This is an excerpt of a story written by Times Herald-Record staff and first printed in 1989 that describes how the Woodstock festival came together. The Times Herald-Record's entertainment editor, Tim Malcolm, contributed some extra writing. Taken from the Times-Herald Record Online as a 13 piece serialized story.
The counterculture's biggest bash -- it ultimately cost more than $2.4 million -- was sponsored by four very different, and very young, men: John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang. Roberts supplied the money. He was heir to a drugstore and toothpaste manufacturing fortune. He had a multimillion-dollar trust fund, a University of Pennsylvania degree and a lieutenant's commission in the Army. He had seen exactly one rock concert, by the Beach Boys.
Roberts' slightly hipper friend, Joel Rosenman, the son of a prominent Long Island orthodontist, had just graduated from Yale Law School. In 1967, the mustachioed Rosenman, 24, was playing guitar for a lounge band in motels from Long Island to Las Vegas.
Their first idea: to create a situation comedy for television, like a male version of "I Love Lucy."
To get plot ideas for their sitcom, Roberts and Rosenman put a classified ad in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times in March 1968.
Artie Kornfeld, 25, wore a suit, but the lapels were a little wide and his hair brushed the top of his ears. He was a vice president at Capitol Records.
Michael Lang didn't wear shoes very often. Friends described him as a cosmic pixie, with a head full of curly black hair that bounced to his shoulders. He brought a rock concert proposal to Kornfeld at Capitol Records in late December 1968.
Lang and Kornfeld were searching for seed money for the festival and money to build the recording studio. They never saw the ad, but their lawyer recommended they talk to Roberts and Rosenman. The four met in February 1969 in Woodstock. "They wanted a written proposal, which we had but we didn't bring with us," Lang recalls. "We told them that we would meet again with a budget for the festival."
By the end of their third meeting, the little party had snowballed into a bucolic concert for 50,000 people, the world's biggest rock'n'roll show.
The Woodstock Ventures team scurried to find a site. Real estate agents across the mid-Hudson were scouring the countryside for land to rent for just a few months. For $10,000, Woodstock Ventures had leased a tract of land in the Town of Wallkill owned by Howard Mills Jr. "It was a Sunday in late March," Joel Rosenman said. "We drove up to Wallkill and saw the industrial park. We talked to Howard Mills and we made a deal."
"The vibes weren't right there. It was an industrial park," Roberts interjected. "I just said, 'We gotta have a site now.'"
The 300-acre Mills Industrial Park offered perfect access. It was less than a mile from Route 17, which hooked into the New York State Thruway, and it was right off Route 211, a local thoroughfare. It had the essentials, electricity and water lines.
The land was zoned for industry; among the permitted uses were cultural exhibitions and concerts. The promoters approached the town planning board and were given a verbal go-ahead. Nonetheless, Michael Lang was unhappy with the site. It was missing the back-to-the-land ambience Woodstock Ventures was selling. Ventures set to work on the Mills property, all the while searching for an alternative.
Rosenman told Wallkill officials in late March or early April the concert would feature jazz bands and folk singers. He also said 50,000 people would attend if they were lucky. Town Supervisor Jack Schlosser thought something was fishy. "More than anything else, I really feel they were deliberately misleading the town," he said. "The point is, they were less than truthful about the numbers. I said at one point, 'I don't care if it was a convention of 50,000 ministers,' I would have felt the same way."
By early April, the promoters were cultivating the Woodstock image in the underground press, in publications such as the Village Voice and Rolling Stone. Ads began to run in The New York Times and the Times Herald-Record in May. For Kornfeld, Woodstock was always a state of mind, a happening that would exemplify the generation. "The cool PR image was intentional," he said.
Melanie Safka had a song on the radio called "Beautiful People." An extremely hip DJ named Roscoe on WNEW-FM played it. One day, Melanie ran into a curly haired music-business guy named Michael Lang, who was talking about a festival he was producing. When Melanie asked if she could play there, Lang's answer was a very laid-back, "Sure." "I thought it would be very low key," recalled Melanie.
