by Michael Lang
Since the Woodstock concept was proving to be a developing blueprint in my head, I found it difficult to collaborate. I could close my eyes and see the festival’s components, then keep them juggling in the air until they were formulated to the extent that I could assign their execution to team members. Other than an initial organizational chart I had drawn up showing various functions and positions to fill, we made it up as we went along.
We settled on calling our creation “An Aquarian Exposition: The Woodstock Music and Art Fair.” That name “Woodstock” symbolized the rural, natural setting I envisioned. I suggested “Aquarian Exposition” to encompass all the arts, not only music but crafts, painting, sculpture, dance, theater—like a 1969 version of the old Maverick festivals. And I wanted to reference the Aquarian age, an era of great harmony predicted by astrologers to coincide with the late twentieth century, a time when stars and planets would align to allow for more understanding, sympathy, and trust in the world. Our festival would be that place for people to come together to celebrate the coming of a new age.
There had been so much conflict over the past year, with violent confrontations occurring on college campuses, in urban ghettos, and at demonstrations across the country. At Woodstock we would focus our energy on peace, setting aside the onstage discussion of political issues to just groove on what might be possible. It was a chance to see if we could create the kind of world for which we’d been striving throughout the sixties: That would be our political statement—proving that peace and understanding were possible and creating a testament to the value of the counterculture.
It would be three days of peace and music.
To determine the possible size of the audience, we started researching the major population centers of the northeastern corridor—New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts. When we did the math, we realized we could have as many as two hundred thousand people. The number seemed almost inconceivable for a concert: Attendance records had been broken at Shea Stadium when the Beatles played there in 1965 and ’66 to some fifty-five thousand people. In ’67, between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand attended Monterey Pop for each of its three days—but no one stayed overnight at the Monterey Fairgrounds where it was held.
In early March, I contacted a real estate agent about the Winston Farm property. He spoke to Schaller, the owner, and seemed encouraging about our leasing it for a music-and-art festival. He quoted $40,000 for a twelve-week rental—much more than we’d budgeted—and passed along the contact info for Schaller’s Manhattan attorney. In the meantime, word got out in Woodstock that I was thinking of having a festival in the area. Soon, I was hearing from the town supervisor, Bill Ward, and an official from the county health department, who made it clear they did not want a large outdoor event to occur in the town of Woodstock. Suddenly, Schaller’s real estate agent stopped returning my calls. John and Joel contacted Schaller’s attorney and set up a meeting for the last week in March.
At least we had the location for the Woodstock recording studio. On April 17, we’d put down $4,500 as a deposit on the Tapooz property, which we’d negotiated to purchase for $55,000. We determined the scope of the facility, the description of which would run in an article in Billboard: “A recording center is being established [in Woodstock] by Woodstock Ventures, which has just purchased a 30-acre site near the Woodstock Music and Art Fair—a 16-track studio and hotel complex…Joel Rosenman said the Woodstock Sound Studios will allow producers and artists to create in a pleasant atmosphere where adequate recording time is easy to secure. The studio will provide housing, rehearsal studios, a 24-hour kitchen, and recreational facilities, including a swimming pool and tennis court. Stan Goldstein, formerly of Criteria Studio in Miami, is consulting on construction of the studio and will be an engineer there.”
Though the festival site wasn’t nailed down, we chose the weekend of August 15 as the festival date. I needed to get things moving and sign bands before they were booked elsewhere. From the concerts I’d promoted and organized in Miami, I’d learned a lot about staging, what worked for audiences and what didn’t. At Miami Pop, we experimented with different kinds of music—blues, classic rock and roll, acid rock, pop, folk—and I found that the audience got into all of it. The kids of the counterculture were not pigeonholed in their musical tastes. So I decided on an eclectic group of artists and made up a wish list that ran the gamut from Jimi Hendrix to Johnny Cash.
