The Road to Woodstock

by Michael Lang

  When I told Max about the payoff demand, he blew his top. “No way are you to pay a bribe to Morris Abraham! I’ll find out who’s at the bottom of this and make sure there are no obstacles to your music fair—and if there are, I’ll make public this bribery attempt!” Max had become our staunchest ally. He liked our idea of donating the money to the hospital too, and we promised to follow through. John agreed and the donation was made to Bethel Medical Center.

  On Sunday, July 20, we took a break from our preparations for the town hall meeting to watch the lunar landing and see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. The irony! America was putting a man on the moon, and we were just trying to land on earth.

  Monday night, Don Ganoung, Mel, Stan, and I arrived to meet with town supervisor Dan Amatucci, the Bethel Town Board, and the Bethel Zoning Board. The room was tiny, and we all sat together around a table. Bethel residents showed up, but there was just enough space for a few to stand. Some peered through an open window.

  Mel presented a hastily drawn plot plan for Max’s land, which was filed with the zoning board. We identified the plot of land where we wished to hold the festival: three miles west of White Lake in a block bordered by Route 17B, Perry Road, Hurd Road, and West Shore Road.

  We had hired a Sullivan County lawyer, Richard Gross, who told the board members that he had been advised by the Bethel town attorney Frederick Schadt that there were no zoning issues: Max’s land was zoned commercial and agricultural. We promised to submit building plans as soon as possible for the board’s approval.

  Max spoke eloquently on our behalf, urging the boards to approve the festival: “All they are asking is fair play. Once we have formed a barrier against those who want to grow their hair long, we can just as well form a similar barrier against those who wear long coats or go to a different church.”

  “I would not stand in the way of anything if it is legal,” Amatucci announced after our presentations. “We will welcome anyone to the town if they abide by the law, mind their p’s and q’s, and live within the law. If they do this, there will be no problem.”

  After three hours of discussion, we waited outside the town hall as votes were cast. While our fate was being sealed in that room, I sat alone on the building’s steps, reflecting on what had to be some sort of cosmic intervention that—just hours after being expelled from Wallkill—had led us to a man like Max Yasgur and this perfect place. Coincidence or luck just did not explain it. It was karmic. We were meant to be here. As I looked up at the American flag waving from the portico over my head, I knew we would get the approvals we needed.

  Both boards unanimously decided in our favor. Just after the meeting, Don Ganoung told the press: “They gave us the green light—the festival will be held as planned! We are all very excited. We have leaped the biggest hurdle anyone can imagine.”

  At the board meeting, we had emphasized our desire for local business involvement in the festival. Members of White Lake’s small business community welcomed us with open arms. Garage owner Ken Van Loan, head of the Bethel Businessmen’s Association, told the press: “This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to Sullivan County. It’s a shot in the arm to the town economy. The festival will boost money spent in Bethel for lodging, food, and auto maintenance.” He later estimated that we’d spent $200,000 in Bethel within the first ten days of our residency.

  There were only 2,366 residents living in Bethel. That part of Sullivan County had fallen on hard times since its heyday as a resort area in the 1940s and ’50s. Families had moved on to more exotic locales for their summer holidays. Tourism and agriculture remained the main sources of income for the area. There were still a few large hotels near Liberty that catered to well-heeled Jewish vacationers from New York City—like the Neville, Grossinger’s, and the Concord—but the countryside was mainly dotted with run-down bungalow colonies and failing motels. Nearby Monticello had a racetrack—but it was not what you’d call a flourishing attraction. It seemed that Bethel needed us as much as we needed them.

  Not everyone was happy about our arrival. On Sunday night a crudely lettered sign made from a large piece of plywood had been placed just down the road from the entrance to Max’s property: STOP MAX’S HIPPY MUSIC FESTIVAL—NO 150,000 HIPPIES HERE! BUY NO MILK. Not a good omen for us. But when Max saw the warning, it only strengthened his resolve to help make our festival a reality. That was a measure of who he was.