Woodstock Ventures was trying to book the biggest rock'n'roll bands in America, but the rockers were reluctant to sign with an untested outfit that might be unable to deliver. "To get the contracts, we had to have the credibility, and to get the credibility, we had to have the contracts," Rosenman said.
Ventures solved the problem by promising paychecks unheard of in 1969. The big breakthrough came with the signing of the top psychedelic band of the day, the Jefferson Airplane, for the incredible sum of $12,000. The Airplane usually took gigs for $5,000-$6,000. Creedence Clearwater Revival signed for $11,500. The Who then came in for $12,500. The rest of the acts started to fall in line. In all, Ventures spent $180,000 on talent.
"I made a decision that we needed three major acts, and I told them I didn't care what it cost," Lang said. "If they had been asking $5,000, I'd say, 'Pay 'em $10,000.' So we paid the deposits, signed the contracts and that was it: instant credibility."
The residents of Wallkill had heard of hippies, drugs and rock concerts, and after the Woodstock advertising hit The New York Times, the Times Herald-Record and the radio stations, local residents knew that a three-day rock show — maybe the biggest ever — was coming.
In Wallkill, those feelings were unleashed upon landowner Howard Mills and his family. Residents would stop Mills at church to complain.
Ventures tried to head off some of the complaints by hiring Wes Pomeroy, a former top assistant at the Justice Department, to head the security detail.
Campground coordinator Stan Goldstein went alone to his first Town Board meeting in Wallkill.
"This was before we knew we had problems," he said. "It was probably in June. We had a full house. No more than 150 people. There were some accusations. Someone made some references to the Chicago convention. That it was young people, and this is the way the youth reacted, and that's what we could expect in our community."
As the town meetings and the weeks wore on, the confrontation between Woodstock Ventures and the residents of Wallkill worsened. Woodstock's landlord, Howard Mills, was getting anonymous phone calls. The police were called, but the culprits never were identified, much less caught.
"They threatened to blow up his house," Goldstein said. "There were red faces and tempers flaring. People driven by fear to very strange things."
The Wallkill Zoning Board of Appeals officially banned Woodstock on July 15, 1969. To the applause of residents, board members said the organizer's plans were incomplete. They also said outdoor toilets, such as those to be used at the concert, were illegal in Wallkill. Two weeks earlier, the Town Board had passed a law requiring a permit for any gathering of more than 5,000 people.
"The law they passed excluded one thing and one thing only – Woodstock," said Al Romm, then-editor of the Times Herald-Record, which editorialized against the law. Supervisor Jack Schlosser denied this was the intent.
The Wallkill board may have done Woodstock Ventures a favor. Publicity about what had happened reaped a bonanza of interest. Besides, if Woodstock had been staged in Wallkill, Ventures' Michael Lang said, the vibes would have squelched the show or turned it into a riot.
Elliot Tiber read about Woodstock getting tossed out of Wallkill. Tiber's White Lake resort, the El Monaco, had 80 rooms, nearly all of them empty, and keeping it going was draining his savings. But for all of Tiber's troubles, he had one thing that was very valuable to Woodstock Ventures: He had a Bethel town permit to run a music festival.
"I think it cost $12 or $8 or something like that," Tiber said. "It was very vague. It just said I had permission to run an arts and music festival. That's it."
The permit was for the White Lake Music and Arts Festival, a very, very small event that Tiber had dreamed up to increase business at the hotel.
"We had a chamber music quartet, and I think we charged something like two bucks a day," he said. "There were maybe 150 people up there."
Tiber called Ventures, not even knowing who to ask for. Michael Lang got the message and went out to White Lake the next day to look at the El Monaco. Tiber's festival site was 15 swampy acres behind the resort.
"Michael looked at that and said, 'This isn't big enough,'" Tiber recalled. "I said, 'Why don't we go see my friend Max Yasgur? He's been selling me milk and cheese for years. He's got a big farm out there in Bethel.'"
