by Bob Spitz
Michael quickly came to Roberts’s defense. “The festival’ll help us to make a reputation for the retreat, man. These music cats’ll get to know us at the show, and we’ll hit ’em with the studio on the way out. Trust me, man. One follows the other.”
Reasonably satisfied, Artie suggested they take an option on the land in Woodstock just to insure that it would still be available to them when the festival was over. Everyone agreed.
“Aren’t we getting slightly ahead of ourselves?” Joel cautioned. “We’re talking about money, land, festival, talent, studios. It’s a little much to bite off in one afternoon’s time. How about if we think things over for a while, jot down ideas and improve on our suggestions, and get together again in a couple of days to hash things out.”
“Good idea,” Michael agreed softly. “Where?”
Joel suggested Miles Lourie’s office, but depending on everyone’s mood, it could just as well be at their apartment or at Artie’s place. “Let’s keep it loose. But, by that time, everyone should have given some additional thought to how we should proceed.”
Again, Michael edged to Joel’s side. “Yeah. It’s important we get rollin’ as soon as possible. This thing’ll sneak up on us before we know it, and timing’s gonna be real crucial to pullin’ it off before anyone else moves in on our action. Every fucker in creation’s gonna want a piece for himself and we gotta be prepared to steamroll over ’em.”
Everyone’s head turned to Lang, half-stunned by this Napoleonic pronouncement of strategy. He had been casually restrained to a point of shyness, a timid prince seeking refuge in the shadows of outspoken kings. There were moments during the discussions when he withdrew completely, following the repartee with his silent eyes. Now, Michael revealed himself to the others as a seasoned guide, and Roberts and Rosenman reacted with astonishment. Michael caught their surprise and, with what was to become a familiar and recurring symbol of their consternation in the months ahead, held them at bay with a tight-jawed, childlike smile of defiance.
Somewhat uneasily, the four men stood up and shook hands on their future polity. This time, their physical differences were palled by unified aims and ultimatums. The Age of Aquarius was closer than even they thought.
• • •
Artie was ecstatic over the meeting’s resolution. He blithely pranced out of the apartment building and into the street like a child who’s just been told he is being taken on his first visit to the circus.
“This is it, man! These cats are goin’ all the way down the line with us. Jesus, Michael! Didja see the way that guy Joel’s eyes lit up?”
Michael smiled, more broadly this time, and held out his hand, palm upwards. Artie smacked it with all his might and returned the gesture.
“Yeah, they got it bad, man,” Michael agreed. “Roberts is a goner.”
“I saw him starin’ at you with those big, wanting eyes of his. He was flippin’ out. Shit, man—he wants to be hip in such a bad way, I thought for a moment he was gonna come over and sit on your lap.” They laughed and slapped each other’s palms again.
Slouched down securely in the back seat of a taxi, Michael lit up a joint, took a long, hard toke on the pulpy stump, and passed it over to Artie. He let his head fall gently against the torn leather seat cushion and closed his eyes. The rush of adrenaline Lang experienced bouncing on the back seat was fast and fluent. He let his mind wander, but his words were programmed with cold accuracy to summarize the matters at hand.
“They’re only part o’ the trip. We got it all this time, man. Music, movies, finance, recording studios, hotels, land. Man, the fuckin’ world’s at our feet. We’re locked. Know what I mean?”
Kornfeld’s giddiness signified his absolute elation, an intoxicated delight, and he was reconciled to facing a future of predominant well-being with the full tide of grace. This Woodstock venture—the retreat, the festival and who knew what else would come out of it—would just about insure his future independence.
2
Artie Kornfeld’s autonomy, in point of fact, unfolded from a time when he was very young and growing up in an assortment of cities along the eastern seaboard. His father, the eldest of eight children born to Russian immigrants, had become a policeman during the Depression as a means of supporting the family. Artie’s mother was a self-educated woman unsparingly dedicated to blind-alley liberal causes. Together, they moved from precinct to precinct, from crusade to crusade, faithfully climbing each rung of the social ladder and “bettering their American dream.” When Artie was born in Coney Island in 1942, they were caught in midstream of fulfilling their ambitions but continued to move forward with intransigent fascination for what life would bring them. By the time he graduated from high school, Artie had attended fourteen schools, and as a result, he found himself able to assume any cultural attitude for which the situation called.
During the middle-1950s, the Kornfelds moved their home base to Charleston, North Carolina, where Artie got his first taste of grass-roots rock and roll—not the kind that was bleached of its energy and recycled for white audiences up north, but the Negro rhythm and blues culled from gospel music and field chants. He was overwhelmed by its wildness, the screaming, unintelligible choruses that rang over and over in his head. It affected him perhaps more than anything else he had ever experienced. The Chords, Ivory Joe Hunter, the Gladiolas, Stick McGhee—magic voices that pumped out 45 rpm records audibly defining what another favorite of his, Little Richard, called “the healing music—the music that makes the blind see, the lame, the deaf and the dumb hear, walk and talk.” For Kornfeld, it was all so evilly irresistible. Before long, he had wheedled his way into a job carrying buckets of ice and soda at the Charleston Coliseum where he was exposed to artists such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Fats Domino. It was a far cry from his other part-time work, organizing the mailing lists for Harry Golden’s Carolina Israelite, which his mother had arranged for him. The two, however, managed to coexist until it was time, again, for his family to pull up stakes for the move back north.