  All the local papers carried stories about our rise from the ashes. “Comparing our reception here to that of the Town of Wallkill,” Rona was quoted as saying, “we are overwhelmed! We have been getting fantastic cooperation from county, town, and village officials.” Paul Marshall told Newsday that the cost of moving the festival would be about $100,000.

  Another paper reported that we had sold seventy thousand tickets. When these numbers came out, Dan Amatucci started fielding phone calls from worried locals, about twenty the first day. “It will be worse than the grasshoppers in the grain fields,” one resident told the Times Herald-Record. So far, though, no threat of legal action.

  Max continued to speak out on our behalf: “They’re pretty good kids, and I welcome them,” he told the Hackensack Record Call. “I’m from a different generation, and we did other things…Just because a boy wears long hair doesn’t mean he’s going to break the law. I don’t buy that nonsense. This is going to be something different, but I don’t have any fears at all.”

  To assuage other residents’ fears, I released a statement: “There may have been a misconception as to the total number of persons attending the festival. The 150,000 figure reported will be the total attendance over three days, with possibly 50,000 at any one time.” This was disingenuous but necessary in those early days of Bethel.

  “If residents of the immediate area are concerned over the protection of their properties,” Wes assured uneasy neighbors, “we will place a security detail at their homes twenty-four hours a day.” We also let it be known that helicopters would be used for traffic control, as well as to transport anyone who needed to go to the hospital. Ambulances, doctors, and nurses would be on the grounds at all times.

  We knew we had to move into overdrive to get the site built—not only to be ready in time for the concert, but also to proceed so far along that nothing and no one could stop us. It was like a raid—get in, get up, and get it on before anyone had a chance to prevent it.

  JOHN ROBERTS: Once Max entered the picture, it kind of freed up a generosity impulse on our part, and so we just started spending. Things were going past too quickly to think in terms of profit and loss. I swear, I never thought of profit and loss. I just thought of getting it on—and I’ve determined in retrospect why I was so careless in my thinking about it at that point. It was because I had contemplated the abyss of a total wipeout a week earlier! The three quarters of a million dollars we had spent as of July 1 was gone, plus we’d have to end up refunding about $600,000 worth of tickets, so compared to a $1,300,000 bath, everything else seemed like an enormous windfall. We were [no longer] making the calculation as to what the income was going to be. Otherwise there would be no festival, and you could hope whatever the ancillary rights were, whatever number of tickets you would sell would pay you back. Every week we were collecting tens of thousands of dollars for tickets, so we always had enough to cover ourselves, up until the last week when we moved to White Lake—and then we had quite an enormous number of expenses and no income. Some of the expenses were not anticipated. The original budget was out the window.

  Everything began at once on-site. We had twenty-eight days to build what would normally take three months. On Monday and Tuesday, July 21–22, trucks started arriving with the building materials, and we completed the site layout. We convinced the utility company to run power lines from eight miles away. The local phone company rep resisted our request for numerous phone lines for the production trailers, backstage area, and security office, not to mention the hundred pay phones we wanted for the concession area. Fin
ally, Chris Langhart called a phone company executive he knew in Ohio, who flew in to advise us. As our consultant, he managed to pressure the local phone company to get this impossible job done in the time we had left, and they brought in eight crews to do it. The phone lines eventually cost us about $20,000 to install—but New York Bell really made its money on thousands of collect calls placed by people on the pay phones during the festival.

  Everybody was moving as if possessed. Our first priority was putting in roads and installing the plumbing systems. Max didn’t want any underground pipes, which complicated everything, but Chris Langhart figured out a way to do it. It was like laying out and installing an infrastructure for a city. It was a massive thing to build in a month. We also got permission from Max to drill several wells to add to the water supply.

  MEL LAWRENCE: We got this water-witch guy who was an albino with a divining rod, and this guy hit on everything. I think we hit water five out of eight tries.

