Never send your son on the road

Part One of a series: Motels I have known

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It was a frigid evening in 1974 when I set out to cover the last concert on the Bob Dylan and the Band tour, scheduled to take place on February 14.  I departed for the coast a few days early so I could get my bearings once I got out there.  I was flying Pan Am out of JFK.  When I showed up at the gate, I spied my friend Chip Monck in the waiting area.  You will probably remember Chip’s voice better than the man himself.  He was the stage manager at Woodstock, the guy whose bass voice boomed from the speakers – and on the soundtrack album – warning concertgoers to stay away from “the brown acid, man” because it was causing some bad trips.

I had met Chip in June of 1969 when the planning for Woodstock had just begun.  The concert offices were on 7th Avenue, just up the street from the old Village Voice offices on Sheridan Square at the corner of Christopher and 7th.  I attended the first Woodstock press conference, held at the Village Gate by Arnie Kornfeld and Michael Lang, two of the rock ‘n roll operators who conceived of the event and had opened the office on 7th Avenue.  It was what you would call a total counterculture press conference.  Kornfeld and Lang sat on a Persian carpet on the stage in the room that was called “Upstairs at the Gate,” attired as I recall in peasant shirts and blue jeans and leather Jesus sandals.  They spent about a hour telling the sparse crowd of print  journalists and television reporters who had turned out how groovy the concert was going to be, man.  The famous Woodstock poster of a dove perched on the neck of a guitar hung behind them. 

After the press conference, Michael Lang, the more voluble of the two, invited a few of us back to the Woodstock offices to hang out and have a closer look at what they planned.  That’s where I met Chip, a tall, lanky guy with long hair and a full, droopy mustache right out of ‘30’s western movie.  Lang was a speedy little guy, a born promoter, bragging about how many tickets they had sold – it was then in the low thousands – and how many they expected to sell, in the tens of thousands at that time as I recall.  Chip was the prototype of the laid-back hippie.  He was in charge of building the stage and doing the sound and lights.  He looked like the kind of hands-on hippie you would expect to have a leather tool belt hanging around his waist, and he did wear one the several times I saw him setting up other concerts in later years.

While visiting the Woodstock office another day, I casually asked him what provisions they were making for latrine facilities.  Chip wrinkled his brow thinking.  Nobody had really thought about that, he said.  He called Lang over and asked him.  He didn’t want to be bothered thinking about where concertgoers would be going to the bathroom.  He was on the phone with rock stars like Country Joe McDonald and John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, arranging the acts that would be performing.

Chip was interested, however, and we huddled in one of the rooms in the office talking about where everyone who came to Woodstock was going to relieve themselves.  I told Chip the way the Army handled toilet facilities in the field for large numbers of troops was to dig what they called a “slit trench,” one foot deep and one foot wide, and screen it off with simple canvas walls held by wooden stakes.  I was trying to describe what it would look like when I remembered that I had a copy of the Army field manual for “Field Sanitation” I had been issued at West Point.  It was back at my loft.  I promised I would bring it into the Woodstock office the next day.

When I did, Chip was fascinated by the detail the field manual went into about field latrine facilities.  There were drawings and specifications for the slit trench and the canvas screens you erected to provide a modicum of privacy as they squatted over the trench.  And the Army had actually come up with a formula for how much slit trench you would need, based on the number of troops you had.  It was simple.  You plugged in the total number of troops, and the formula gave you the number of linear feet.  So Chip and I took the latest figure of tickets they expected they would sell based on how many they were selling every day – I think they expected to sell around 60,000 –and out came the linear feet of slit trench.  As I recall, it was about a mile long, maybe more. 

Well, that was a shocker.  Chip called Lang over again and started to show him the field manual and tried to get him interested in what they were going to have to do if all these people who were coming to the Woodstock concert were going to have a place to take a piss or crap, but once again, Lang couldn’t be bothered.  As you are probably aware, at the last minute they ordered up some port-a-potties from a local supplier, and the scene of the guy coming to clean out the port-a-potties became a famous moment in the Woodstock movie.  To make an even longer story short, that’s how I got to be friends with Chip Monck. 