While Lang waited, Tiber telephoned Yasgur about renting the field for $50 a day for a festival that might bring 5,000 people. "Max said to me, 'What's this, Elliot? Another one of your festivals that doesn't work out?'" Tiber said.
Yasgur met Lang in the alfalfa field. This time, Lang liked the lay of the land.
"It was magic," Lang said. "It was perfect. The sloping bowl, a little rise for the stage. A lake in the background. The deal was sealed right there in the field."
Within days after meeting Max Yasgur, Michael Lang brought the rest of the Woodstock Ventures crew up in eight limousines; by then, Yasgur was wise to Woodstock, and the price had gone up considerably. Woodstock Ventures kept all the negotiations secret, lest it repeat what had happened in Wallkill. At some point, Elliot Tiber and Lang went to dinner at the Lighthouse Restaurant, an Italian place just down Route 18B from El Monaco in White Lake.
That's where the news leaked.
"While we were paying the check, the radio was on in the bar. The radio station out there, WVOS, announced that the festival was going to White Lake," Tiber said. "The waiters or the waitresses must have called the radio station. We were just in shock."
The Woodstock partners have since admitted that they were engaged in creative deception. They told Bethel officials that they were expecting 50,000 people, tops. All along they knew that Woodstock would draw far, far more.
Contracts for the use of land surrounding Yasgur's parcel ended up costing Ventures another $25,000. Meanwhile, hand-lettered signs were being put up in the Town of Bethel. They read: "Buy No Milk. Stop Max's Hippy Music Festival."
Bethel residents had read about the worries in Wallkill: drugs, traffic, sewage and water. Public fury grew. A prominent Bethel resident approached Lang. He said he could grease the wheels of power to get Lang the approvals he needed. All the fixer wanted was $10,000. Woodstock Ventures got the cash and put it in a paper bag. Lang won't name the man who solicited the bribe. But ultimately Woodstock Ventures would not pay.
In late July, Woodstock Ventures got permit approvals from Bethel Town Attorney Frederick W.V. Schadt and building inspector Donald Clark. But, under orders from the Town Board, Clark never issued them. The board ordered Clark to post stop-work orders; the promoters tore the signs down with Clark's tacit approval. He felt he was being made the fall guy for the town.
By August, Elliot Tiber was getting anonymous phone calls. "They'd say that it'll never happen, that we will break your legs," Tiber said. "There was terrible name-calling. It was anti-Semitic and anti-hippies. It was dirty and filthy."
A week before the festival, Max Yasgur's farm didn't look much like a concert site.
"It was like they were building a house, except there was a helicopter pad," Art Vassmer said.
That same week, a group of outraged residents filed a lawsuit. It was settled within a few days; the promoters promised to add more portable toilets.
Those 800 petitioners weren't too happy with Bethel Supervisor Daniel J. Amatucci.
"He didn't inform us about all the people until a week before the festival," remembered resident Abe Wagner. "He turned around and threw it [the petition] in the wastebasket without even looking at it."
Woodstock Ventures decided to try to win over the residents in Bethel. It sent out the Earthlight Theater to entertain local groups. It booked a rock band called Quill to do free performances. But Earthlight, an 18-member troupe, didn't do Shakespeare or Rodgers and Hammerstein. They did a musical comedy called "Sex. Y'all Come." They also stripped naked. Frequently.
On Aug. 7, Ventures staged a pre-festival festival on a stage that was still under construction. Quill opened the show, and Bethel residents sat on the grass, expecting theater. Instead, the Earthlight Theater stripped and screamed obscenities at the shocked crowd.
The opposition plotted a last-minute strategy to stop the show: a human barricade across Route 17B the day before the concert. Tiber heard about the plan Monday.
"So, I go on national radio and said that they were trying to stop the show," he said. "I didn't sleep well. About two o'clock in the morning, I wake up and I hear horns and guitars. This is on Tuesday morning. I look out, and there are five lanes of headlights all the way back. They'd started coming already."
