SEX, DRUGS & ROCK ‘N ROLL…40 years later
If any one thing defines the Baby Boomer generation, it was Woodstock—that pivotal weekend of music in rain-drenched upstate New York. It wasn’t so much the music that made our parents afraid as it was the fact that we, well, we stayed out in the rain. After all, didn’t your mother ever tell you….
By Jane Earle
When one walks into the museum at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts and is immediately enveloped in the sights and sounds of the 1960s, it seems inevitable that that turbulent decade of protest, war, assassination and a moon landing would end with something cataclysmic, something that would sum it up in one grand explosive event: Woodstock.
Out of those black and white images looming high above visitors on the museum’s curved walls walk the ghost of those 10 years which no American who lived through them will ever forget. We see John F. Kennedy meeting with advisors over the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall, Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office on Air Force One with a grieving Jackie at his side, the troop build-up in Vietnam, civil rights marches on Washington, passage of Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights act, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy within a two-month time period.
But Woodstock wasn’t inevitable. It almost didn’t happen at all in spite of months of effort and an outlay of $600,000 on the part of its four organizers. And when it did happen, it wasn’t at Woodstock which is a town some 30 or miles away from the place where what has been called the greatest music festival of the era did take place. But it will for all time be known as Woodstock, although the rest of its title, Art Fair and Aquarian Exhibition has long since been lost.
Woodstock Ventures was an unlikely partnership of four young men with New York roots: Michael Lang, who had promoted a small music event in Florida where he had owned a head shop; Artie Kornfeld, the youngest person to become a vice-president of Capital Records; John Roberts, heir to a drug store fortune, and Joel Rosenman, who was practicing at his uncle’s Wall Street law firm. Rosenman and Roberts were advertising that they had capital available to fund creative ventures and Michael Lang had an idea. He and Kornfeld met through an intermediary and immediately bonded because they were from Bensonhurst, a New York neighborhood where they had grown up within blocks of each other.
Lang’s idea was to build a recording studio at some bucolic location in New York state where big name musicians could be housed and cared for while they recorded their music in a first-rate studio environment. Kornfeld was already producing records for Capital and finding new talent and Roberts and Rosenman were building a recording studio in New York City. They would provide the financial support and management and Lang would assume the role of promoter and operations director. Kornfeld filled in where his talents lay.
Lang decided that the place to build the studio was in Woodstock, a small town in western New York state where Bob Dylan and The Band had been living for some time. Every year there was an arts festival in town and it seemed a place that would be receptive to the studio and the music festival that Lang felt would be needed to draw musicians’ interest to the studio. He scouted the area and found an old Victorian establishment that could be renovated for the studio and eventually a closed industrial park that could work for the festival. By early spring, a contract was in place to use the industrial park and they were beginning to reconfigure it into an acceptable, if not exceptional, site. In April Lang booked his first act, Jefferson Airplane. He rightly judged that if he got one or two big names at the beginning, the rest would follow. The date set for the beginning of the festival was Friday, August 15.
Signs of nervousness were beginning to appear among the town’s business people and residents. At this point the young entrepreneurs were thinking the music festival could draw as many as 100,000 fans and they began to staff for the handling of such a large number. Lang hired a man recommended by the Association of Chiefs of Police to be in charge of security, an act he thought would provide some assurance to local citizens. He also hired a colleague recommended by his new security chief, a Catholic priest, as a sort of community liaison. Questions and complaints continued.
Meantime, the owner of the site under contract for the festival, began to get death threats on his home telephone. In a taped interview which is part of the oral history in the museum’s display, the owner said that with the threats, he would happily have withdrawn his permission for use of his site but he had a contract. On July 15, the town’s zoning board rejected the partners’ application for a permit. With the opening act set to go on in 31 days, the hunt was on for a new location.
The industrial site had not been ideal, but Lang had hoped to make it workable. Now he was looking for a better site because there was no time to major renovation. Out traveling through the lush green countryside, the agent who was showing them property turned down Hurd Road, off state highway 17B and a quarter of a mile later topped the hill that looks down on the natural bowl formed by the gently rolling hills of a large dairy farm. From the first look, Lang knew that was where the festival was meant to be.
There were a few problems: they would need to build roads bring plumbing, electricity, telephone service and adequate water to the property in the 30 days they had left. At this point, they expected that attendance could rise to 200,000 or perhaps as high as 250,000. The entire population of the town of Bethel was 2,366. Not the least of their issues was that the 2,000 acre site was owned by a local conservative farmer who might not be willing to enable the invasion of music seeking hippies.
Michael Lang says in his book, The Road to Woodstock, that there never would have been a Woodstock except for Max Yasgur. Yasgur showed them around his farm, agreed to consider leasing it to the Woodstock Ventures partners and said he didn’t think that the young partners had been treated fairly at Woodstock. The partners agreed to pay him his price of $50,000 and shook hands on the deal.
But Yasgur wasn’t done. When grumblings began in the town, he spoke to the town council and told them, “You don’t like what they look like. I don’t particularly like what they look like either. But that’s not the point. They may be protesting the war but thousands of American soldiers have died so they can do exactly what they are doing. That’s what the essence of this country is about.”
The preparations went forward: scrambling to find food suppliers, setting up a table on the main street in White Lake (four miles down the road from the Yasgur farm) to hire plumbers, carpenters, electricians and anyone else who could supply skill and labor. It was a boom for Sullivan County. They drilled water wells on the Yasgur farm to augment the water supply, they set up aid stations to take care of the sick and injured and scrambled to get adequate food supplies.
