08/14/1989
"Gravy in your ear," said the voice on the phone at 2 a.m. in the nearly empty newsroom.
The last time I'd heard that voice, it was offering "breakfast in bed for 400,000."
It belonged to Wavy Gravy, now 53, the cosmic clown of Woodstock and leader of the Hog Farm Commune. He'd been comic relief there, as well as security chief, feeder of multitudes, and guide back to reality for the psychedelically lost.
For weeks I'd been listening to solid middle-aged citizens go goofy and moist over memories of a weekend 20 years ago when we moved into our lofty ideals and set up housekeeping.
How'd we do that, Wavy? What happened?
"It was a disaster area," he said. "Whether you're bailing out flood victims in Bangladesh or earthquake victims, in a situation like that there's no classes. Everybody's reduced to a common denominator, and the rain and the mud did that.
"When the whole world was watching us . . . well, you tend to be better than you are. We lifted ourselves up."
Well, okay, but does it take a disaster? A lot of people want that feeling again.
"They have to get off themselves and open up their hearts and minds and souls to the energy that is trying to make the whole thing better for everybody. It's available, but just not in a quantum hit," Gravy saidsoothingly. "Sometimes when I go the children's cancer center I feel it. I felt it at Amnesty shows."
Recruitment
Wavy was recruited for Woodstock.
New Mexico's Hog Farm Commune, about 85 strong, had been zipping around the country in a caravan of eight fantastically painted buses, "doing a traveling show, a consciousness-raiser to show the audience they were the star - called Hog Farm and Friends in Open Celebration," he said.
In Montrose, Penn., police swooped down, searching for drugs. The Hog Farmers weren't particularly concerned, Wavy says, because they weren't "holding."
"They searched five hours and found a pipe left by a hitchhiker with a quarter gram of marijuana ashes in it, and two guys got 3 to 5 years."
So the Farmers went to New York - Wavy calls it the Cement Apple - to get together a war chest to hire lawyers for an appeal.
"We were doing security for Sly (Stone), baby-sitting, anything. Then this guy in a suit showed up and asked if we'd work this festival in New York."
Stanley Goldstein, the man in the suit, explains in Joel Makower's Oral History of Woodstock that the festival organizers were very concerned about making sure the crowd would feel comfortable and safe. Expecting a largely urban turnout, they needed a group who could teach these tenderfeet how to survive in the woods. Through the counterculture underground, they also learned that Wavy was an experienced traveler who could ease people out of whatever bad drug trips arose.
"We'd been living in campsites and buses for years and were very good at survival. But we said we'd be in New Mexico then, so thanks anyway.
"Goldstein said he'd send an Astrojet for us, and we thought, 'Oh, God, another loony.' "
But they did it. When the Farmers arrived in New York - "85 of us and 15 Indians" - they were met by a gaggle of reporters and photographers, lights blazing.
Wavy says the lead reporter told him he was to be head of security for the festival. This was news to Wavy, but he asked the reporter, "Well, do you feel secure?"
"Well, sure," the reporter said.
"Must be working, then," Wavy said.
"Well, what are you going to use for crowd control?"
"Cream pies and seltzer bottles," quipped Wavy, and everybody wrote it down.
Camp Winnarainbow
For the last 15 years, Wavy (Hugh Romney, by birth) has been running a camp for children 7 to 14 in Laytonville, Calif.
Camp Winnarainbow specializes in circus arts and performing arts - juggling, improvisation, trapeze and "attitudes for survival in the 21st century."
The kids at the camp, who live in tepees on its 500 acres, come "45 percent from the rock 'n' roll community, 45 percent from the New Age community, and 10 percent from really difficult home situations, abused and disturbed kids," he says. "Approximately 25 percent get partial scholarships, and the Grateful Dead help out with $10,000 to $15,000 a year."
Besides the camp, the remaining Hog Farmers, about 50 now after a peak of 100 in the '60s, run a tepee factory under the name Intents, a fruit business called Stan's Jam, and a telephone-answering service in Berkeley, Calif., puckishly called Babylon.
Wavy himself, who used to open for Peter, Paul and Mary as a stand-up comic, is on the board and "official FUNd-raiser" of the Seva (pronounced SAY-va) Foundation, which mounted last fall's Home Aid concert in New York to benefit the homeless.
He has just released a new comedy album on Relix called The '80s are the '60s Twenty Years Later - Old Feathers, New Bird, and plans to be part of an Oct. 7 demonstration for the homeless in Washington organized by Mitch Snyder.
Not planned as free concert
Rumors have been flying that everyone except the investors knew that Woodstock was planned from the start as a free concert. Did he think it would be free?
"Absolutely not. It wasn't until we were called out to the infield and Mel Lawrence, the site manager, said, 'We didn't get the turnstiles up but we're gonna start taking tickets.' And we turned around and there were 50,00 3people already there to try to take tickets from.
"We heard they'd just gotten the movie contract with Warner Bros., and we said, 'Do you want a good movie or a bad movie?' "
At that moment, Woodstock became a freebie.
"I like to say that Woodstock was created for wallets and the universe moved in and did a little dance," Wavy said.
"That I could be included in that is one of the neatest things that ever happened to me. There was an energy there that we somewhat recognized, but certainly couldn't direct. If we just surrendered to it, we were capable of superhuman stuff."