By the afternoon of Thursday, Aug. 14, Woodstock was an idyllic commune of 25,000 people. The Hog Farmers had built kitchens and shelters with two-by-fours and tarps. Their kids were swinging on a set of monkey bars built of lumber and tree limbs, jumping into a pile of hay at the bottom. Wavy Gravy recruited "responsible-looking" people and made them security guards. He handed out armbands and the secret password, which was "I forget."
Down the slope, stands were ready to sell counterculture souvenirs: hand-woven belts, drug paraphernalia and headbands. Christmas tree lights were strung in the trees. Sawdust was strewn along the paths. Over the hill, carpenters were still banging nails into the main stage. The Pranksters and the Hog Farmers had built their own alternative stage.
A young Bethel couple lived a quarter-mile from Yasgur's field. The wife, 22, was pregnant with the couple's second child, and the husband, 27, a salesman, had an important business meeting in Albany on Friday morning. But the couple wasn't budging from Bethel. They looked out front.
"Nothin' but cars and people. Saw a trooper. Ten kids were on the hood of his car," the husband said.
They looked out back.
"People were camping all over the yard," he added.
Michael Lang woke up Friday morning to find that something was missing ... the ticket booths. Others had known for days, but Lang said that Friday morning was his first inkling that Woodstock would never collect a single dollar at the gate.
Concert organizers blamed state police for the monstrous traffic jam.
The troopers had refused to enact the festival's traffic plan.
"I think the cops figured that if they had done that, they would acquire responsibility for whatever might happen," said campground coordinator Stan Goldstein.
"Of course, they were not necessarily in favor of these kinds of events, and they wanted it to turn to (chaos). They wanted it to be a disaster."
Day one of Woodstock was supposed to be the day for the folkies. Joan Baez was the headliner, preceded by a bill that included Tim Hardin, Arlo Guthrie, Sweetwater, The Incredible String Band, Ravi Shankar, Bert Sommer and Melanie. One rock act " Sly and the Family Stone " was added for a little taste of the rock 'n' roll of the weekend.
The scheduled starting time was 4 p.m. The performers were spread around in Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons miles from the site. Because of the traffic jam, the promoters were frantically contracting for helicopters to shuttle in the performers and supplies. But the helicopters were late. A four-seater finally arrived after 4 p.m.; it could handle only single acts. Co-producer Michael Lang had two choices: Hardin, who was drifting around backstage stoned, or Richie Havens, who looked ready. "It was, 'Who could get set up the quickest?'" Lang said. "And I went with Richie Havens." Three days of music started at 5:07 p.m. Aug. 15, 1969.
Every time Havens tried to quit playing, he had to keep on. The other acts hadn't arrived. Finally, after Havens had played for nearly three hours " improvising his last song, "Freedom" " a large U.S. Army helicopter landed with musical reinforcements.
Of all the acts Friday night, Woodstock's producers were worried only about Sly and the Family Stone. The band had a tendency to fire up small crowds, inviting people to rush the stage. With a couple hundred thousand people, Sly and his band could ignite a riot. So Woodstock co-producer Artie Kornfeld cleared the pit in front of the stage to give security a fighting chance. Then he and his wife, Linda, climbed down, all alone into the vast chasm between the musicians on stage and Woodstock's horde.
"He was singing, 'I want to take you high-er!' and everyone lit up. All those lights in the crowd, thousands of them," Kornfeld said. "We were right between Sly and the crowd."
A Woodstock acid trip wasn't always voluntary.
"Outside (the tent), they were giving out electric Kool-Aid laced with whatever," nurse Mary Sanderson said. "They said, 'Don't take the brown acid.' They put it in watermelon. Now, when kids take a tab of acid, they know what they're getting into. When you drink something that's cold because you're thirsty, that's different. A lot of the kids hurt with this stuff were just thirsty. They didn't have any choice."
