It was a festival.

It was a festival.

We almost didn’t go to Powder Ridge on Thursday, July 30th, because the reports between the Blood, Sweat and Tears singles on the radio were ominous. 'There would be road blocks’, ‘there was a huge traffic jam’, ‘National Guardsmen were just waiting to. spring on the youth assembling in Meridan, Connecticut’. The locals were really trying to stop the kids from coming. But Danny Fields, Loraine Alterman, Henry Edwards and I figured that it would be an adventure, and wanted to go even more. All the beautiful children were sure to be there even though a court injunction had been handed down three days before preventing the actual music festival from taking place.

State Superior Court Judge Aaron J. Palmer had issued the injunction because the people in the town felt the festival was a “public nuisance”. Janis Joplin, Richie Havens, Sly & The Family Stone, Grand Funk RR, Ten Years After, Ten Wheel Drive, and Melanie would not appear (although all week long Michael Goldstein, a highly unpopular New York press agent who was the front for the promoters, Middleton Arts, was on television saying the festival was on and that the kids should come). State Attorney Vincent J. Scamporino enforced the injunction, and on Wednedsay, July 29th, Louis Zemel, one of the owners of the ski area where the festival was to have been held, announced that the acts could not go on. The Zemel Brothers are apparently unpopular in Meridan, Conn. Reportedly in the thirties they supported unpopular causes like Pete Seeger, and recently they tried to obtain visas to Cuba. Oh you know, once the kids got there the townspoeple would be nice to them and give them water and let them sit on their lawns and say how polite they were for a bunch of freaks, but the real power in the area is the Catholic Church and a handful of people who own most of the property and they weren’t having any of it. Woodstock backlash. The Middleton Arts people, who never actually presented themselves (thus leading to Mafia rumours) ran, leaving the Zemels and the kids holding the bag.

Anyway our trip up was beautiful, with Dead and Stooges and Velvets and Groovies tapes and no traffic jams. We got to the Holiday Inn in Meridan two hours after leaving New York. At the Inn were a battery of newsmen, camera crews and a lot of kids with sleeping bags and knapsacks. “How far is it to the site?” “Oh . . . it’s pretty far . . . and there are road blocks all around. But if you walk you can get through.”

Baron Wolman of Rags told us that you needed a resident or emergency pass for your car in order to be able to drive in and out, and we had to go to the Middlefield Town Hall to get that. We had to talk our way through two road blocks to get to the town hall to see the FIRST SELECTMAN who would give us the required pass. The FIRST SELECTMAN was out, no one knew where, and the ladies there didn’t know when he would be back. None of them ever heard of any of the papers we said we were from, (including the straight New York Magazine) so there was nothing they could do to help us. The pass could only be issued by the FIRST SELECTMAN.

We decided to try and talk our way through some more road blocks. The Connecticut State Troopers seemed ok, they were incredibly harried and hassled (“I came here from five hours away, don’t know this area at all, and they told me to do a job,” one of them apologized) and they let us through. As we approached the site we were immediately caught up in festival fever . . . hundreds of kids camping out in tents, on blankets, walking with knapsacks, smoking, laughing, crashing. There would have been no chance that this would have been anything but a free festival, (“If you don’t have a ticket .don’t come,” said Michael Goldstein over and over on television that week). The gates were scanty, and besides all festivals are free. It was a ski area that could have held about 25,000 comfortably, and 50,000 were encouraged to come. This had been advertised as the big one for 1970.

The people here were the younger brothers and sisters of the Woodstock audience, but very definitely a part of Woodstock nation. The average age seemed to be about 17... many of them missed out on Woodstock, and they damn well weren’t going to miss out on this one. The kids didn’t even seem to be the well heeled children of the middle class playing hippie for the weekend, well at least most of them didn’t, there were a lot of travelling families and collectives who have made a definite committment to this lifestyle.