Once back in New York, he became totally immersed in city blues variations on the southern rock phenomenon. Electric blues had crept into the predominantly white ethnic neighborhoods in such a way that it was becoming popular for teen-age quartets to gather on playgrounds and in front of luncheonettes in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens where they improvised four-chord melodies. By the time he was sixteen, Artie was writing music and playing with the top local bands.
Artie continued making demos of his songs while in school. By 1963, it was monopolizing so much of his time that he transferred to night sessions at Queens College and worked on his music during the day. It was there that he met Charlie Koppelman, a songwriter who, along with two friends, had just recorded a tune as The Ivy 3, called “Yogi.” Koppelman suggested Artie meet a friend of his—a young music publisher named Don Kirshner.
A week later, Kornfeld took the subway into New York City, met with Kirshner and signed a contract with Aldon Music to write songs for $125 a week advanced against future royalties. He would have accepted payment in glass beads, but he didn’t tell Kirshner that. It was the music business; he had dreamed of this happening to him for ten years. Now he had become part of it.
Kirshner’s office at 1650 Broadway was considered the nucleus of New York’s burgeoning rock empire. The building housed the archives of the Tin Pan Alley era—the publishers, the indignant cigar-smoking managers, roving songwriters, and independent record companies—and was in the process of making the much-resisted transition from swing to rock. When Artie began work there, writing teams such as Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Carole King and Gerry Goffin were churning out hits faster than Kirshner could locate singing groups for them. Five music rooms constituted the creative wing of the publisher’s suite, and each morning, the young resident writers would fight over who got what rooms. Space was sc
arce and everyone wanted to work. By ten-thirty, Kirshner would frantically pop into each room pleading for material.
“We need a song for the Shirelles in two days, a song for Dion in three! Let’s hear those pianos going!”
Before long, Artie had several hits on the charts. For the Shirelles, he wrote “Tonight You’re Gonna Fall In Love With Me” with Toni Wine, and “I Adore Him” for the Angels, which he penned with a handsome, blond-haired boy from California named Jan Berry who later formed one half of the singing group Jan and Dean. Jan subsequently introduced Kornfeld to a surfing buddy named Brian Wilson, and the three collaborated on the classic hit “Dead Man’s Curve” and an additional four songs for Jan and Dean’s Drag City album.
Artie married a girl from Forest Hills several years younger than he, with whom he had been going steady, and decided to look for security. He accepted a job as director of Artists and Repertoire for Mercury Records, and stumbled across a family act named the Cowsills whom he thought had immeasurable potential as superstars. He contacted his current writing collaborator, told him about the group, and together they sat down to write a hit for the Cowsills.
They wanted to write a “flower song” to commemorate what was happening on the West Coast. That spring of 1967, a youth crusade for peace and love was emerging from San Francisco’s rock underground and was spreading eastward. Everyone, young and old, was seduced by its ingenuous rallying cry: “Flower Power!” “It can’t miss,” they agreed.
The lyric that emerged from their collaboration entitled “Rain, the Park, and Other Things,” was about falling in love with a young hippie girl and was originally planned as a ballad:
I love the flower girl,
Oh I don’t know just why,
She simply caught my eye,
I love the flower girl,
She seemed to have the way
To find a sunny day.
The song was an immediate hit and Artie left Mercury to enter into an independent production deal with the Cowsills, for which he also received a percentage of the management and control of their music-publishing interests. He stayed with them through 1968, producing and writing the group’s material. When he left, he emerged from his Cowsill Connection independently wealthy; he had produced two triumphant albums on the heels of successive gold singles for them and would continue to earn royalties from the existing product on the market. Therefore, earning a livelihood didn’t appear to be a problem; a spate of related projects would see him handily through the next few years. Soon thereafter, however, his old friend Charlie Koppelman, who had also been making a name for himself producing teen-oriented acts for various labels, insisted upon introducing Artie to Alan Livingston, who, at the time, was the president of Capitol Records.
Livingston and Kornfeld hit it off so well that Artie was offered a job at Capitol on the spot. They created a special position for him and a title to suit his luminous ego: Director of East Coast Contemporary Product. His chief function, concealed somewhere beneath the grandeur of that label, was to seek out and sign new hard-rock groups—a specialty they sorely lacked. To protect himself and to guarantee some job security, Artie asked to be placed under a two-year contract with the company, and Livingston agreed.
Capitol was a Mormon-owned company that, most industry insiders agreed, had been relatively lucky in putting out records by the Beach Boys and the Beatles in the years between 1961 and 1968. But once he was firmly installed into their corporate machinery, Artie found Capitol’s problem to be far deeper than anything money or appearance could correct. He discovered they already had the types of groups they were looking for under contract; the Band, Bob Seger, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Joe South—all were artists who appealed to the flower generation’s electric tastes. The company’s antiquated focus, however, was more sharply directed at maintaining the supremacy of their stalwart sellers, the Lettermen and Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadian Orchestra.
