more about WOODSTOCK

Sunday August 16, 2009

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WOODSTOCK

( August 15, 16 & 17 - 1969 )

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And In The Beginning ...

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Woodstock was initiated through the efforts of Michael Lang, John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, and Artie Kornfeld. It was Roberts and Rosenman who had the finances.

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They placed the following advertisement in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal under the name of Challenge International, Ltd.: “Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions.”
Lang and Kornfeld noticed the ad, and the four men got together originally to discuss a retreat type recording studio in Woodstock, but the idea evolved into an outdoor music and arts festival. There were differences in approach among the four: Roberts was disciplined, and knew what was needed in order for the venture to succeed, while the laid back Lang saw Woodstock as a new, relaxed way of bringing business people together. There were further doubts over the venture, as Roberts wondered whether to consolidate his losses and pull the plug, or to continue pumping his own finances into the project.

In April 1969, newly-minted superstars Creedence Clearwater Revival were the first act to sign a contract for the event, agreeing to play for ten thousand dollars. The promoters had experienced difficulty landing big-name groups prior to the Bay Area 'swamp rockers' committing to play. Creedence drummer Doug Clifford later commented "Once Creedence signed, everyone else jumped in line and all the other big acts came on."

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Given their three AM start time and non-inclusion (at Creedence frontman John Fogerty's insistence) in the Woodstock film, Creedence members have expressed bitterness over their experiences at the famed festival.

Woodstock was designed as a profit-making venture, aptly titled "Woodstock Ventures". It famously became a 'free concert' only after it became obvious that the event was drawing hundreds of thousands more people than the organizers had prepared for. Tickets for the event cost US $18 in advance (approximately US $106 today calculated for buying power, and approximately US $75 today adjusted for inflation) and $24 at the gate for all three days. Ticket sales were limited to record stores in the greater New York City area, or by mail via a Post Office Box at the Radio City Station Post Office located in midtown Manhattan. Around 186,000 tickets were sold beforehand and organizers anticipated approximately 200,000 festival-goers would turn up.

Woodstock Ventures made Warner Bros. an offer to make a movie about Woodstock. All Artie Kornfeld required was $100,000, on the basis that "it could have either sold millions or, if there were riots, be one of the best documentaries ever made," according to Kornfeld.

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Venue

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The concert was originally scheduled to take place in the 300-acre Mills Industrial Park in northeast Middletown, Orange County, New York in Wallkill, Orange County, New York which Woodstock Ventures had leased for $100,000 in the Spring of 1969. Town officials were assured that no more than 50,000 people would attend. Town residents immediately opposed the project. In early July the Town Board passed a law requiring a permit for any gathering over 5,000 people. On July 15, 1969 the Wallkill Zoning Board of Appeals officially banned the concert on the basis that the planned portable toilets would not meet town code.

Following the ban, Elliot Tiber, who owned the 80 room El Monaco Motel on White Lake in Bethel, New York offered to host the event on his 15 acres. He already had a permit for a White Lake Music and Arts Festival from the Town of Bethel, which was to be a chamber music concert. When it was clear the site was too small, Tiber introduced the promoters to dairy farmer, Max Yasgur, initially on the premise that Yasgur's land would rent for $50 for a festival attracting 5,000. On July 20, 1969, Yasgur, meeting with the organizers at a White Lake restaurant called The Lighthouse, agreed to rent 600 acres for $75,000.

News of the event was leaked to local radio station WVOS (AM) even before Yasgur and the organizers left the restaurant, reportedly by restaurant employees. The organizers paid another $25,000 to nearby residents to rent their land. Yasgur's land formed a natural bowl sloping down to Filippini Pond on the land's north side. The stage would be set at the bottom of the hill with Filippini Pond forming a backdrop. The pond would become a popular skinny dipping destination. The event organizers would stay at Tiber's El Monaco Motel along with

Canned Heat and Arlo Guthrie. Tiber was further rewarded for saving the event by being awarded the sole concession for ticket buyers.

The organizers once again told Bethel authorities they expected no more than 50,000 people.
Despite resident opposition and signs proclaiming, 'Buy No Milk. Stop Max's Hippy Music Festival', Bethel Town Attorney Frederick W. V. Schadt and building inspector

Donald Clark approved the permits, but the Bethel Town Board refused to issue them formally. Clark was ordered to post 'Stop Work' orders, but the promoters tore them down.

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... It's A Free Concert .. Now

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The late change in venue did not give the festival organizers enough time to prepare. At a meeting three days before the event organizers felt they had two choices. One choice was to improve the fencing and security which might have resulted in violence, the other choice involved putting all their resources into completing the stage which would cause Woodstock Ventures to take a financial hit. The crowd which was arriving in greater number and earlier than anticipated made the decision for them. The fence was eventually cut in part by UAW/MF Family prompting many more to show up.