We walked about half a mile from where we parked our car, to the main area where the stage, first aid center and pond were. The first day everyone was swimming in the pond. That was before it was revealed that the pond was horribly polluted and the price of cooling off might be hepatitis. Powder Ridge Puddle was uninhabited from then on. The stage was empty. Completely. Nothing was on it, and the slope looking down to it was filled with people staring at its barren expanse. Danny Fields said, “This is so unbelievably sad. Why do they want to do this to their children?” I thought the most pathetic thing was that the kids really believed that if they just held onto the land they would be given their music. “I KNOW that Sly and Ten Years After are up here”, one girl told me. “I know they are. They’ll be here. You’ll see.” And the kids kept coming in a delightful defiance of the law. I asked some people if they really felt that their stars were so responsible to them that they would risk arrest and sing for free for them. “Well we’re going to have to start supporting the people who care about us,” said John Millet, leader of the Fish Fry Family. “If groups won’t come and play for us for free at festivals, and the record companies can’t aid in this, then we’ll have to stop buying their records.”

At one point Thursday afternoon someone walked across the stage with a broom, and people started buzzing . . . something was about to happen . . . people came running from all over, from the other side of the pond, down from the tent-dotted hills, . . . yelling and cheering . . . happy. “We’re gonna get our MUSIC, man!” . . . and nothing happened. The injunction clearly prevented anything musical from going down on that stage.

That night the Zemels were arrested with Bill Hanley for defying the injunction by allowing electricity, water, and phone lines to get through the site. They were released a few hours after the arrest, and the utilities kept on flowing. But the music blackout was being enforced.

At least until Friday. By Friday afternoon the kids began to come alive. All the talk about self-sufficiency and controlling ones’ own destiny was realized. The Peace Rock people started generating their own electricity from Mister Softee trucks, built alternate stages away from the forbidden main one, and local bands came to play. Two of them, Jelba from New Haven, and Goodhill from Bridgeport played to wildly enthusiastic crowds. Someone remarked that the 1910 Fruitgum Company could have come and been received well. There were about 30,000 kids at Powder Ridge by now.

There sure were some beautiful kids there. Rita from the Fish Fry Family (who turned out to be a former student of Henry’s) led us down through the woods to a lake where people could swim without fear of illness. After we stepped over thebarbed wire surrounding it, the lake was quiet and peaceful. Then some state troopers came in, their fingers aloft in peace symbols, faced the nude bathers and dope smokers and announced that the man who owned the property wanted us off, but if we went over a hill and a few feet away we would find another nice swimming area where we would be undisturbed. It was much more of a peace symbol crowd than a fist crowd to begin with, so the troopers were received cordially and everyone tried very hard not to give off any bad vibrations.

Since our car had been towed away the night before because we parked in a “restricted” area, we didn’t take it up to the site anymore. (Danny spent until three in the morning trying to locate the car, and finally got a taxi to take him to retrieve it. He had to pay $15.00 for the taxi, another $15 to get the car out. As the man at the service station pulled out a wad of bills he remarked that he hadn’t had that much money when he had come into work in the morning. He then went on to say, “Man, what a bummer. It’s really a drag that these kids have to get hassled and can’t have their music.”)

So we bummed rides with the establishment press from New York, people from the Times and the Post. All these older men who reluctantly go to cover rock festivals and who are looking for the bad trips so they can scare everyone’s parents. They also were obsessed with reporting about body odor and shit smells. Danny observed that they had their heads in the toilet bowl so much that they could only smell shit. One item in one of the New York newspapers said that Powder Ridge was beginning to take on visual aspects of Atlantic City, like all the old people just shuffling around with a vacant, bored expression on their faces. That reporter obviously knows little about being stoned and happy and into yourself and quiet.

