Category Archives: Woodstock Music and Art Fair

Music et al, Music of the 60s, Woodstock Music and Art Fair

Big Brother Holding Company Album

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Big Brother Holding Company album

Big Brother Holding Company album

“Call On Me” by Big Brother  The Holding Company
Their first album released on August 12, 1967

Monterey International Pop Music Festival

Big Brother Holding Company Janis Joplin

The audiences’ applause to their performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival still echoed when Mainstream Records released Big Brother’s eponymous Big Brother and the Holding Company album.

DA Pennebaker and the festival’s organizers had to convince the band to perform twice, after it had refused to let Pennebaker’s team film their first performance.

In the end, it was Janis Joplin that Leacock-Pennebaker, the film company, put on their movie’s poster.

Big Brother Holding Company album

Big Brother and the Holding Company

The personnel on their first album was not to be the same group that played at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair two years later. By then, Joplin’s musical journey had brought her to other places with other musicians.

Personnel

This album’s band was:

  • Janis Joplin – vocals
  • Peter Albin – bass guitar
  • Sam Andrew – guitar, vocals
  • David Getz – drums
  • James Gurley – guitar, vocals
Track listing

And the songs were:

Side One

  • Bye, Bye Baby
  • Easy Rider
  • Intruder
  • Light is Faster Than Sound
  • Call On Me
 Side Two

  • Women is Losers
  • Blindman
  • Down on Me
  • Catepillar
  • All is Lonliness

Band members wrote all but three of the songs which they recorded in December 1966–before Monterey Pop. The songs are AM-radio length, that is, all are under three minutes, one, Blindman, less than two minutes. A far cry from what Big Brother and most other so-called underground bands evolved into.

Big Brother Holding Company album

Future Joplin

It would be the Cheap Thrills album with its iconic R Crumb cover that put Big Brother on the musical map in terms of recordings.

If people didn’t already know of the band’s power through the Monterey film, the cover alone enticed them to purchase the album. An album with each song over four minutes, one over five, and and famous “Ball and Chain” coming in at 9:02.

Ironically, three years later to the day was Janis Joplin’s last concert performance. You will often see it listed as taking place in Boston, but it was actually in Cambridge in Harvard Stadium.

From the Boston.com site: Scheafer Beer co-sponsored a summer concert series at Harvard Stadium along with the city of Boston’s “Summerthing’’ arts initiative, a program launched in 1968 to help “cool off’’ the city in the heat of the summer. The stadium could fit more than 35,000 attendees, but these events were limited to 10,000 and a $2 ticket fee per person. By 1970, the lineup was nothing to sneeze at: Highlights included The Grateful Dead, Miles Davis, Ike and Tina Turner, Van Morrison, B.B. King, and The Supremes.

The show was delayed because equipment was stolen, but to their credit, Bill Hanley and his crew regrouped and replaced and the show went on.

Big Brother Holding Company album
Festivals, Music et al, Woodstock Music and Art Fair

Almost Woodstock

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Almost Woodstock

Almost Woodstock

Woodstock Ventures was on the gasping last lap of getting their festival set up whether they liked it or not Having to physically move what they could from Wallkill to Bethel and  having to redo much of what they had already done there took patience, fortitude, and good fortune.

Almost Woodstock

Monday 11 August 1969

  • John Roberts was one of the four partners of Woodstock Ventures. His family owned Block Pharmaceutical and his trust fund financed the festival.  As of that afternoon’s accounting, Woodstock Ventures had posted receipt of advance ticket sales totaling $1,107,936. Woodstock Ventures (i.e., John Roberts) had spent nearly twice that sum
  • workers bolted telephone poles into place around stage. Some poles were split or rotten.
  • Woodstock Ventures came to agreement with William Filippini for use of Filippini Pond. The agreement may have been $5000.
Almost Woodstock Music Art Fair

Tuesday 12 August 1969

Continued legal challenges
  • festival representatives met with the state supreme court justice regarding complaints by local businesses about the festival’s impact on them.  After reassurances and explanations, local businesses dropped all complaints.
  • the main concession providing food was Food for Love was not yet ready.
Almost Woodstock

Wednesday 13 August 1969

More issues
  • nearly 30,000 people had shown up for festival and were in the “bowl.” Bill Hanley,  sound-man extraordinaire [see also Last Seat],  pulled his sound truck into the service road behind the stage, plugged in some equipment to a portable amplifier, and piped prerecorded music for the crowd.
  • staff technicians noticed a drop in water pressure throughout site. Audience members had accidentally stepped on and cracked plastic pipes. Staff made repairs.
  • John Roberts, with his father and brother, arrived on site to discover that there were no ticket booths for the 30,000 people already on-site.
  • the suit against the festival was withdrawn after a promise of police protection for the residents was agreed to.
  • construction of the pedestrian bridge over West Shore Road trapped the $200 an hour crane. 
  • NYC Police Commissioner Howard Leary reminded all NYC police officers: no  “moonlighting.”
  • NY State Police “randomly” stopped and frisked young people in cars at the Harriman interchange on NY State Thruway. Drivers, passengers, and cars were checked for anything illegal.
Almost Woodstock