We were somewhere over the frozen cornfields of Nebraska or Kansas when I realized I was flying into L.A. to cover this big, important concert – the first time Dylan had toured since 1966 – and I had no idea whatsoever where I was going to stay.  Chip was flying out to L.A. for the same reason, so I pushed through the curtains on the 747 between my seat in coach and Chip’s in first class and found him and asked him where he thought I should stay.  One of the flight attendants had apparently seen my illegal invasion of first class and quickly appeared to tell me to return to my seat in coach.  Chip looked at the flight attendant – a young woman about our age – and smiling through his considerable mustache, turned on the charm.  Awww, he’s a friend of mine, can’t you make an exception for a few minutes, he asked, his bass voice as distinctive as a fingerprint.  Apparently realizing who was asking, she relented.  It was okay for me sit in the free seat next to Chip Monck for awhile.

Chip told me I should stay in a little out-of-the way place in West L.A. called the Wilshire Hilton.  It was on a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard which at that time hadn’t turned into the corridor of massive high-rise condos that are now there.  Chip said it was quiet, fairly cheap, close to the 405, which I would be taking to get down to the Forum in Inglewood, but still close to the heart of the rock ‘n roll action along Sunset Boulevard.  Chip had a limo waiting for him at LAX and offered to give me a ride to the Wilshire Hilton.  He was staying not far away with friends in Bel Air.  It was no problem.

When they dropped me off, I was surprised to see that the place didn’t look like what you would think of as a regular Hilton hotel like, say, the New York Hilton.  It was a low-rise U-shaped building that looked more like a motel than anything else.  I think it had three stories, and the upper rooms opened directly onto long balconies overlooking a pool surrounded by palm trees in the back.  It was late, maybe 10 pm. by the time we got there.  The small lobby on the first floor was empty except for one guy at the desk and a doorman.  I got checked into a room on the second floor and put down my stuff and went back downstairs to see if there was a bar where I could get a beer and maybe a burger.  There wasn’t, but the doorman offered to drive me in the hotel’s courtesy car to a nearby strip mall where I could get both.

I picked up a six-pack and a take-out burger and fries and soon we were back at the Hilton.  I had just settled down in my room to enjoy my feast when I heard a huge ruckus outside my door. I blew it off and dug into my burger, but it got louder.  I could hear women’s voices chattering excitedly and loud laughter, and I could hear men’s voices, too, calling to the women.  Then I heard a series of splashes.  They were jumping in the pool.  The sound of their excited cries got louder.  I wondered what the hell was going on at this quiet, out of the way Hilton Chip had turned me onto, so I opened my door and peered out.

Several semi-naked young women ran past my door pursued by several semi-naked men who were much older than the women were.  The women were topless, wearing only panties.  Several of the men were wearing, if it could be called “wearing,” a towel wrapped around their waists.  Some of them were smoking long cigars as they chased the women from one room to another.  Quite a few of the crowd were now in the pool, completely naked.  More doors opened down the way from my room, and more young women appeared, followed quickly by more overweight older men. It wasn’t a party, exactly…it was more of a bacchanalia.  That was it!  The men all knew one another, calling to each other by name, but the women, who were clearly not their wives, didn’t know each other, which hardly put a dent in the boisterous fun they appeared to be having…or was it faking?

I couldn’t put my finger on what was going on there at the quiet, out of the way Wilshire Hilton.  So I made my way downstairs to the lobby and sought out my friend the doorman.  What the hell’s going on here tonight? I asked him.  There’s an orgy happening around the pool!  Who the hell are these people?

The doorman grinned and pulled me aside so the desk man couldn’t hear us.  “There’s a judicial convention in town,” he whispered.  “They’re all judges, and I think they’ve made a few calls looking for companionship, and I guess they found some.”

“Judges and hookers?” I asked. 

“Hey, whatever makes the world go round,” the doorman said with a wide grin.