  Wes started working out the new parking arrangements. We realized we’d have to rent more land around the area for parking lots—we hoped to use the system we’d devised for Wallkill to bus people to the site. Eventually, we’d spend another $25,000 on land rentals.

  A hiring office at the El Monaco was set up, just some tables in the area in front of the office. It seemed like everyone within a hundred-mile radius who was under thirty and could handle a hammer showed up to apply for work. We hired about seventy carpenters and laborers to build the seventy-by-eighty-foot stage, the lighting and sound towers, the artists’ pavilion, and fifty or so concession structures. Within a day or two, we had over two hundred workers preparing the land and campgrounds, including the first group of Hog Farmers, who’d arrived in the Road Hog. As the weeks went by, these numbers would increase to over a thousand.

  Chip Monck and Steve Cohen arrived with their blueprints and designs. Steve appointed his assistant Jay Drevers, a twenty-one-year-old carpenter from the Fillmore, as foreman in charge of constructing the stage. Mel got all those telephone poles rerouted to White Lake. We signed a contract with a garbage-disposal firm, which would use compactors to deal with the garbage before hauling it away, and we arranged with Portosan to provide and service the portable toilets.

  From the first days, foul weather plagued our progress on the Bethel site. Rain complicated getting the fields cut and cleared, and slowed down the construction of the roads. Some patches had to be laid down three or four times, as the roadway would just sink into the mud after a particularly hard downpour. Members of the work crews slogged through mud and high grass, wet to the knees.

  “The kids don’t mind this,” Rona told one newspaper. “This is part of their thing, the same as the guys who go hunting or fishing in the rain.”

  MEL LAWRENCE: We were really together as a team. There were guys cutting down trees so that we could build the food stands, guys building the stage, guys building the pathways through the woods. Everybody was pulling together. I tried to tell them that it was karma that was going to carry us through this. If we treated this land, which was so beautiful, with respect—by not driving our trucks across where the people were going to be but rather using the roadways—that karma would come back to us. Everybody bought into that. And it was raining like crazy all the time. Everybody was getting B-12 shots once a week at the local clinic. That was great!

  I’d wake up in the morning and there’d be 150 impossible things to accomplish that day. I’d knock them off one by one, then wake up the next morning and start all over again. I stayed in the moment, so the pressure would never get to me. I loved the challenge and the ballet of all those moving parts. Over time, it did get to almost everybody else. When someone on staff would wander off into the woods, mumbling, “I’m done, I can’t take this anymore. Everything is on me and we’re never going to make it!” I would bring them back: “I know it’s hard and the pressure is on, but it’s not just on you. It’s on all of us. Believe me, together we’ll get this done.”

  Everybody knew what we were up against. The telephone-company men worked around the clock for us; the power company did the same. Everybody really pitched in, in a great way. It was infectious. Given the time we had, this was an undertaking of heroic proportions, and just about everyone rose to the occasion.

  JOEL ROSENMAN: Michael got good people. He wasn’t sure, I think, who he needed, and so he got maybe twice as many people as he needed, and we paid maybe a lot more than we had to pay. But I think it’s to his credit that he put together a group of people who overkilled greatly what was necessary to do the project.

  From the New York office, we started notifying managers and agents about the change in location and added a contract rider to that effect. Most were cool with it, though Creedence Clearwater Revival sent word through their management that they “didn’t want to play in a cow pasture!” Fortunately, they changed their mind. The Jeff Beck Group did cancel—not due to our venue change, but because they had broken up when their lead singer Rod Stewart decided to join the Faces.

  We added a few more blues-rock acts—Texan Johnny Winter, an amazing slide guitarist; the Keef Hartley Band from England (Hartley was a drummer who’d played with John Mayall); and another British group, Ten Years After, featuring Alvin Lee, the fastest guitarist around. I also booked Mountain, a new power trio formed by the great producer Felix Pappalardi, who’d worked with Cream, the Youngbloods, and others. Pappalardi played bass and Leslie West was the frontman, with a huge voice and a blazing guitar style. These were all bands who’d been inspired by the original bluesmen like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.

