Fifty-Five Years From a Field of Grass

Fifty-five years dreamed like yesterday. The Woodstock generation is slipping into their twilight years. Here we are, August 2024, celebrating an event, an era, a generation that will echo many decades into the future. The last exhausted, wet and muddy fan staggered out of Max Yasgur’s alfalfa pasture almost 55 years ago, on August 18, 1969. Some call the Woodstock Festival the benchmark of an era of human advancement. Others say it was a big mess and just a hell of a party for a misguided generation of hippies, drugs and free love. For me, it was an amazing experience, and event too large for me to grasp at that moment and a visual awakening for a naïve adolescent young man.

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969 was planned to have 25-50,000 attendees. More than 500,000 people were drawn to a pasture in beautiful Sullivan County in upstate New York. For four amazing days, Max’s farm became a counter cultural mini nation in which future superstar musicians displayed their talents and minds. Spirits were opened, drugs were plentiful, and love of many sorts was free. The music began Friday August 15^th at 5:00 p.m. and continued until mid-morning Monday, August 18^th.

The mass of attendees was so large that New York state governor Nelson Rockefeller, closed the New York State Thruway for almost 60 miles south and it created one of the nation’s worst traffic jams. All of this happened practically in my backyard. This is where my story begins. In early 1969, I was a ninth grader doing what shy, nerdy, middle American young men did.  A lot of insignificant and boring things. My dad was involved in some dairy cow auctioning, real estate and small-town politics. In early April, he received a call from Howard Mills Jr., one of his real estate contacts. Mr. Mills had just leased a parcel in his industrial park, just outside of Middletown, in Wallkill, NY.  It was about three miles from our home as the bird flew. Mills told my dad that they were planning a music concert. The 300-acre park offered perfect access to Route 17, which hooked into the New York State Thruway. It was right off Route 211, a major thoroughfare through Wallkill and Middletown. As most uptight, middle-class parents and townspeople reacted, they were suspicious from the start and did not want hippies in their town. Word started to spread as ads were run in the underground press (Village Voice, Rolling Stone). Ads began to run in our local paper, The Times, Herald, Record and New York Times.  The residents of Wallkill were fearful of hippies, drugs and rock concerts.

Local residents knew that a three-day rock show (maybe the biggest ever) was coming. My dad’s other connected friend was Wallkill’s town supervisor, Jack Schlosser. He, Mills and my dad were drinking buddies and were drumming up resistance.  They asked us to attend all the meetings and that’s where I initially observed and met some of the cast of characters known as “Woodstock Ventures”.

 The young men were John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld, and Michael Lang. Artie is an inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame , alive and well.  I have had some contact with him in recent years. John, Joel and Michael are now deceased. John Roberts was the oldest at the time. At the age of 26, Roberts supplied the money. He was heir to a manufacturing fortune. He had a large trust fund from the Polygrip/Polident family ownership. Rosenman was also a trust fund baby and was a traveling musician in his own right.  Rosenman and Roberts met on a golf course in 1967 and became close partners working together in 1968.  They opened a state-of-the-art recording studio in Manhattan, called Media Recording Studios .They recorded and produced an incredible list of top names during this time.   To attempt to leverage their vast money supply, in late 1968, they ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, worded:

Two young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions.”

Artie Kornfeld, at 25, was the first VP of Rock and Roll at Capitol records in NYC, signing talent like Hendrix, Joplin and scores of big names. In his own right, he had been with Dione and the Belmonts and wrote beautiful songs and produced for the Cowsills, “I love the flower girl” and wrote “Dead Man’s Curve”, for Jan and Dean. His list of talent signed in mind boggling!

Michael Lang was the youngest and had more ideas and energy than funds. He had owned the first head shop in Florida. In 1968 he produced, up to then, the largest rock shows ever. The two day Miami Pop Festival drew more than 40,000 people.  He was the manager of a rock group called Train and wanted to get them signed to a record deal. That’s how Lang met Kornfeld. Lang got an appointment with Artie at Capital, knowing they had grown up in Queens, and they hit if off immediately. They lived together with Artie’s musically talented wife and fueled by a few joints, started developing ideas around the fast-growing rock music scene.

At that time, musicians like Morrison, Dylan, Hendrix and Joplin were hanging out in the artists’ mecca, 100 miles from New York, called Woodstock. They wanted to raise enough funds to build a recording studio in that small town. In looking for seed money for their venture, their lawyer connected them with Roberts and Rosenman, and the little fund raiser grew into a plan for the largest rock music festival in history. Wallkill, after some searching, became their choice.

Sometime in May, we checked out the Wallkill site and there was a flurry of activity. In early June, a call center had been set up and hundreds of workers were eagerly building the stage for the event. The festival was getting local and national press, mostly negative, and the locals were hard-pressed to see how 50,000 hippies could invade their town without chaos. Ads continued to run in underground papers, the New York Times, Rolling Stone and in the local paper that I delivered, The Times Herald Record. We attended the council meetings, and the cast of characters would arrive in limos and even by helicopter at times. Lang, in particular, showed up with long shaggy hair, no shoes or sandals when he walked into the chambers. The protest from the locals and attendees got loud. Mills was getting threats, and the local paper was running inflammatory stories about the “dirty hippies” coming to town.