I started spending time with Hector Morales, at William Morris, again. When he’d helped me with the Miami festival, we’d become good friends. He let me hang out in his office from morning until night learning to book talent. Hector’s assistance would be invaluable throughout the project. I soon realized that to create credibility for our show, I had to immediately sign a few of the bigger acts by offering them a fee that would ensure their acceptance. For example, if an act was getting $7,500, I’d offer $10,000. Once two or three big names were signed up, I’d find myself being taken seriously by artists’ agents and managers, and fees would become more reasonable. Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Canned Heat were the first artists to accept. We got the Airplane and Creedence for $10,000 each.
Canned Heat had scored two major hits since appearing at Monterey, “On the Road Again” and “Going Up the Country,” so their fee was $12,500.
I booked Crosby, Stills and Nash before their debut album was released. Their manager, David Geffen, came into Hector’s office one day, clutching a test pressing of their just-completed recording. “Wait till you hear this!” he gloated. We were knocked out. The Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds had been two of my all-time favorite groups, and CSN took their music to a new level. The vocal harmonies were fantastic on “Helplessly Hoping” and “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” And I loved the guitar and organ interplay on “Wooden Ships,” which I later discovered was inspired by Crosby’s adventures in the Grove. I knew “Marrakesh Express” would be a hit.
Geffen was looking for the right venue to kick off the band’s first tour, and we all agreed Woodstock should be it. I booked them on the spot, paying his asking price of $10,000. We did a lot of interesting booking that way—signing new acts like Joe Cocker and Mountain to be introduced to our peers at Woodstock.
Even by late March, buzz began circulating about the festival. One night Garland Jeffreys and I went to see Van Morrison perform in New York at Steve Paul’s Scene, a very cool club owned by Johnny Winter’s manager. We chatted about the festival to Steve and others, and by the next day, I heard from someone in Los Angeles who called to say he wanted his band to play. Artie began calling his friends at radio stations and got them to mention Woodstock on air.
My philosophy in all areas of festival staffing was to get the very best people available on our team. I looked for those with the most expertise in their field and, whenever possible, people who understood what we were trying to do. When I contacted Stan Goldstein in Miami to see if he was available, I learned he’d left Criteria and happened to be in New York. He was working as a sound engineer (his first love) at the Hit Factory but was about to leave for a job in Los Angeles. I met with him in New York and I hired him for a salary of $500 a week, $100 more than I was making.
STAN GOLDSTEIN: Michael offered me the opportunity to be in charge of physical arrangements for the festival. I told him I really wasn’t interested in doing a festival. My interest was in pursuing my recording career. Michael disclosed that a recording studio was being built, simultaneous with the development of the festival, on the Tapooz property. Eventually we came to an agreement that I would help him design and staff the festival, and once the major players were in place and the design complete, I would be released and begin building the studio in association with the chief engineer of Media Sound, John and Joel’s studio. We would be cochiefs of this new studio to be constructed.
Within a fairly short period of time after I joined, the decision was made that it would be a three-day event and the outline of what ea
ch of the days would be was established. The Friday concert would start late in the day—gentle music without major, major headliners, so that we could stage arrivals, with some people arriving on Friday, late in the day, after work. Saturday and Sunday would be headliners. The slogan “Three Days of Peace and Music” was determined, and Michael came up with the idea of having a guitar and a dove as the logo—which was later developed into a brilliant poster by Arnold Skolnick.
Unlike the enclosed location at Gulfstream Race Track, for this festival we needed to build a city, a place where people didn’t depart at day’s end, where they would want to camp overnight and have a longer experience. Stan and I immediately started researching the logistics for accommodating two hundred thousand people spending three days at the site. As there was no precedent for what we were planning—outside the military—we began to develop strategies to determine what we’d need on-site and how much it would cost. For example, to estimate how many Porta-Potties we would need, we’d time people going in and out of bathrooms at public facilities.
STAN GOLDSTEIN: I would get to Yankee Stadium early and go into a bathroom and count the stalls. I had a watch and a clipboard and would count how many people went through the doors in what period of time. Then I would divide that by the number of available seats to figure out how many people would use how many toilets over a period of time.
