would only inflame the situation.
What seemed to save the day was an
overwhelming communal spirit—the
mass of humanity, some surely chemi-
cally mellowed, proved remarkably
cooperative.
Against this backdrop a Boston
group known as Quill opened up the
festival’s hot and muggy second day.
“They were an upbeat young band
in the unenviable position of getting
things going while the sound was
being adjusted,” Michael Lang recalled.
An eclectic quintet founded by broth-
ers Jon and Dan Cole, Quill mostly
played small clubs in the Northeast,
but they had also opened for someSaturday
to Sunday,
August 16–17
Quill
12:15–12:50 PM
By the Saturday morning of day two,
conditions at the festival had reached
crisis stage. The site was awash in rain
and mud; there were food and water
shortages and grossly inadequate sani-
tation and bathroom facilities for a half
million people. What’s more, hundreds
of thousands of would-be attendees
were still stranded on the clogged thor-
oughfares around Bethel. At one point,
New York governor Nelson Rockefeller
considered sending 10,000 National
Guard troops to the festival but was
dissuaded by concert organizers who
feared an infusion of armed military46 LIFE WOODSTOCK