  At Steve Paul’s Scene, I’d discovered a kind of throwback fifties group called Sha Na Na. They were a bunch of Columbia University students who played rock and roll classics and dressed like it was the fifties. Their name was inspired by a lyric in the old doo-wop hit “Get a Job.” They wore their hair slicked back in DAs and did dance routines. I thought they would be a fun addition, acknowledging our rock and roll roots while giving the audience a chance to lighten up. I went backstage to see them after their set and offered them the date. By this time, everyone knew about Woodstock, and they were stunned to be invited.

  I signed Sly and the Family Stone through Hector Morales. I loved their sound—rhythm and blues and soul that rocked—and Sly’s lyrics ran deep. He’d been one of the first acts we booked, but I dropped him because he was getting a reputation for canceling shows. Hector assured me that Sly had been making his summer dates and that Woodstock was important to him, so I rebooked them and hoped for the best. We thought we had the Moody Blues lined up too, but the band’s manager wrote that “an album being made…in London is not turning out very well” and that the group had to cancel their trip to the States to finish it.

  While everything was blowing up in Wallkill, I’d received a letter from Apple Corps Ltd. Though John Lennon still couldn’t get into the country, they offered me a couple of their new artists: James Taylor and Billy Preston. Apple also wanted to send over an experimental film for us to project and a silver plastic installation to stand in for the Plastic Ono Band. Because of the scramble for a new site, the letter languished in the site office and did not get my attention until it was too late. They all would have been great additions to the weekend—even the conceptual substitute for the Plastic Ono Band.

  Rumors were rampant about Woodstock—before the Wallkill debacle, various papers reported that Lennon and possibly Dylan would be there—but now we needed to get the word out that the concert was still on. Wartoke made phone calls and sent out a flurry of press releases to hundreds of newspapers about the change in location.

  JANE FRIEDMAN: At that point, we were constantly being asked by everybody what was happening with Woodstock. We didn’t want it to die, so we kept the information flowing every day. When it became controversial, we tried to engage people into taking a side. It was a brilliant campaign.

  Because it made national news, losing Wallkill was probably the biggest p
ublicity boost we could have gotten. To make the most of it, we decided to create an ad to place in the New York Times, the Daily News, and other papers explaining what had happened and giving information about our new location. We commissioned Arnold Skolnick to draw a caricature of two hillbillies holding shotguns, standing next to a jug of moonshine.

  The ad ran for a week, beginning July 25. Now it seems a bit heavy-handed, though it was funny. It probably helped to sell thousands more tickets.

  A few days later, on July 28, a benefit was held at the Village Gate to raise money for scholarship funds to enable “ghetto artists” (the predecessors to graffiti artists) to exhibit at Woodstock. This was part of the art program we had planned, reaching out to artists of all types to have their work shown and sold at the festival. Performers at the benefit included Marian McPartland, Les McCann, and Roberta Flack. John Morris had also come up with the idea of bringing Native American artists from New Mexico on the Hog Farm Express plane we had chartered to transport the Hog Farm. He contacted some members of the Hopi tribe, who agreed to fly out on August 7 with Hugh Romney and the others.

  July 28 also marked the date of our first press conference in White Lake, as well as another meeting at the town hall with police, local officials, and state health department representatives. It had been one insanely busy week since we’d gotten our okay.

  But trouble reared its head again. A group of angry residents showed up at the town hall with their own brand of Concerned Citizens Committee petition. This committee included two members of the zoning board who had voted yes the week before. Now, banding with some of Max’s neighbors and a few other residents, they were citing Woodstock as “a public nuisance, a health menace, and conducive to traffic congestion creating fire and health hazards.” They planned to do what they could to stop the festival. We spent eight hours answering questions and showing our plans to local officials. Finally, they agreed with us that there was no time or reason for a town meeting regarding our festival.