We thought that the U.S. Army would have information on setting up temporary “cities,” for troop deployments overseas or in rural locations. Stan made arrangements to go to the Pentagon, but his appointments were canceled. The army was unwilling to divulge information about field sanitation.
When John and Joel met with Schaller’s attorney in late March, the meeting did not go well. They were informed that Schaller had decided not to rent the property to us after all. We started to get concerned. We had booked talent, we were hiring staff, and we had no place for the festival. We began searching areas farther afield from Woodstock, surveying properties via helicopter, and driving to check out possible sites. There was still snow on the ground, so an accurate assessment of potential sites meant a lot of walking. It was on one of these site walks that I became acquainted with Tom Rounds, Tom Driscoll, and Mel Lawrence, from Arena Associates, based in L.A. Taking advantage of my groundwork, they had produced the second Miami Pop Festival at Gulfstream Race Track in December ’68, after I’d moved to Woodstock. I’d heard good things about the festival from Stan, who’d recorded some of the acts. I invited them east to meet and discuss our Aquarian Exposition. Rounds’s background was radio, Driscoll controlled a strawberry empire in California, and Mel was the operations guy. Lacking experience running a huge operation, I was considering hiring a line producer, someone skilled in production as well as in conducting a business with hundreds of employees. Arena Associates wanted $50,000 for each partner, plus a percentage of the gate, for the physical production. That was too much money. “Thanks for coming out,” I told them, “but I think I’ll do it myself.”
But during our meetings and site surveys, Mel and I had quickly clicked. He was a very practical, “get it done” guy, and he understood what I was trying to do. I needed someone to be site manager, and he seemed to have the right skill set and my kind of vision. When the three were leaving, I asked Mel to stay on. He agreed to join my staff for a flat fee of $8,000.
MEL LAWRENCE: I was hooked on being a general and said, “I want to do this.” I liked Michael. He had an air of confidence—and he made you feel confident. This quality gave you faith in him.
Mel had entered the concert business through radio and had been involved with some big concerts in Hawaii. He worked on the country’s first pop festival, the Magic Mountain Festival in Northern California, and handled staging, fencing, and traffic operations at Monterey Pop the following week. As our site manager, he could help in all these areas and more.
MEL LAWRENCE: Our first planning meeting for Woodstock took place in a luncheonette on Sixth Avenue. Michael, Stan, and I started one of my patented outlines, which can run fifteen or twenty pages. We sort of laid out the festival on napkins.
On the last Sunday in March, John and Joel went for a drive upstate to look around, increasingly desperate to find a site. Heading back to the city in John’s Porsche, they saw a sign on Route 17 that read: MILLS INDUSTRIAL PARK FOR RENT. It was two hundred acres in the township of Wallkill, in Orange County, about a ninety-minute drive from New York City. The asking price for a four-month lease was $10,000, pending approval from the local zoning board. Joel and John paid $1,500 as a deposit for a two-way, thirty-day option on the land. They appeared before the Wallkill Zoning Board on April 18 and told them we’d be having an arts fair at the Mills Industrial Park with a possible forty to fifty thousand people attending over a couple of days. They downplayed the rock and roll component, perhaps a bit too much, and promised to take out liability insurance for the event. The Wallkill Zoning Board members seemed a bit dubious but told them they had no objections to our plans.
When I checked out the Mills Industrial Park, my first reaction was horror. The flat, bulldozed property looked as if it had been raped. Buzzards were flying around. It was as far as you could get from the feeling I was looking for. I had pictured walking into an open, pastoral scene of beauty and calm that could make you feel comfortable and at peace. This was ugly, cold, hard, and dirty and felt as if someone had taken what they wanted from the land and left the debris.
John, not unreasonably, was getting anxious, and after talking to Mills and showing the site to Mel, I was persuaded that we could transform it into an acceptable landscape. It would never be idyllic, but it did have electricity, water, and access from major roads. Our festival’s name would remain Woodstock, no matter where it was held. I was not going to give that up. The name Woodstock had come to represent the heart of what I hoped to accomplish.