The show wasn't going on. Janis Joplin, the Who and the Grateful Dead refused to play Saturday night. Their managers wanted cash in advance. Woodstock Ventures feared the fans would riot if the stage was empty. The promoters pleaded with Charlie Prince, the manager of the White Lake branch of Sullivan County National Bank, to put up the money.
Prince knew that Ventures President John Roberts had a trust fund of more than $1 million. Late Saturday night, Prince negotiated his way through the clogged back roads from Liberty to White Lake, where he opened up the bank.
He discovered the night drop slot was overflowing with bags of cash. Prince called Joe Fersch, the bank's president, who told him to use his judgment. After Roberts gave Prince a personal check that night for "50 or 100 thousand dollars," Price wrote the cashier's checks. The performers were paid. The show went on.
"I felt that if I didn't give him the money for the show to go on, well, what would a half-million kids do?" Prince said.
John Sebastian, not on the bill, played 4th, after Country Joe McDonald, performing 5 songs. [the following from this interview with Sebastian]
Q - You performed at Woodstock. (1969) Was it hard to go out on your own after having been part of such a successful group?
A - You have to remember now, I was not being terribly successful at going solo. I was making a nice transition. At a crucial moment, I had to wait a year and a half while two record companies fought over my recording. MGM claiming because the Spoonful still owed a record, that this was something they intended to put out as a Lovin' Spoonful album and me saying this would be incredibly dishonest. There's only one of four members on this thing. Having to wait out that time, I certainly didn't get the feeling of setting the world on fire. But, what did happen is I went to Woodstock as a member of the audience. I did not show up there with a road manager and a couple of guitars. I showed up with a change of clothes and a toothbrush. It just so happened that because most of my friends were musicians I ended up backstage. There was a moment when the stage had filled up with water and it was impossible to put electric instruments onstage. At that time Chip Monck (Woodstock announcer, stage co-ordination) said to me "Look, we need somebody who can go out there with an acoustic guitar and hold 'em (the audience) while we go out and sweep the water off the stage and let it dry up and you're elected." So, I had to run and borrow a guitar from Timmy Hardin and go on. But, it was not anything I had planned for. It was just one of those nice accidents and it resulted in my career then taking another step forward. Now, I was the Summer Concert guy. I played every Summer concert there was.
The Who had released its first rock opera, "Tommy," in June. Now, just after midnight, the English hard-rockers were performing the three-record set's theme song, "See Me, Feel Me." "Listening to you, I get the music," sang the fringe-shirted Roger Daltrey, "gazing at you, I get the heat . . ."
Head Yippie Abbie Hoffman sat on the stage with Michael Lang during the Who's set. Hoffman had been working the medical tent since the festival's opening act, gobbling down tabs of acid to stay awake.
At sunup Sunday, Grace Slick's voice wafted out of the festival bowl to a pasture above: "One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small …"
"Some (jerk) was out there making eggs over a campfire, going, 'Hey man, it's the Airplane! Hey, man, it's the Airplane!'" recalled Jerome O'Connell, a hippie from Rome.
Wavy Gravy called it "Breakfast in bed for 400,000." The recipe: Rolled oats or bulgur wheat (often both). Cook until mush. Add peanuts for taste. Cook until the texture of goulash. For a side dish, stir-fry any vegetables that can be scraped together. Scoop the mixtures onto paper plates.
By noon, the sun was beating down on Bethel. Heat stroke became the biggest worry; even some fans were showing signs of pneumonia from being drenched for two days. The promoters considered turning the fire hoses on to mist the crowd but didn't. It started to rain again in the afternoon. Sunday's lineup again was packed with rockers: The Band; Joe Cocker; Crosby, Stills & Nash; Ten Years After; Johnny Winter; and Jimi Hendrix.
While other stars flitted in and out of the show aboard helicopters, Hendrix was roaming the crowd on foot. Some remember the star's turn in the freak-out tent that day. Hendrix lay on a stretcher for about 30 minutes before roadies hauled him out.
