HEAD OF PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES AT WOODSTOCK '99 HAS HANDS FULL

NEW YORK -- It is easier than you might think to pick out Dr. Paul Michael
Ramirez, the director of psychiatric services for the Woodstock festival,
among his professorial colleagues at Long Island University in Brooklyn.

For one thing, he's got a long ponytail, the male sign of at least a
wannabe independent spirit. For another, he is of the proper age, which is
to say middle, to possess the wistfulness required for a successful
professional to donate his services for what is, after all, a commercial
undertaking. Ramirez, 48, also headed the psychiatry team for the last
Woodstock anniversary event, five years ago.

A story from the front, please, Dr. Ramirez.

"I remember a consultation with a young man in his early 20s, who said he
had taken LSD," Ramirez begins, somewhat academically, in his offices at
LIU's Brooklyn campus. "He couldn't tell me his name. He couldn't tell me
what city or what state he was from. Finally I said, 'Can you tell me what
planet you are on?' He couldn't, so I put him under 24-hour observation.
Later he was fine."

That's a very Woodstock question, about the planet.

"I figured if he couldn't answer that question he was in really bad shape."

One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small, folks used to sing
in the time of the first Woodstock, in '69, and if that should happen at
the three-day, 30th anniversary music festival this weekend and you should,
as it was said in those ancient times, freak, not to worry:

Besides the sports complex, the shopping center and the $150 admission
price, Woodstock '99 will have psychiatric services, headed by Ramirez and
assisted by a staff of 50. (Like all the medical services, it will be free.)

Does he think people are going to be doing that many drugs?

"Oh, yeah," Ramirez says cheerfully. "We'll have the population of a
fair-sized city. I just got word that Metallica is playing Saturday. People
who go to hear Metallica tend to do more drugs than people who go to see
Peter, Paul and Mary."

Why is the professor, who specializes in neuropsychology, has a private
practice near his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and at his
weekend place in Woodstock, and has a curriculum vitae that could choke a
horse, working for free?

"A lot of people are going to be in need and be hurting."

Uh-huh, as the therapists say.

By the time we got to Woodstock we were half a million strong, people used
to sing of the first time around, but Ramirez was not there.

"I was 18 and had just gotten my first job, as a clerk at American
Express," Ramirez says. "The week before Woodstock my boss called us all in
and said, 'If you're not here Friday, don't bother coming in Monday.' There
were about 15 of us. I was the only one who showed up for work Friday and
nobody was fired."

Where did such a work ethic come from in the age of tune in, turn on, drop
out? One doesn't wish to make too much of childhood with a
neuropsychologist who consults with drug companies, so, most briefly, the
making of Ramirez:

Both parents immigrated from Puerto Rico. Ramirez's mother was a seamstress
in a sweatshop, his father a tool and die maker. Ramirez lived in Manhattan
until he was 10 and his parents bought a house in Queens.

"Neither of my parents was well educated, but they really pushed
education," Ramirez says.

It should also be noted that while the young Paul Ramirez did not make it
to the Woodstock Festival, he did, at 16 and 17, travel often and
surreptitiously to the town of Woodstock, the hippie Hamptons of the '60s.
"I'd go up there with my friend Enzo Guido, who I'd known since fifth
grade," Ramirez says. "We were both on the debating team and we'd both give
our parents the same story: We had an out-of-town trip for the team. Then
we'd go up on the bus and hang out. He played guitar. Bass."

Time tripping: Is there anything heavier, if you're true to the rock 'n'
roll, than looking in the mirror and seeing a guy who's losing his hair?

"He just told me the other day he's going to be a grandfather. In February.
Imagine."

Ramirez -- to time trip back -- put himself through Lehman College by
teaching karate and, having no notion of what he wanted to do in life,
majored in Renaissance and Reformation history. This prepared him for three
years of construction work. Many degrees later (he has three masters and a
Ph.D. in psychology) he found himself specializing in psychopharmacology,
which appealed to him as a combination of science and psychology. His
personal excursions in such matters, he says, were limited. He smoked some
marijuana in college, but never took LSD.

Some words of wisdom for the Woodstock partyers who may be of a more
pharmacological bent, please.

"As I said on MTV, keep in mind that the person who made that designer drug
you're taking might have failed chemistry."

Then, apropos of nothing, as the interview is ending and Ramirez is heading
out to his weekend place:

"You know what I discovered on a trip to Cancun last year? There are 120
different kinds of tequila."

Uh-huh.