We rapidly started filling staff positions. Most of the technical people came through Bill Graham’s Fillmore organization. The top lighting director in rock and roll, Chip Monck, had worked at Monterey and at Mel’s Miami Pop Festival. He’d started his career at the Village Gate, had run the lights at the Newport festivals since their inception in 1959, and had designed the lighting for the Fillmore East. He rang me up about the festival after he heard about it from Hector Morales.
CHIP MONCK: I went to see Hector Morales and Hector said, “Hey, this curly-headed kid has been in here and he’s booking every bit of talent in the world.” I wasn’t working at the moment and thought, It sounds like it’s going to be something pretty big! So I called up Michael and said, “Gee, let’s have a cup of coffee and put our heads together.” I contacted Annie Weldon, who was John Morris’s wife at that time, and said, “Can I bring this kid over and introduce him to you and John? Will you please just politely host the evening so we can get this thing moving?” So we met at their place on Thirteenth Street and Sixth Avenue.
“Hector explained to me what you’re booking,” I said to Michael, “and I really want to know more about it and if we can be of help.” Michael laid out his vision—without revealing too much but giving just enough. It was up to us to lock in and agree. That’s what you do with a promoter or a skilled entrepreneur. You take orders. Michael was understated, and when he got into a hole or into a corner, he did his famous mumble.
He was looking at having maybe two hundred and fifty thousand people. My feeling was we were looking at between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. It was going to be huge and it was going to be everybody, and it had to be done correctly. Any time anybody saw Michael and realized what he was doing and what the accomplishment could be, they immediately signed themselves on.
Chip came on board for a $7,000 salary. A charming and unflappable guy, he had a good grasp of what we were trying to put together. Chip’s friend John Morris sort of talked his way into a job. He had been concert promoter Bill Graham’s right-hand man at the Fillmore, and he knew numerous artists and their managers. I hir
ed him to do artist relations—he would help with some of the booking and then work with the agents and managers on fulfilling the individual riders listing the technical requirements for each artist. During the festival he would be the artist liaison.
Chip and John both recommended Chris Langhart as our technical director. An acknowledged genius by everyone who worked with him, Chris taught theater design at NYU and had set up the plumbing and engineering plans for the Fillmore East. He would do the same for us.
CHRIS LANGHART: There came to be salary negotiations, and Michael [was] very street wise. We finally settled on a figure—a low and a high—having argued it back and forth. He announced he would flip a coin, and as far as I was concerned, the low and the high were a little far apart. I said, “We’re not having that flipping of the coin routine, because I have a student in my class who can flip a coin reliably twelve times out of thirteen.” And this wide, Cheshire cat smile [came] onto his face, so we settled on [a] figure, and from then on we got on pretty straight ahead.
I hired Bill Hanley to build our sound system. I say build because a system that could provide sound for the size crowd we expected did not exist. Originally for the job, I’d considered Owsley Stanley, who designed the Grateful Dead’s massive system and was their sound engineer (as well as the country’s leading manufacturer of LSD). But Hanley was the best live soundman in the business and that’s what I needed. I met with him and explained the size of the project, and he seemed interested and eager to tackle it. “I know how to do it,” he said. “I can build you a system that will work.”
A company called Concert Hall Publications, operated by Bert Cohen and Michael Foreman in Philadelphia, had worked on Mel’s Miami festival, primarily in staging and promotion. Artie knew Michael, who sometimes wrote for the underground press. We hired them to develop our advertising campaign and to create the festival program book. They wanted to do more, though, and Bert somehow convinced John and Joel into commissioning him to design the interior of the Woodstock Ventures offices on West Fifty-seventh Street. Though all four of us realized the absurdity very early on, Bert turned the new office space into an over-the-top psychedelic casbah. Meant to evoke an environment like the black-light poster rooms in my head shop, or the interior of the Electric Circus, the offices consisted of platforms arranged at various heights and were carpeted in chartreuse. This misguided attempt at hipness shot right past cool and landed on ridiculous.