Fire and Rain (30 page)

No sooner had summer arrived than they began circling back to their early days, before the gold records and divergent interests. On July 8, the two spent a day at one of Columbia's New York studios, returning to the songs that had first drawn them together. “Barbriallen” (also known as “Barbara Allen”) and “Roving Gambler” had both been covered by the Everly Brothers on
Songs Our Daddy Taught Us
, their collection of traditional and country songs from 1958. Simon took the lead on the third, the Scottish traditional song “Rose of Aberdeen.”

Their love of the Everlys had manifested itself before, both on the road and in the version of “Bye Bye Love” included on
Bridge Over Troubled Water
. At their Royal Albert Hall show in London in April, they'd covered not only the Everlys' “Bye Bye Love” but two other
Songs Our Daddy Taught Us
melodies, “Lightning Express” and “Silver Haired Daddy of Mine.” The new recordings, put down on tape for reasons that were never disclosed, not even to Columbia Records, had a relaxed, coffeehouse-intimate modesty, Simon even joking mid-song in “Roving Gambler” that he could sing it forever. The songs were like Switzerland—neutral ground where they could set aside their differences and revel in a sturdy melody and the sound of their joined voices.

Nine days later, they were driven out to Forest Hills Tennis Stadium for the first of two headlining shows, playing before a total of twenty-eight thousand people. Home to the tennis championship that came to be known as the U.S. Open, the open-air stadium was a mere mile and a half from Simon's childhood house in Flushing. They'd played there before, opening for the Mamas and the Papas in 1966 before graduating to headliners in 1968. With the Mamas and the Papas, they were paid
only $1,000. In another sign of their achievement, they'd now be compensated $50,000 for each of the two nights. They'd also be receiving an unheard-of 90 percent of that money, with the promoter, Leonard Ruskin, only receiving the remaining 10. Before the show began, Lewis went into the office to collect his check. When Ruskin handed Lewis a check for $90,000, Lewis, for a reason he couldn't explain later, thought he should be receiving the full $100,000. “Jesus, is that
all?”
he barked. Ruskin reached over and grabbed Lewis' collar, screaming at him.

Otherwise, the first night was business, and music, as usual. With Simon wearing a Yankees cap for hometown flavor, they played a set that, more than any other, delved through their musical and shared history. While still avoiding revivals of “Hey, Schoolgirl” or other leftovers from their Tom and Jerry days, they sang a playful version of Dion's swooning doo-wop classic “A Teenager in Love” and combined “Cecilia” with “Bye Bye Love.” Garfunkel shone on “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her,” Simon's song about the search for ideal love (although Garfunkel once told a friend it was about drugs). Garfunkel's voice sounded especially dreamy and willowy, Simon's guitar ripples imitating the drizzling rain evoked in his lyrics.

On cue, Larry Knechtel emerged from the wings and began playing “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Knechtel, who'd been born and raised in the sketchy, roughneck town of Bell, California, glanced around and saw a young, clearly educated crowd, the men sporting neckties. Not very rock and roll, he thought, but then, neither were his two bosses. Knechtel glanced over at Garfunkel, and the lights shining down on Garfunkel's head made it look as if a halo had encircled his head. After Knechtel left the stage, they closed, appropriately, with “Old Friends.”

Other than Lewis' tussle with Ruskin, both shows at the stadium went off without incident. The concerts were so uneventful that neither the
New York Times
,
Daily News,
nor the
New York Post
bothered to publish reviews. Just before Simon and Garfunkel walked offstage the first night,
Garfunkel's girlfriend Linda Grossman took out a camera. As the moon came up over the stage—poetically recalling the “moon rose over an open field” line in “America”—she aimed and clicked. Later, she discovered the roll of film hadn't been wound correctly inside the camera, and she was left with nothing. Undocumented on all fronts, their music and image slipped away with the night.

