Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles by Wendy Holden, Don Felder Page A

was being held on a six-hundred-acre dairy farm not far from Dover Plains. Billed as “Three days of peace and love,” it was to be held at a place called Bethel, near Woodstock.
     
    “Hey, we should go to this,” I suggested to my roommates one morning, after reading about it in a pamphlet someone had stuck under the windshield wiper of the van. “Just about everyone we know will be there. There’s bound to be some guys coming up from New York and maybe even Florida. The lineup’s incredible—Janis Joplin, the Band, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker, the Grateful Dead. Even Hendrix is playing.”
     
    “Awesome,” replied Mike. “OK. You organize it.”
     
    Buried in the list of bands, I spotted Crosby, Stills & Nash, whose debut album, Suite: Judy Blue Eyes , was fast climbing the charts. Something told me that the life path of young Stephen Stills was going to keep crossing mine.
     
    I was right about everybody coming to Bethel—half a million people, actually. When we arrived, in an old Chevy Suburban with a gang of friends from New York, it seemed like everyone was trying to get through the same six-foot-wide gate we were aiming for. Among those in our convoy was Season Hubley, the cute girl I’d fallen for when she came to Gainesville two years earlier. Sadly for me, she was with someone else, and wanting her to be with me instead of him marred my entire experience of the three-day festival.
     
    I do remember that it rained a lot. There was an incredible storm, which came rolling in from the east in great billowing clouds. The high winds nearly blew down the precarious speaker towers. We slept in sleeping bags in the Chevy, listening to the torrential rain drumming on the roof. Apart from when the storm was at its height, and all the electronics onstage had to be covered in plastic to keep them from shorting out, the music was nonstop. We’d lie in the back of the car, stoned out of our heads, waiting for the announcements for who was on next.
     
    “Oh, man, I gotta see this,” I’d say and drag myself up, out of the car, into the rain. Sliding down the slippery hill toward the stage, I’d listen to Santana, Hendrix, or Alvin Lee playing until my ears felt like they were bleeding.
     
    It was a mudfest, absolutely horrible, cold and wet. The sticky clay squelched up between your toes and found its way into every pore and crevice, but nobody seemed to care. Along with thousands of other people, I’d stand in the driving rain, swaying in time to the music, before coming back to towel myself off and steam up the car windows until the caked mud finally dried. Woodstock was certainly an experience.
     
    Back in Dover Plains after the festival, life seemed somehow harder to bear. I’d known Stephen Stills as a kid, and there he’d been at four in the morning, on the same stage as some of the rock-and-roll greats, banging it out with the likes of Graham Nash, who I’d been so in awe of when he came to Gainesville with the Hollies. It was only the second time Crosby, Stills & Nash had played live together, and they were steaming. Stephen sat up on a stool in a blue-and-white poncho and sang with that distinctively gravelly voice of his. It was so groovy. I wanted to be up there alongside him more than anything in the world.
     
    Instead, I was bumming around some big old house in the sticks with a bunch of potheads, trying to salvage a situation I knew was fast becoming untenable. I felt completely isolated, physically and musically. We were miles from anywhere and there were no girls or friends outside the band. Winter was coming and we were broke. Nobody seemed to understand that we were going to freeze to death in that huge, heatless house unless we did something about it.
     
    Winter came and, with it, the snow. It was like nothing I’d ever seen in my life. We’d had sprinklings in Boston and New York, but this was so deep it banked up against the front door, soft and fine like powder. It