad brown
acid.
New Yorker Michael Lang,
who in the '60s owned a head shop in Coconut Grove,
Fla., and who created the Woodstock warmup Miami Pop
Festival in May 1968, helped shape the Woodstock Music
and Art Fair through persistence, charisma and Herculean
organizational savvy. He proves to be a brilliant,
amusing raconteur in "The Road to Woodstock,"
in which he recounts how the festival came together.
The book's detail-laden
flashbacks from organizers and performers such as hippie
goddess Melanie, a newcomer who had no idea what she was
getting into; a cranky Pete Townshend, who blasts ''the
people at Woodstock'' as ''a bunch of hypocrites''; and
a bemused Grace Slick, who recalls singing ''sort of
half asleep,'' are potent enough to give readers a
contact high.
Reading Lang's book can
be a heady experience. He recounts vivid tales of the
early days in the Grove — which he describes as ''an
artsy laid-back vibe, the kind of place where dogs lie
down and sleep in the middle of the road.'' Lang and his
pals spent a lot of time outwitting cops (some corrupt,
others of the Keystone variety). One planned bust of a
pot party went hilariously awry as a tipster alerted
Lang and his cronies to the coming arrests, and word
spread along the Grove grapevine: ''As a line of police
cars raced through the Grove in one direction, an equal
number of longhaired cyclists would whiz past them,
going the opposite way.''
As the leader of a
rag-tag group who had never staged anything of the
magnitude of Woodstock, Lang steadfastly believed in his
vision even as fate conspired against him. Woodstock
wasn't even in Woodstock, N.Y. The location fell through
at the last minute, and as Lang recounts, producers had
to go to nearby Sullivan County. They found a large
field owned by amiable dairy farmer Max Yasgur, who
apparently was someone over 30 whom hippies could trust.
Lang also proves a brisk
storyteller in the later chapters, which describe such
career-making performances as those by newcomer Santana
and Sly & the Family Stone.
''I got to witness the
peak of the festival, which was Sly Stone. I don't think
he ever played that good again — steam was literally
coming out of his Afro,'' guitarist Carlos Santana
recalls. However, not every act rose out of the muck.
The Grateful Dead had problems. ''A combination of the
weather and hallucinogenics proved their undoing,'' Lang
writes.
But chunks in the middle
of "Road" feel an interminable slog — like
the traffic jams that led to the field at Yasgur's farm
— to anyone uninterested in spread sheets and the
headaches with which concert promoters deal. Perhaps
this was Lang's unintended way of making the reader feel
as he did 40 years ago: For every one giddy step
forward, there's a corresponding and frustrating step
back.
Pete Fornatale's
"Back to the Garden" — titled after a line
in Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" — lacks the
peaks and valleys and import of Lang's book. After all,
Fornatale, a veteran New York radio personality, merely
reported on the event. He relies on about 110 sources
— some living (David Crosby, Paul Kantner) and others
dead (Jerry Garcia, Abbie Hoffman) to take readers back
to Yasgur's farm in Bethel ''when the s--- hit the fan
(or, in some cases, when the fans hit the s---'').
Fornatale's belief is
that ''you didn't have to be at Woodstock to be at
Woodstock,'' and his mighty task here is to weave the
recollections to prove that paradox. "Back to the
Garden" is a brisker read than "Road to
Woodstock" as it lacks the minutia that sometimes
makes the reader's eyes glaze in Lang's book. And
Fornatale's conversational style and the assortment of
characters he quotes make for a lively read.
Some have fond stories.
Original Sha Na Na guitarist Henry Gross, who later had
a '70s solo hit about a missing dog
("Shannon"), tells of drinking with Hendrix,
who had also performed at Lang's Miami Pop Festival.
Others were less than enchanted with the shows:
Concertgoer Jim Marion tells of leaving the
rain-drenched festival early. Marion would have a
considerably better time going back to the garden with
these books as guides.
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