Attendance estimates kept rising. By Sunday, the state police figure was 450,000, and others rounded it off to an even half-million. But Times Herald-Record editor Al Romm, who coordinated coverage from a trailer behind the stage, believed the estimates were all wrong. Citing aerial photos, Romm swore that Woodstock drew maybe 150,000 people.
Bert Feldman, Bethel's historian, also maintained that the attendance figures were wrong. But he thought the figures were low.
"There were 700,000 people there," he said. "The attendance estimate is based on aerial photos, and there were thousands of people under trees."
Artie Kornfeld figured the capsule he was taking was speed, Dexedrine, something to keep him alert for the rest of the festival. His wife, Linda, took one too. Then he began hallucinating that the National Guard (which was not there) was shooting into the crowd. The colors were all melting together.
"I was dosed. It was my first psychedelic, and it happened at Woodstock," Kornfeld said. "I never would have chosen that place deliberately, never to do it at Woodstock." He earned later that the capsule was powdered psilocybin mushroom, a powerful hallucinogen.
"I decided that we needed help. It was 12 hours before Hendrix," Kornfeld said. "I was Thorazined out of it. That's why I missed Hendrix."
It was about 9 a.m., time for Jimi Hendrix, the headliner. He had launched into the national anthem.
"I remember trying to fall asleep during 'The Star-Spangled Banner,'" said Phil Ciganer, Jerry Garcia's buddy. "I just wished he would stop."
The party was over.
Woodstock Ventures had to face a different kind of music. The partners had obtained letters of credit, backed by John Roberts' trust fund, from a bank on Wall Street. Now, Ventures was at least $1.3 million in debt.
Woodstock had been a damn-the-expense money pit for six weeks. Kornfeld's promotional expenses were more than $150,000, 70 percent over budget. Lang's production expenses had soared to $2 million, more than 300 percent over budget.
Ventures had paid crews overtime to do six months of work in six weeks' time. Three days of running a private air fleet of helicopters had also helped to bust the budget. When it was all over, the Wall Street bankers demanded an accounting. The promoters had sold about $1.1 million in tickets, but Ventures had written maybe $600,000 in bad checks and had other debts. As of Aug. 19, 1969, the high-water mark of the counterculture had cost at least 2.4 million hard, capitalist dollars. Thousands of dollars more in fines, fees, claims and lawsuits hadn't even come in yet. To top it off, there was a criminal investigation. The attorney general's office and the Sullivan County district attorney were starting to dig.
Epilogue
After Woodstock, Wavy Gravy wanted to keep the energy going. He returned to the Hog Farm commune, where he discovered, "Every hippie in the world had moved to our house."
Dairy farmer Max Yasgur toured Israel about two years after the concert and had the opportunity to meet Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.
"Max said to Ben-Gurion, 'I'm Max Yasgur of Bethel,' and Ben-Gurion shook his hand and said, 'Oh yeah, that's where Woodstock was, wasn't it?" recalled Liberty's Lou Newman, a friend of Yasgur's. Yasgur died in 1973.
For the next decade following the festival, Woodstock was virtually a cliche for all that was goofy about the '60s.
Joel Rosenman and John Roberts were still in venture capital, but instead of funding concerts, they were dismantling conglomerates and handling mergers.
Artie Kornfeld was the one who was able to use his Woodstock credentials. He remained in the music business, promoting rock acts and albums. He worked with Bruce Springsteen and Tracy Chapman.
Michael Lang, too, stayed in music. His title as Woodstock's producer gave him a certain cachet with superstars of the business.
Lang signed a Long Island singer named Billy Joel to his first record contract. He was Joe Cocker's manager. But even Lang downplayed Woodstock. "I didn't talk about it for years," he said.
That was in 1989.
Lang has helped produce two festivals carrying the Woodstock name. Kornfeld continues leading the Woodstock Nation as its "pied piper."
The festival attendees have grown into promoters of the cause, and Woodstock remains a symbol of peace, love and music.
A monument stands on the Yasgur site of Woodstock, which is now part of Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, a concert venue that accompanies a museum that celebrates the 1960s and that little concert that happened on a field in Bethel.
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