There was just no way the venue and town could support 50,000 visitors. Finally, at the last meeting on July 15, 1969, to the cheers of the crowd, the council members soundly rejected the existing permit. The headlines in our beloved Times Herald Record announced the decision with glee and the Woodstock partners were without a festival site.

Elliot Tiber was an openly gay designer who lived in Manhattan. He and his parents owned a small struggling hotel in Bethel, NY, called The El Monaco.  He had 13 acres and a music festival permit. When he read about the mess in Wallkill, he called the partners and, by luck, talked to Michael Lang. His parents were behind in the mortgage, and they could use the money. Lang immediately took his helicopter and landed in front of the hotel. They viewed the site and knew it couldn’t work. Tiber then remembered his milk man, Max Yasgur. Max was a music fan and had hundreds of open acres. Lang, Tiber and Max met at the 300-acre bowl-shaped alfalfa field on July 20, 1969. While Neil Armstrong was taking his first steps on the moon, Lang and Yasgur made a handshake deal.

After the last council meeting, I thought we’d seen the last of the excitement and of the partners. In late July, we received a call from my cousin, Charles Lloyd.  He asked us to come up and see where the festival had landed. He just happened to be Max Yasgur’s dairy manager. Yasgur was the largest dairy farmer in the area and my dad, a livestock marketer, had sold him many cows for his dairy. Max’s dairy made the most amazing chocolate milk. Max was a very nice guy with only three fingers on his right hand. We drove around through the pastures, past a lake and up a slight hill on a dirt road. Going out, I remember a brisk breeze and the sloped field of alfalfa waving in the wind. The men said, “This is where it is going to be”.  They chatted a bit, and that was that. Crazy to believe that these were the same guys that had been chased out of Wallkill into my cousin’s realm. I had no idea of the magnitude of things to come.

As they broke down Wallkill, hundreds  of workers descended upon Bethel and the field. Charles Lloyd was involved with setting up security with 10-20 locals. None had any idea what would be ahead with only less than three weeks until the opening. As the weeks shortened to days, the locals in Bethel were getting wind of the magnitude of the event and promises made by Lang and partners of a 50,000-attendee event exploded. When articles in the Rolling Stone and New York Times announced that over 180,000 tickets had been sold, the resistance reached a fever pitch! There were not enough portable toilets for 10,000, water, camp sites, food, etc. could not support 20,000. Just as occurred in Wallkill, the towns people were starting a revolt. Threats were made, stop work signs were posted and talk of bribes was in the air. On August 11, 1969, the Bethel Town Council were going to vote to revoke the permit from Tiber. By that time, he and his parents had received an estimated $60,000 for the use of his permit, hotel rooms, and consulting fees. Tiber, fearing that he might have to return the monies, asked his mom where it was and she said, “I paid off the  mortgage.” The Woodstock partners and Tiber were five days away from opening and were desperate to save it!

In the El Monaco national radio stations, newspapers, and press had set up shop. Lang and company knew Tiber had a big mouth and told him to go on national radio there and make a plea. Elliot went on the air and expressed that the “haters” were trying to take this beautiful event away from us, so please get behind it and “by the way come anyway, IT’S FREE!” The Woodstock partners about had a cow after that but they had no recourse. Max also made a plea to the council. The “free” statement resounded through the nation and was echoed by a well-known DJ in NYC, Cousin Brucie (Morrow). There was no internet, no cell phones, just  radio, some TV, word of mouth and newspapers spread the word. The town’s people, the council members and all opponents knew it was too late as stopping it would cause a riot!

This is the real reason almost 500,000 people attended the festival.  On  August 14, 1969, the day before the event, buses, cars, vans, hitchhikers started to arrive and fill the New York State Thruway and Route 17, it was a 70-mile traffic jam.

You can read hundreds of books and see movies about the events that took place from August 15 –  18, 1969: the music, the weather, the sounds. On the morning of August 18, 1969,  Hendrix was wrapping up his set in the distance with only about 30,000 stragglers left. It looked like a war zone. The bucolic fields had been turned into a mass of mud, trash and human fatigue. The clean-up effort was immense.

As we drove by a nearby lake, a few festival goers were swimming naked in the dirty water.  My mom reached around to cover my eyes, but too late , I received my first sight of an unclothed woman or two.  Young and naïve at the time, I had no idea of the impact of the event and frankly neither did anyone else.  Many of the musicians rocketed to fame.

The partners took 10 years to pay off the debt and Max suffered emotional and physical depression, and never really recovered.  The site now is called Bethel Woods, a $10 million concert and museum, dedicated to the events that occurred that weekend. In 2019, the 50^th anniversary , Michael Lang tried his old tricks.  Maybe karma got him that time and Max and Tiber were not around to save it. The proposed anniversary event of the decade could not find a landing place, musicians were hired and let go and it fell flat. His past reputation of subsequent Woodstock events was a nightmare!

We are having our festival of celebration in the redwoods of the Los Gatos, CA mountains this year. Laura, my poor wife who has heard nothing but Woodstock stories for many years, and old and new friends. There will be music — cover songs from the original festival lineup and new songs. Our own Redwoodstock celebrating 55 years! I can truly say that Woodstock ’69 was an event that can never be duplicated; 500,000 people in one place for three days without violence for the cause of peace, love and music!