Back to Yasgur’s farm

[6 articles]

Three days of peace and music make a comeback

http://www.manchesterjournal.com/ci_12872442

Andrew McKeever - Managing Editor
Posted: 07/20/2009

MANCHESTER -- There aren't too many moments that define or capture an
age. Neil Armstrong's moon landing was probably one. The destruction
of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was another.

Woodstock, the rock festival held at a farm in upstate New York over
a weekend in mid-August, 1969, was, without question, one of those.
While generations of people born too late to have made it to the farm
for "three days of peace and music" may have long ago gotten bored
with the tales and legends -some factually based, some less so --
spawned by the mammoth rock festival, there's no denying it was a
pivotal moment in the youth culture of that time. Its impact has been
debated, and sometimes mocked, in the intervening years, but it's
hard to argue it wasn't a signature moment of a certain point in time.

Forty years later, now aging baby boomers and others who feel some
kind of connection or interest in what it was all about have a chance
to re-visit that moment in history when Michael Lang, the producer
and co-creator of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, as it was
officially known, makes an appearance at the Northshire Bookstore on
Saturday, July 25, to discuss his new book, "The Road to Woodstock."

The book traces the long arc of how Lang came to develop the idea of
the festival: from his childhood in Brooklyn as the son of
entrepreneurial parents, his early encounters with the alternative
music scene and counterculture of Greenwich Village which led him
eventually to Miami, Fla. open a "head shop" - those born after 1980
may struggle with that one but you can probably take an educated
guess if you think in terms of what were essential supplies for the
countercultural lifestyle of the 1960s. While in Miami, he produced a
rock festival which proved to be the early template for what grew
into the far grander Woodstock event.

Lang returned north in the wild summer of 1968 -- the year of
political assassination and upheaval-- and settled for a time in
Woodstock, N.Y., then as now something of an artist's and writer's
haven. The area was home to many talented musicians, some who went on
to national recognition, who would perform on weekends at outdoor
concerts called Soundouts.

"...the Soundouts were in direct contrast to the national climate,"
Lang writes in The Road to Woodstock. "They had a joyous, healing
feeling to them... with little kids running around, people sharing
joints and lazing around on blankets as the sun set....The Soundouts
reignited the idea that first struck me in Miami. But here I began to
see the pieces of something even bigger coming together."

From there one thing led to another, and Lang takes the reader
through a long sequence of people he met up with, partnered with and
persuaded -- overcoming enormous reluctance and skepticism in some
cases -- to work with him at producing an event that they thought at
tops, might attract upwards of 200,000 people.

The fact that it wound up drawing at least twice that, not counting
the other 400-500,000 who wanted to get there but couldn't, was his
biggest surprise, he said in a telephone interview last week.

"What we built was for 200,000 people -- that was the upper range of
what I thought would be possible and was hoping for," he said. "When
half a million (people) showed up it was a stretch."

For anyone who wants to re-live the memory of those halcyon days,
Lang's description of the endless haggling with all the comers --
town officials in Wallkill, N.Y. where the concert was to be moved
after their original site near Saugerties, N.Y. (which was used for
the 25th anniversary concert in 1994) fell through, to maneuvering
through the agendas of music moguls like Bill Graham and
self-appointed political spokesmen like Abbie Hoffman -- will bring
back smiles of recognition. The saga of how Lang and his group found
themselves without an approved site for the event a month before the
show was to open is one that may be known, but is told here in
fascinating detail, leading on to the magical moment when the
organizers, desperate to find a usuable location, stumbled upon Max
Yasgur, a farmer in the nearby town of White Lake, and beheld the
natural amphitheater that was to help them make history.

Another fascinating subplot is the negotiations with all the big name
musical artists of the time; including those who might have been
there (Lang wanted to get John Lennon of The Beatles, for example).

Lang's favorite moment came when Richie Havens - who wasn't supposed
to be the opening act but was cajoled into that role by Lang - went
on stage and the sound system worked he said.

"We had been working against impossible odds and it all came down to
that moment," he said.

The book, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not, neatly traces the
schism of the counterculture of that era - one part peace, love and
harmony, the other part hard-boiled, real-world sorting out of power
and monetary relationships. Hanging over the book is the question of
where all that positive energy went to afterwards. But on another
level, it was just a rock festival, with all kinds of messy problems,
and one that Lang never gave serious thought to re-creating.