There was a boring press conference held Friday afternoon to brief us on all of the up to date happenings. Mr. Zemel told us that he wanted at all costs to avoid a “confrontation”, and there would be no attempt to remove the people off the premises. As if anyone would have left ... if we left it would have meant that they had won. The Zemels admitted also to having a film crew of their own on the site, and hoped to make a movie of the event that would help them to make back some of the money they had lost whenthe promoters split. The reporters asked a lot of questions about whether the toilets were working, how the garbage was being collected, and what the food situation was. A store had been set up next to the first aid station (you could look through a big glass window and see the bad trips while you were buying packages of rice, soup, cookies), and food and joints were being sold. There were several Mister Softee trucks on the premises that were continuously being asked by the authorities to leave (no business of any kind was supposed to be going on) and watermelon was being sold at twenty-five cents a slice, if you had the money, otherwise it was free. Women stood by the Mister Softee trucks and asked for change for the “free kitchen”. Rita told me, “We’ve been eating macaroni and stuff that our family takes with us and it’s really getting to be a drag. So last night I panhandled over $6.00 in one hour. That’s not bad, earning $6.00 an hour!! You see, everything at the Mister Softee trucks is either 25 or 50 cents. You look for people with dollar bills. They have to be getting change, and they can’t really say they don’t have any, right? We got $6.00 and bought everybody in our family ice creams!” Everyone was sharing food, dope, cigarettes.

I have never seen so much dope sold openly. One boy told me that even though he was ripped off for the twenty dollar ticket he didn’t mind because he could make so much selling grass that it would all be worth it. Announcements were made that the brown acid was bad . . . someone’s wife had a baby and we were all godparents ... all extra psychedelics should be donated to the free kitchen. It was a festival.

Except the promoters were a bit guilty that it wasn’t the kind of festival that they had sold tickets for. A statement was read over the P.A. system that a series of concerts would be held later in August at Yankee Stadium that would have all the acts who were supposed to be at Powder Ridge, and the tickets would be honored there. THAT was greeted with general laughter and disbelief. Later on it was made known that Yankee Stadium turned the whole plan down. They know a loser when they see one.

Friday Melanie came up. Perhaps everyone didn’t know she was there; for about 10,000 kids however, she made it a little brighter. One boy saw her walking, carrying her guitar and wearing a long, satin embroidered dress and asked, “Melanie are you going to sing?” She smiled yes. “Isn’t that illegal?,” the Times’ reporter asked her. “How can‘singing be illegal?”, Melanie replied. “Out of sight!”, the boy yelled, “that means we’ve made it!”

Melanie walked with her manager and some other people to an improvised stage near the free kitchen. Goodhill was on and Melanie was told that she could go on in a half hour. She wasn’t announced but the crowd assembled on the slope in front of the stage (about 10,000 people) were told that a surprise had come. Melanie then took off for about an hour. No one could find her. Finally she was located in a field singing in the dark to about a hundred people. “How can you tell her to leave the field,” Danny demanded. “Are you going to tell her she has a more important gig somewhere else?” Her manager Stan Poses solved the problem by inviting everyone to go back to the stage to hear Melanie sing. Surrounded by fans and flashlights, Melanie made her way back to the stage, and when she crossed the platform, there was a huge roar of approval.

She sang “Lay Down, Candles in The Rain”, her song about Woodstock. She sang “Beautiful People” and everyone raised their clasped hands together in the air. She sang “Peace Will Come”, which is her new single. She and all the people sang Mungo Jerry’s “In The Summertime”. She sang her song about not eating animals and “Close To It All”. A hundred different colored balloons were thrown out into the crowd by someone. It was all very hokey and corny and it worked. No matter how much of a publicity stunt people may have thought it was, no matter how much you may not like Melanie (and I never did before that weekend) she came there. As much as this became a festival that had nothing to do with stars, the kids were starved for someone FAMOUS and someone special to make them feel that it was all worth it. She was famous and she came and sang for free and she was the only one who did.

Of course in the end it was the kids really being the stars that made Powder Ridge happen in a way that Woodstock didn’t. It was a people’s festival, perhaps the first, and we had a fucking great time.

Lisa Robinson