The comical secret message that got Iron Butterfly banned from Woodstock ’69: “We went down to the Port Authority”
An archetypal music festival that is still lauded among the greatest of all time, predominantly by those who weren’t in attendance at the time, Woodstock Festival back in 1969 brought all the most iconic names of the counterculture age together, in one acid-filled mud swamp in upstate New York. There were, however, some names omitted from that line-up.
Music festival PR teams could learn a lot from Woodstock Festival. Despite being plagued by technical difficulties, extreme weather, and an influx of unticketed, acid-riddled attendees, the festival still managed to portray itself as the greatest live music event of all time, thanks in no small part to the accompanying film released the following year.
That film, after all, does little to show the backstage issues, set timing disputes, or all the various musicians who turned the festival down, didn’t show up, or, in the case of Iron Butterfly, were removed from the line-up at the very last minute.
At first glance, Iron Butterfly were a shoo-in for the Woodstock line-up, owing to their pioneering acid-rock leanings and the legions of hippie devotees they had amassed within their fanbase. Although still in the relative infancy of their career during the late 1960s, the release of the acid rock freak-out anthem ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ in 1968 more or less cemented the band’s Sunday slot at the festival.
By the time Sunday rolled around, though, the Woodstock production team had already dealt with a lifetime of technical difficulties, and neither their patience nor their ‘peace and love’ leanings remained intact. The acid trips were winding down, and many of the mud-drenched hippie attendees had already retreated from the site; there weren’t many left to realise that Iron Butterfly never made it to the festival.
When Iron Butterfly alerted those organisers to the fact that the band were stuck at New York’s LaGuardia Airport without any transportation to the festival site, then it was one trip too far. While the festival bookers attempted to arrange some form of transportation, Iron Butterfly’s manager rang up to demand a helicopter be booked to fly the band directly to the stage at Woodstock. Unsurprisingly, the festival didn’t take too kindly to this demand.
As Butterfly drummer Ron Bushy once recalled, per Drumhead Magazine, “We went down to the Port Authority three times and waited for the helicopter, but it never showed up.” Seemingly, the festival and its production coordinator, John Morris, didn’t take too kindly to the self-aggrandising demand for a helicopter to be provided for the band, particularly given the influx of countless non-paying attendees days prior.
In response to their helicopter demands, Morris sent the group a telegram which read, “For reasons I can’t go into / Until you are here / Clarifying your situation / Knowing you are having problems / You will have to find / Other transportation / Unless you plan not to come.” Acrostically, Morris was telling the band exactly where to go and, luckily, Iron Butterfly got the rather expletive message.
Much to the disappointment of the pioneering hard rock outfit, no helicopter ever appeared to whisk them away to the Woodstock stage, and so they became one of numerous groups to miss out on the opportunity to perform at what remains one of the most iconic live music events to ever transpire.