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The Festival

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The influx of attendees to the rural concert site in Bethel created a massive traffic jam. Fearing chaos as thousands began descending on the community, Bethel did not enforce its codes. Eventually, people were discouraged from setting off to the festival on radio stations as far away as WNEW-FM in Manhattan and the traffic jams were described on television news programs. Arlo Guthrie made an announcement that was included in the film that the "New York State Thruway is closed, man!".

The director of the Woodstock museum discussed below said this never occurred. To add to the problems and difficulty in dealing with the large crowds, recent rains had caused muddy roads and fields. The facilities were not equipped to provide sanitation or first aid for the number of people attending; hundreds of thousands found themselves in a struggle against bad weather, food shortages, and poor sanitation.

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On the morning of Sunday August 17th New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller called festival organizer John Roberts and told him he was thinking of ordering 10,000 New York State National Guard troops to the festival. Roberts was successful in persuading Rockefeller not to do it. Sullivan County declared a 'state of emergency'.

Although the festival was remarkably PEACEFUL given the number of people and the conditions involved, there were two recorded fatalities: one from what was believed to be a heroin overdose and another caused in an accident when a tractor ran over an attendee sleeping in a nearby hayfield. There also were two births recorded at the event (one in a car caught in traffic and another in a helicopter) and four miscarriages. Oral testimony in the film supports the overdose and run-over deaths and at least one birth, along with many colossal logistical headaches.

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Yet, in tune with the idealistic hopes of the 1960s, Woodstock satisfied most attendees. There was a sense of social harmony, the quality of music, and the overwhelming mass of people, many sporting 'bohemian' dress, behavior, and attitudes.

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After the concert .. Max Yasgur, who owned the site of the event, saw it as a victory of peace and love. He spoke of how nearly half a million people filled with possibilities of disaster, riot, looting, and catastrophe spent the three days with music and peace on their minds. He states that "if we join them, we can turn those adversities that are the problems of America today into a hope for a brighter and more peaceful future..."

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Media Reporting

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Very few reporters from outside the immediate area were on the scene. During the first few days of the festival, national media coverage emphasized the problems. Headlines in the New York Daily News read "TRAFFIC UPTIGHT AT HIPPIEFEST" and "HIPPIES MIRED IN A SEA OF MUD".

Coverage became more positive by the end of the festival in part because the parents of concertgoers called the media, and told them based on their children s phone calls their reporting was misleading.

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The Middletown (NY) Times Herald-Record had been following the story ever since Middletown was initially selected as the site of the festival. Al Romm, then editor of the Record, editorialized against the law that banned the festival from Walkill and Middletown. As the only daily in the area, the Record covered the subsequent site selections, which eventually settled on Yasgur's farm. During Woodstock, Al Romm and his wife Ethel were on site as reporters from Thursday, the day before the start of the festival, and coordinated coverage from a trailer behind the stage, and had the only phone line out of the concert site.

Many Record reporters, including Joe Shea, founder of The American Reporter (newspaper), who were at Woodstock on their own, were recruited to cover the emerging story. Romm hired a motorcyclist to get stories and pictures from the impassible crowd to the newspaper's HQ, 35 miles away in Middletown. The Record issued a rare Saturday extra, with a front page picture by Ethel Romm.
The Record ran an extended series recalling the event in August 2009.

The New York Times, Barnard Collier later contended that he was almost continually pressed by his editors in New York to make the story about the immense traffic jams, the less than sanitary conditions, the rampant drug use, the lack of 'proper policing', and the presumed dangerousness of so many young people congregating. Collier is quoted as saying: "Every major Times editor up to and including executive editor James Reston insisted that the tenor of the story must be a social catastrophe in the making. It was difficult to persuade them that the relative lack of serious mischief and the fascinating cooperation, caring and politeness among so many people was the significant point. I had to resort to refusing to write the story unless it reflected to a great extent my on the scene conviction that 'peace' and 'love' was the actual emphasis, not the preconceived opinions of Manhattan bound editors.

After many acrimonious telephone exchanges, the editors agreed to publish the story as I saw it, and although the nuts and bolts matters of gridlock and minor lawbreaking were put close to the lead of the stories, the real flavor of the gathering was permitted to get across.

After the festival was finished, Collier wrote another article about the exodus of fans away from the festival for The New York Times. He speaks of such a peaceful event considering the size of the crowd and listens to Dr. William Abruzzi’s (chief medical officer during the event) opinions that these were beautiful people. This opinion had seemingly rubbed off on several locals. Bus driver Richard Biccum described them as "good kids in disguise."