Thursday 14 August 1969

The day before
  • NY State Police continue to randomly stop and frisk young drivers at the Harriman interchange. 150 arrests made.
  • Bill Hanley’s sound system erected. “According to one expert’s eye, the hi-fi equipment in the bowl represented the most expensive sound system ever assembled at one time in any given location.”
  • Bill Abruzzi, doctor hired to take care of medical issues at the festival, told festival to triple his supply order.
  • although warned not to, about 270 NYC police arrived but insisted Woodstock Ventures pay cash. They worked using aliases.
  • Food For Love demanded all profits after repaying the initial $75,00 fee. Woodstock Ventures agreed.
  • film deal reached: 50% split. Warner Brothers and Woodstock Ventures after negative costs. On Friday, Michael Wadleigh signed on as director.
  • the Diamond Horseshoe, where nearly 200 Woodstock staff had been staying, caught fire.  Hotel staff extinguished the fire because the fire department couldn’t get through.

Is there gas in the car?

Yes there’s gas in the car!

You are still an outlaw in their eyes

Almost Woodstock

Festivals, Today in history, Woodstock Music and Art Fair

Hugh Romney Arrives

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Hugh Romney Arrives

August 7, 1969
Woodstock Music and Art Fair

Hugh Romney Wavy Gravy Arrives

Hugh Romney Arrives

Not Your Ordinary Clown

According to his site, “Wavy Gravy is not your ordinary clown. He certainly has had a long run since his earlier days as a poet and stand-up comic, improvisational theater artist, psychedelic bus caravan luminary, and rock concert MC, and often jokes: “if you don’t have a sense of humor, it just isn’t funny anymore.” 

A week away

Woodstock Ventures had made the move from Wallkill, NY in Orange County to Bethel, NY in Sullivan County. Plans already in place for the festival wherever it was continued apace.

One of those plans was, of course, for food. Ventures had hired Food for Love to provide food, but it had also hired members of the Hog Farm to do general set up and provide food as well.

Some members drove in a Further-type bus from New Mexico to Bethel. Others took the chartered flight Woodstock Ventures paid for from Albuquerque (Al-buh-quirky) to JFK in NYC.

The Museum at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts that today sits on and around the festival’s field rented from Max Yasgur  displays the manifest from that flight. The #1 name is Hugh Romney.

Hugh Romney

33-year-old Hugh Nanton Romney arrived at JFK on August 7, 1969 after a reportedly mythical flight. It was, according to Tom Wolfe in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Romney who came up with the idea of putting LSD in Kool-Aid at the Merry Pranksters’ Acid Test parties in 1965. Apparently someone in the Hog Farm used that same recipe for the flight.

Hog Farm

The Hog Farm was the commune that Romney and his wife Bonnie Beecher was at the center of. It originated in Los Angeles, but after an eviction, relocated to a hog farm in  in Tujunga, California. The deal was labor in exchange for free rent.

In 1969, the commune was in  Llano, New Mexico. Thus the flight from Albuquerque.

Hugh Romney Arrives

The Activist Clown

Hugh Romney was a political activist and authorities often beat and mistreated demonstrators. Romney thought that if he dressed as a clown, authorities would be less likely to hit him. It worked.

Sometimes.

Arrival

When Hugh Romney and his fellow commune-ists disembarked, the NY media were there.  They asked him a question that he had to ad lib an answer to because he didn’t know, as the media asked, how he intended to be part of the festival’s security?

Romney said he would have a “Please Force.” Media followed up: how would he be that? “Cream pies and seltzer bottles.”

The obvious answer for a clown.

Hugh Romney Arrives

While most people speaking of Woodstock and those who became known from their participation in it refer to Romney as Wavy Gravy, he was not known by that moniker. Yet.

If one watches the Woodstock movie, you’ll hear him referred to as Hugh several times during the film. It was Hugh Romney who spoke to the media at JFK. It was Hugh Romney who told the festival crowd about “…breakfast in bed for 400,000.”

Wavy Gravy

It was not until the Texas International Pop Festival in Lewisville, TX two weeks later that after a conversation with him, BB King reportedly referred to Romney as Wavy Gravy.

A name like that stuck to a character like Romney.

Hugh Romney Wavy Gravy Arrives
Wavy Gravy at the City Winery in 2014 speaking about his life and times (photo by J Shelley)
Hugh Romney Arrives

Nowadays

His site shows that Wavy is very much an active person giving lectures and participating in music events as well as being a big part of the annual summer Camp Winnarainbow Kids Camp.

Quite the classic clown.

Hugh Romney Arrives