I wasn’t at the Woodstock Wood- stock. But I was at the Texas Woodstock . Less than two weeks after the tribes left Max Yasgur’s farm, they regathered in the heart of Texas, and I was there. The Chronicle sent me to Lewisville, a prototype of a little Ne- West town near Dallas, On Saturday Aug. 30, 1969. I was standing on the banks of a reservoir at a Corps of Engineers’ campground watching rednecks watching the early arrival hippie skinny-dipping.
An editorial in the Dallas Morning News that morning greeted the tribes. Young people assembling to hear music is one thing. Young people assem- bling in unspeakable costumes, half- naked, barefoot, defying propriety and scurrying morality is another. Where do these people come from? Where had they sprung, and when they went back around the country, were they merely regarded as? There were three days of music, Friday, Monday, Labor Day. The crowd estimates averaged about 100,000. I don’t remember who was positioned as the headliner. At this distance, the only performer I remember is Janis Joplin. I watched from a plywood slab on the side of the stage. She did everything in excess, overdone while the people gathered, spoke unintelligibly between songs, swigged from a bottle of liquor.
As they had at Woodstock, members of the Hog Farm, a New Mexico com- mune, set up a trip tent at Lewisville and insured those who were having a bad trip or needed medical attention Whatever went on up in New York has now become known as “Woodstock” The Texas International Pop Festival was never known as “Lewisville” The length of time it was remembered, with- in, stretching it, may have been as long as Sept. 21, when my story appeared in Texas magazine.
I called it. The story, “Freak Meets West” Excerpts are printed here
Popfest Texas style: That’s it. That’s all. I’ve seen everything. A small-Texas-town cop who stood on a stage, shot the peace sign to about 90,000 hippies and said “Okay, anyone who needs to smoke on some kind of grass, smoke” and said “any time you want to come back, you’re welcome”
This happened—I swear it did— Labor Day weekend at the Texas Inter- national Pop Festival. A community, population 10,000, Little Bethel. Son of Woodstock, Freak Meets West 15 miles north of Dallas at a motor speedway and five miles away at the Garza-Little Elm Reservoir campground.
Pop festivals have been around only a couple of years, and it wasn’t until Woodstock that the pop festival proto- col was really solidified. Previously, pop festivals had been like jazz festi- vals; one undergoes a certain amount of privation — crowding, uncomfortable seating, expensive tickets, scarcity of housing — to be able to hear a lot of artists back to back. At Woodstock, however, where 400,000 turned up when the promoters expected maybe 150,000 tops, the whole festival environment became the thing. The music was secondary. You probably couldn’t hear it because you couldn’t sit close enough, or you never got there to begin with. But you were part of the Experience, part of the Presence. The more freaks the better. You were there at the Gathering of the Great God Almighty, for one time there was more of You than there was of Them.
The national press thought this was an epochal event. Big spreads in Life. On Huntley-Brinkley, The Festival Style was set. So the people coming to Lewis- ville knew what to do.
The main thing was no hassles that would upset the fuzz. No breaking up
things, beating up on each other or the local yokels. The idea was to keep the cops out of the festival area so that no one would get busted for pot or hard stuff. The cops were willing to trade drugs for no hassles. With that crowd, the ogt couldn’t handle the hassles. So no hassles.
Freaks Meet Cowboys: If the pop festival wasn’t enough, the Lewisville Rodeo was in town that weekend. By Sunday, the road from IH 35E to the campgrounds, where a good 2,500 festi- val goers had crashed, was half-and-half with psychedelic VW buses and bashed- up Chevy pickups with gun racks and U.S. flag decals. The cowboys were coming to eyeball the freaks.
Out on the water, a good 100 freaks were skinny-dipping. There had been nude swimming at Woodstock, so there had to be nude swimming at Lewisville. Up on the bank, two cowboys from the rodeo were watching. They were drink- ing Pearl and watching. There weren’t that many girls swimming nekkid, said one like. But it was better than TV back at the motel.
“Get the cowboys” cried one of the skinny-dippers, and about 15 naked, giggling freaks emerged from the water and began to take off the cowboys’ clothes. The cowboys kept their bottles of Pearl and walked into the water. They were grub white from the waist down. The ground hurt their feet.
The sky was black with Cessnas buzz- ing within 15 feet of the freaks. The water offshore was black with the boats. It seemed every square inch of campground not occupied by a freak was occupied by a ’68 Ford Fairlane. The motor was running, the windows were up, the air-conditioner was run- ning, the doors were locked, and the people inside had the same look of passivity and awe that they would have if they were parked on a bluff viewing the Trinity River in a raging flood.
Down by the bank, a whole family had turned up in a Chevy and Cowboys had lawn chairs for the truck bed, a cooler full of beer and Coke, and binoculars. A girl sunbathing naked had her back to them. When another freak told her she was being watched, she turned around to face them.
Get used to getting naked. There. At the freak fest, they liked Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter and Led Zeppelin. But they were crazy about being naked.
Near the belly-painting tent, a guy in cut-offs, long-haired but shaved at the sides, had a boot in each hand, asked “Hey man, do you know where I can buy a straight cigarette?”
Jeff Millar is a member of the Chronicle staff.