“Welcome, brothers and sisters,” read the fliers handed to those entering Downing Stadium on Randall's Island. “This concert belongs to the people.” The same night as Simon and Garfunkel's first Forest Hills show, the New York Pop concerts were firing up forty miles north, on a lumpyshaped, barely one-square-mile island on the East River between Manhattan and Queens. Tens of thousands began swarming across bridges from the boroughs—the one from Queens over a narrow strait appropriately called Hell Gate—to reach the festival grounds. While Simon and Garfunkel sang at their venue, the lineup at New York Pop promised to rattle Downing Stadium to its aging, concrete rafters. Jimi Hendrix, Mountain, and Ten Years After were on the bill, as were newer bands with younger followings, Grand Funk Railroad and Jethro Tull.

The previous summer, a young, curly-topped promoter and hustler named Michael Lang had called Lewis to gauge Simon and Garfunkel's interest in playing Woodstock, the festival Lang was co-organizing upstate. Lewis told him the two men were having “real problems” staying together and fulfilling their obligations. The day before the festival was set to begin, they were supposed to be in the studio laboring over “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright.” Lewis even hinted they might not last much longer as a duo. As a result, Simon and Garfunkel missed out on the major rock and roll event of 1969.

Since then, the rock festival had become an entrenched part of the concert circuit, with promoters both reputable and otherwise casting about for a sequel to Woodstock. Even though that festival was almost a year old, its cultural—and financial—shadow was now beginning to reveal itself. The three-hour film of the event, released in theaters in March, was on its way to grossing a stunning $13 million. Its soundtrack had had three hundred thousand initial orders—huge numbers for a three-LP set with a high list price—and was the number 1 album in the country by July. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's version of “Woodstock” had been a radio hit in the spring. The Woodstock brand was in place to such a degree that when Long Island University announced a “Woodstock Reunion” show on campus that summer of 1970 featuring Tim Hardin and Melanie, the dean received a cease-and-desist letter from Lang's Woodstock Ventures ordering them to stop using the name.

Each week seemed to bring an announcement of a new multi-day, multi-performer festival in Hawaii, Illinois, Florida, even Japan. Sometimes the festivals announced their lineups, sometimes not. Even when they didn't, plenty of optimistic fans mailed away for tickets, assuming the event was legit and the promoters would live up to their promises.

As organizers soon learned as the 1970 concert season began, outdoor festivals that stretched out over days were rarely smooth-running machines. At Florida's Winter's End festival in the spring, rainfall was so heavy that a lake formed between the one hundred thousand ticket buyers and the facilities. The medical team on duty had to build a makeshift raft out of plywood and inner tubes in order to reach fans, including many topless girls who wound up with sunburned breasts. Keeping male concertgoers out of
that
tent itself posed a challenge to the doctors on duty.

Yet by the summer, downpours were the least of anyone's problems. The mere thought of tens or hundreds of thousands of semi-clad kids descending upon their areas sent local officials and police around the country
in search of any means possible to avoid traffic jams, drug taking, and skinny-dipping. New Jersey lawyers began looking into laws to “regulate” rock festivals. Authorities in Middlefield, Connecticut, filed injunctions against a planned festival at the Powder Ridge ski resort. Although no performers were allowed to play, the fifty thousand who showed up nonetheless stayed, camping out and indulging in vast quantities of drugs on a hillside. The same scenario went down at a planned “Bach to Rock” festival in New York's Catskills. After a chaotic Soldier's Field show in July featuring the MC5, Leon Russell, and twenty thousand people, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley nixed all planned shows in his parks. A Hawaiian “World Peace Festival” was canceled before it even began after community groups fearing another Woodstock—or, worse, Altamont—shut it down. Organizers at an outdoor show in Aix-en-Provence, France, worked around a similar ban by redubbing the show a “prolonged concert” and avoiding the “festival” tag altogether.