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The Films

The documentary film, Woodstock, directed by Michael Wadleigh and edited by Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese, was released in 1970. Artie Kornfeld (one of the promoters of the festival) came to Fred Weintraub, an executive at Warner Bros., and asked for money to film the festival. Previously, Artie had been turned down everywhere else, but Fred Weintraub became his hero and, against the express wishes of other Warner Bros. executives, Weintraub put his job on the line and gave Kornfeld $100,000 to make the film. Woodstock helped to save Warner Bros at a time when the company was on the verge of going out of business. The book 'Easy Riders, Raging Bulls' details the making of the film.

Wadleigh rounded up a crew of about 100 from the New York film scene. With no money to pay the crew, he agreed to a double or nothing scheme, in which the crew would receive double pay if the film succeeded and nothing if it bombed. Wadleigh strived to make the film as much about the hippies as the music, listening to their feelings about compelling events contemporaneous with the festival (such as the Vietnam War), as well as the views of the townspeople.

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Woodstock received the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. The film has been deemed culturally significant by the United States Library of Congress. In 1994, Woodstock: The Director's Cut was released and expanded to include Janis Joplin as well as additional performances by Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, and Canned Heat not seen in the original version of the film. In 2009, the 40th Anniversary of the festival, it has been again released on DVD. This release marks first time it has been available in high definition on Blu-ray disc.
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The Recordings

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Two soundtrack albums were released. The first, 'Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More', was a 3-LP (later 2-CD) album containing a sampling of one or two songs by most of the acts who performed.

A year later, 'Woodstock 2' was released as a 2 LP album. Both albums included recordings of stage announcements (e.g. "[We're told] that the brown acid is not specifically too good", "Hey, if we think really hard maybe we can stop this rain") and crowd noises (i.e. the "rain chant") between songs.

In 1994 a third album, 'Woodstock Diary' was released. Tracks from all three albums, as well as numerous additional, previously-unreleased performances from the festival, but not the stage announcements and crowd noises, were reissued by Atlantic as a 4 CD box set titled 'Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music'.
An album titled 'Jimi Hendrix: Woodstock' also was released in 1994, featuring only selected recordings of Jimi Hendrix at the festival. Longer double disc set, 'Live at Woodstock' (1999) features every song of Hendrix's performance omitting just two pieces that were sung by his rhythm guitarist.

In 2009 complete performances from Woodstock by Santana, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, and Johnny Winter were released separately and were also collected in a box-set entitled 'The Woodstock Experience'.

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Aftermath

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Bethel voters tossed out their supervisor in an election held in November 1969 because of his role in bringing the festival to the town. New York State and the town of Bethel passed mass gathering laws designed to prevent any more festivals from occurring. Attempts were made to prevent people from visiting the site, its owners spread chicken manure, and during one anniversary tractors and state police cars formed roadblocks.

20,000 people gathered at the site in 1989 during an impromptu 20th anniversary celebration. A local man put up a monument at the site, and in 1997 a community group put up a welcoming sign for visitors. Unlike in Bethel, the Town of Woodstock made several efforts to cash in on its notoriety. Bethel's stance changed in recent years, and the town now embraces the festival. Efforts have begun to forge a link between Bethel and Woodstock.[40]
Approximately 80 lawsuits were filed against Woodstock Ventures. The movie financed the settlements and paid off Woodstock Ventures $1.4 million dollars of debt it had incurred from the festival.

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Woodstock Today

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A plaque has been placed at the original site commemorating the festival. The field and the stage area remain preserved in their rural setting. On the field are the remnants of a neon flower and bass from the original concert. In the middle of the field, there is a totem pole with wood carvings of Jimi Hendrix in the middle, Janis Joplin on top, and Jerry Garcia on the bottom. A concert hall has been erected up the hill, and the fields of the old Yasgur farm are still visited by people of all generations.

In 1997, the site of the concert and 1,400 acres surrounding was purchased by Alan Gerry for the purpose of creating the 'Bethel Woods Center for the Arts'. The Center opened on July 1, 2006 with a performance of the New York Philharmonic. On August 13, 2006, Crosby Stills Nash & Young performed to 16,000 fans at the new Center, 37 years after their historic performance at Woodstock.

The Museum at Bethel Woods opened in June 2008. The Museum contains film and interactive displays, text panels, and artifacts which explore the unique experience of the Woodstock festival, its significance as the culminating event of a decade of radical cultural transformation, and the legacy of the Sixties and Woodstock today.

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The year 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. There has been extensive worldwide media interest in the anniversary.

A number of activities to commemorate this historic festival will be taking place around the world. One such will be in Hawkhurst, Kent (UK), at a Summer of Love party, with acts including two of the participants at the original Woodstock - Barry Melton of Country Joe and the Fish and Robin Williamson of the The Incredible String Band, plus cover bands for Santana and the Grateful Dead.

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Woodstock Ventures and Sony Music announced a partnership in April on Woodstock.com, which is both the official site for Woodstock and a social network.

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LARRY..CURTIS..SPURLOCK

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