The work was feverish and went ‘round the clock the last few days. The last two or three days before the concert was scheduled to begin, route 17B began to fill up with traffic. By Friday, August 15, with the music set to begin in the evening, the organizers were sending word to radio stations that the venue was full and no more concert goers could be accommodated. By Friday afternoon Route 17B was a parking lot. The partners had fenced the property and set up a gate where ticket holders could enter. By mid-afternoon, the fence had been torn down and all pretense of requiring tickets had been abandoned.
There wasn’t enough food and there wasn’t enough water. Local residents, thinking they might be facing a humanitarian disaster in their back yards, did what they could. One local woman remembers her father coming into the house and telling them to find and fill every pot in the house with water because “the kids up on that mountain” didn’t have food and water. Leni Binder, who, with her husband ran a gas supply business, saw what was happening and went to the closest store and bought all the bread on the shelves and peanut butter, cheese and anything else that wouldn’t spoil. She spent much of the night making sandwiches and sent them out in baskets with her driver the next morning to hand out to the kids camping out at the festival. She refused to accept money for the sandwiches.
The concert opened with a set by Richie Havens who wasn’t scheduled to appear until the fifth set. He was one of the first performers to arrive and Lang pressed him to open even though his bas player had not yet arrived. With the surrounding country in gridlock, performers were airlifted in by helicopter.
In the end, 450,000 young people came to Woodstock, they camped and danced and sang in the rain that came down every night. They stood in line for food and water and the portable latrines and helped each other out when they needed to. There was no violence. Thirty of the biggest names in music performed beginning with Richie Havens on Friday night and ending with Joan Baez who finished her song at 2 o’clock Monday morning.
Max Yasgur, the improbable hero of Woodstock, brought to the microphone by the promoters toward the end of the festival, told the mob still huddling in the rain “I think you people have proven something to the world: that a half million kids can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music.”
Being There
Rich Grant, Communications Director for Visit Denver was there. He was working at his summer job at Bushkill, an old resort in the Adirondacks, when he and his buddy saw a lot of people passing through on their way west.
“We didn’t have TV, we didn’t know where they were going but we talked to them and they told us about the big festival,” Grant said. He and a couple of friends decided to follow along. They might as well; they had been fired from their dish washing jobs because they were talking and not washing dishes.
They talked two of the waitresses into going with them with the idea that they could return to work on Saturday for their regular shift. Since nothing was moving on any road into or out of Bethel, N.Y., the waitresses lost their jobs too, along with their $500 bonuses for the season.
Since we didn’t know anything about it or even where it was,” Grant said, “we just followed the traffic until we were directed into a field to park. We were still five miles from the festival.”
His friend broke the gallon bottle of red wine they had brought with them and cut his foot on the glass. “He had to hop for five miles. Eventually, we found the first aid tent. It was right next to the bad trip tent which was like something out of the Civil War with screaming and moaning from the patients.”
One of the group had paid the $5 for a ticket while the rest were planning to just hang around on the fringes. When they got to the gate into the festival grounds, the fence had been pulled down and no one was paying to go in. The friend with the ticket walked back five miles to try to scalp it.
“It was one bad thing after another,” Grant remembered. “We stood in line to get rice and to get water. At night it rained.” When they finally located their car it had to be pulled out of the mud by a tractor.
When he got back to school at Pennsylvania State, everybody who had been to Woodstock was caked with mud up to their knees. “We left it on for a while. It was like a badge of honor.”
What he remembers most was seeing how many hippies there were. “We knew there were hippies but we didn’t have any idea how many of us there were. And then we saw them all at Woodstock.”
In November, Grant went to Washington for the first Vietnam moratorium march where Woodstock’s 450,000 were surpassed by 600,000 protesters. But things were much grimmer in Washington where flower power did not rule at it did at Woodstock.
Grant went to Washington to march four times. “It was the revolution. A day without a demonstration was a day wasted.”
From Woodstock to Bethel Woods
The music festival that was originally planned for the town of Woodstock was moved a little over 30 miles away to a dairy farm owned by Max Yasgur. It is 2,000 acres of beautiful, green, gently rolling countryside. Once recovered from the trampling of 450,000 music lovers at the festival, the Yasgur farm languished in nearly its original state with nothing more to mark its moment in history than a bronze plaque mounted on a rock at the bottom of the hill. Children flew their kites there.
Three decades later, Alan Gerry, a local cable television pioneer sold his cable network to Time Warner for $2.7 billion. Gerry, who had his first TV shop in Liberty, another of the small towns in western New York, endowed the Gerry Foundation which undertook the preservation of the Woodstock site and the construction of Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.
The structures are beautifully designed and built of wood and stone and take advantage of the natural terrain to provide wonderful outdoor performance space. The main building houses the ticket office, museum, gift shop and indoor performance and teaching venues.
The Road to Woodstock
By Michael Lang
Michael Lang’s account of how Woodstock came into being is a tale well told by the man who was there. The book, published by HarperCollins Publishers, New York, N.Y., came out this summer just in time for the fortieth anniversary of the music festival. Lang, who was at the heart of organizing and bringing about the festival, allows others who played key roles, to speak of them in their own words. It was an event worth capturing between the covers of a book. $29.99 at most book stores.
The Bethel Woods Web Site
Bear in mind when you visit www.bethelwoodscenter.org that the primary function of the Web site is to announce the season’s program and to sell tickets. You can get full information on this year’s August 15 Bethel Woods Music Festival; Heroes of Woodstock, the commemorative event marking the fortieth anniversary of the original festival. You can also see what events and performances, including a wine festival and the annual arts and crafts fair are planned for the site through the fall. If you are interested in facts about the 1969 Woodstock festival, your best bet is to click on the “Press” button where you will find fact sheets about the festival, the 60’s time line and a list of key players who brought the Bethel Woods Center into being.
Journalist Jane Earle spends a part of every summer in Upstate New York near Bethel Woods where she writes. This year, Earle launched her online publication www.janesreport.com. Be sure to check it out.