Even when the festivals took place without incident—as they did in Indiana and Iowa—a cranky, unpleasant haze hung over them. After fans heard about the successfully crashed gates at Woodstock, a rallying cry began: Admission to such events should be free! The protest made no sense, since everyone knew the performers needed to be paid to make a living, but the cry went out nonetheless. In Amsterdam, seventy thousand barged into the Holland Pop Festival without forking over a cent, much to the annoyance of the twenty-seven thousand who had. Outside the gates of the Atlanta International Pop Festival in Byron, Georgia, over the July 4th weekend, fans chanted, screamed, and demanded to be let in without tickets. Fearing a catastrophic battle, the promoters reluctantly agreed, and ten thousand streamed in. Even as Duane Allman was leading the Allman Brothers Band through a stunning set, Lester Maddox, the state's cantankerous governor, introduced a bill in the state legislature to ban future festivals, denouncing the skinny-dippers as “immoral.”

John Brower, the Canadian promoter who'd attempted to launch the
Music and Peace Conference with John Lennon, settled for a three-day Strawberry Fields Festival at a raceway in Ontario, Canada. By calling it a motorcycle race with “added entertainment,” Brower and his partners were able to circumvent government interference and a planned shutdown. But even then, only 65,000 of the 150,000 who descended upon the campground to hear Sly and the Family Stone, Grand Funk Railroad, Mountain, Jethro Tull, and others actually paid. The festival ended up losing over $1 million.

At New York Pop—the name “festival” was avoided to ward off any interference—the problems began even before the gates opened. Randall's Island had once housed an orphanage and an asylum; in 1936, in time for the American Olympics trials, an outdoor stadium was built on the grounds. A month before New York Pop, Brave New World Productions, which was organizing the event, was hit with a list of demands by an ad-hoc coalition of the Young Lords—Spanish Harlem's answer to the Black Panthers—and a group of New York Yippies dubbing themselves the RYP/Off Collective. The extensive list included bail funds, defense money for Black Panthers trials, and free tickets for Spanish Harlem residents who couldn't afford them. (The festival wasn't overly pricey: $8.50 for one night, $15.00 for two, and $31.00 for all three.) If Brave New World didn't agree, the radicals would essentially ruin the festival—badmouthing it, telling everyone it was free—and the promoters reluctantly agreed to many of the demands.

With its cinderblock seats and dirt field, Downing Stadium wasn't a particularly scenic locale, and the festival, starting Friday, July 17, only seemed to grow gnarlier by the hour. As thousands set upon the gates, the promoters had no choice but to give in or risk mass injuries. The locks were removed, and tens of thousands bulldozed in without paying. Inside, an announcement on the PA warned concertgoers of bad acid making its way around the field, and a woman claiming to be a member of the renamed Weather Underground alerted the crowd that the group
would attack a “symbol of American justice” shortly after the festival ended. Security was being provided by the radical collective, not police, leading to disorganization both in the crowd and backstage. “There were lots of good vibes,” remembered Jimi Hazel, a teenage Bronx rock fan taken to the festival by his older brother, “and then you'd come across something.”

Onstage late that first night, Hendrix was visibly unnerved by the jittery crowd and a malfunctioning sound system. “The equipment was picking up radio frequencies through the amps,” Hazel recalled. “Some Spanish cab driver would come out of the amp.” During “Foxey Lady,” Hendrix turned to drummer Mitch Mitchell and exhaled a tired “whew.” After trudging his way through a set, Hendrix told the crowd, “Fuck you, and good night,” and left the stage.

When word began to spread that the promoters might not be able to pay them, many acts scheduled to play the second night—Delaney and Bonnie, Indian music composer and sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, and Richie Havens—either stayed in Manhattan or visited the site and left without getting anywhere near the stage. The heat and humidity soared on the second day, adding to the strain. Adhering to their increasingly erratic behavior, Sly and the Family Stone, the planned headliner for the third night, was a no-show. When New York Pop finally tumbled to a close, organizers dubbed it a financial debacle.