It was a more difficult task than even he had imagined. Whenever he registered a complaint with the company’s board of directors about all the promotion given the Lettermen, he was punctually shown the accounting department’s balance sheet on them. “These young men have been making a lot of money for us over the years, Mr. Kornfeld. You can’t argue with success.” For Kornfeld, it was a rude awakening about the realities of the business of rock and roll.
One afternoon, in late November 1968, Kornfeld’s secretary buzzed him over the intercom and announced, “There’s some kid out here who wants to see you. He says his name’s Lang. Michael Lang.”
Because of his earlier experience at 1650 Broadway with hordes of incredibly talented songwriters roaming the corridors trying to get their material heard, Artie’s policy was to interview everybody who approached him with a tape. He also felt that since Capitol Records was the beneficiary of millions of dollars yearly from young people he would like to spend some of it on New York kids to give them a start.
Artie was amused by Lang’s cherubic appearance—“like some kind of magic pixie,” he later told his secretary. Artie was growing used to having hippies with long, stringy hair down their back ushered into his office, but although he was a product of the same culture, Michael Lang was noticeably different in his approach. He was not overly confident or demanding like his counterparts. If anything, “he was very shy and timid” and approached Artie as if he had been granted an audience with the king.
Lang had been around—that Artie was sure of. He carried himself in the manner of a vulnerable kid who possessed the mystical ability to beat others at their own game by the power of suggestion. Artie warmed to him immediately. There was something about Lang’s presence he found totally disarming. He was a phantasm, both real and deceptive, and Artie wanted to learn more about him.
Lang told Artie that for the past couple of years he had been hanging out wherever the scene was fast and then moving on, trying to elbow in on the local action and make a few bucks. Like Kornfeld, Lang was originally from Brooklyn. He had scraped around there for most of his twenty-three years, but when he experienced the new, free spirit taking hold in Greenwich Village, he moved to Florida and opened the first head shop there in Coconut Grove. His idea was to carry the spirit with him and spread it across the land as if it were a religion. He held Artie transfixed with stories about the characters he met there—smugglers, dope dealers, two-bit gangsters, bikers musicians—and about his dabbling in the local rock and roll scene. He had sweet-talked his way into the Miami concert circuit and had put on a few minor shows there, including a small festival. But he decided to “bag it” for management because “that’s where the real bread” was Lang had found a hard-rock group called Train, which he had signed to a management and production deal, and he was now working on getting their act together. He lived in upstate New York in a small arts and crafts village called Woodstock. Artie had never heard of it.
“This band’s outta sight, man,” Michael opined in a manner that seduced his listener into agreeing with him even before hearing the band. Artie found himself nodding in agreement. Lang projected an image of being in touch with what was happening and with what was vital. “They’re gonna blow you away!”
Artie wound the tape onto a recorder behind him. When he turned back to inquire at what speed the material had been recorded, he found Michael holding out a lighted joint to him. The gesture of friendship caught Artie off-guard and he was visibly shaken.
“It’s cool, man,” Michael advised, smiling warmly. “It’s nothing to get uptight about.”
“I’m not uptight,” Artie protested, accepting the joint and dragging on it as though it were an everyday occurrence. He choked mildly on the smoke as he tried to hold it down. According to Artie, not only had he not done any grass before, he had never experienced anyone smoking dope in the Capitol offices. It just hadn’t been a part of the record scene as he knew it; the groups smoked, sure, but never while the
y were in the building. The whole thought of getting high in his office was exhilarating to him. Wouldn’t it only serve to heighten his perception of the music? Wasn’t that his job—to be totally “turned on” to what was going down in the music scene? If those Mormons could only see him now, Artie thought. They’d head back to Salt Lake City faster than they could count their Lettermen profits.
Lang’s grass was far superior to his band. Kornfeld thought Train was “awful, very untogether.” They tried to combine too many strains of music on top of one another: jazz, blues, acid rock, free-form synthetics. It just didn’t work.
“Uh . . . nice,” Artie said when the tape had run out. “They’re, uh, innovative, really different, man. Let me think about it, listen to it a few more times, and we’ll see what we can do. In the meantime, whaddya say you come over to my place for dinner tonight. I’d like you to meet my wife, and we can hang out awhile.”
That night, the two boys, along with Linda Kornfeld, stayed up until long after midnight trading stories about music, drugs, the war, the impending revolution, the music business—Michael devoured tales about the music business like a child with an ice cream cone—and cemented a relationship they all pledged to continue. Artie “saw a very sharp mind, someone who has the power to see beneath the surface of everything and who was also fun to be with.” He saw their friendship as a vehicle for making some of his own dreams come true.
Before the evening ended, Kornfeld had committed Capitol Records to enter into a business arrangement with Michael Lang for Train. Artie considered it to be a fair trade; he would teach Michael about the music business, and in return, Lang would teach him about the street. Kornfeld informed him that he could arrange an immediate ten-thousand-dollar advance for Lang so he’d have some money to live on, and they could probably swing the whole deal for something in the vicinity of one hundred fifty thousand dollars. Artie, of course, would produce Train’s albums.