"It was an amazing event in that a group or community of people came
together, that it was peaceful at a time when things were pretty
horrible," Lang said. "All these things we had been striving for came
together that weekend -- I thought this was a chance for us to
demonstrate what the world was going to be like when we were in
charge. I think it was a moment of hope in a very dark time."

--------

Back to Yasgur's farm

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2009/07/19/back_to_yasgurs_farm/

40 years later, memories of the difficult birth and the iconic (if
drug-addled) triumph of Woodstock

By Steve Morse
Globe Correspondent / July 19, 2009

Forty years later, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair seems like a
faint, faraway dream. Tickets to the event were surely a dream by
modern standards. A one-day pass cost $7 - less than the cost of a
beer at the Comcast Center now. And all three days cost $18 - more
than $300 less than a good seat to a single show by the Rolling
Stones or Madonna.

Woodstock was an improvised hippie happening: "We made it up as we
went along,'' writes producer Michael Lang. But despite mud,
overcrowding, a lack of food and sanitary facilities, it can still
lay claim to being an unmatched cultural event. It was the first big
outdoor rock concert on the East Coast, attended by an estimated
500,000 people, and it has come to symbolize an entire generation.
(Crowd estimates vary because most people streamed in for free.)
Woodstock paved the way for the green movement and blissfully lacked
the corporate signage that typify today's co-opted rock shows.

Two new books are out, looking to plug into Woodstock nostalgia, with
the 40th anniversary coming next month. Both are to be recommended,
but for different reasons. Lang's "The Road to Woodstock'' is an
adrenaline-rush account of the weekend itself and the activity behind
the scenes, from the struggle to coax bands into signing up (Lang
stayed up all night with the Who's Pete Townshend until Townshend
finally agreed at 8 a.m. so he could get some sleep) to negotiations
with skeptical town officials in upstate New York who feared an
invasion of hippies. The town of Wallkill turned him down only a
month before the festival, forcing Lang to hustle to find an
alternative site: Max Yasgur's 600-acre farm in Bethel. Carpenters
were still finishing the stage on the first day.

The other book, "Back to the Garden,'' is by New York disc jockey
Pete Fornatale, who collects dozens of first-person memories from
bands, organizers, and fans. He is not a great writer and is prone to
clichés ("by Friday the route to the festival had more clogged
arteries than Elvis Presley''), but fresh insights from the artists
make it an important read. And while most of the quotes he uses are
positive (Woodstock "was wonderful and breathtakingly exhilarating,''
says Arlo Guthrie.), some are much less so. Take this one from Indian
sitar master Ravi Shankar, talking about the stoned nature of the
crowd: "It reminded me of the water buffaloes you see in India,
submerged in the mud. Woodstock was like a big picnic party, and the
music was incidental.''

Lang's book is the better of the two. He coauthored a mostly
pictorial book, "Woodstock Festival Remembered,'' for the event's
10th anniversary, but this is his most extensive analysis. He's a
charming character - so much so that he once convinced his parents
that smoking pot was fine, after his mother found a stash in his
bedroom closet in Brooklyn. And, after a fractured career path of
running head shops in Miami and Coconut Grove, he moved to Woodstock
and put his charm to work there. He had a vision for the festival and
knew the right people to recruit. He had three partners - John
Roberts, a trust fund kid; Artie Kornfeld, a Capitol Records
executive; and Joel Rosenman, son of a Long Island orthodontist.

Lang also hired technical directors from the famed Fillmore East in
New York and secured some of his favorite bands, paying $10,000 each
to Creedence Clearwater Revival and Jefferson Airplane; and $12,500
for Canned Heat. He rented Yasgur's farm for $50,000 and appeased
radical activist Abbie Hoffman with $10,000 to set up a printing
press for political pamphlets on site, though no political
discussions were allowed on stage.

Lang does a fine job of recreating the crazed spontaneity of the
weekend. Performers such as the Airplane, John Sebastian, and Guthrie
dropped acid before their sets, and Carlos Santana admits to being
high on mescaline when he played. Set times were pushed back by 12
hours because of bad weather and delays in getting to the site. And
countering the assumed Woodstock bliss is Lang's confession that two
vendor tents were burned down by fans angry at high prices. In
Fornatale's book, the interviews - many are new and some culled from
his radio show through the years - are better than his intervening
text. He offers little about the logistics, but a lot about the
musicians, giving extensive (and sometimes superfluous) histories on
each act that played. He veers away from the concert to give a long
history of the sitar, for example. But he gets in some great new
details along the way. One comes from Alvin Lee of Ten Years After,
who says that while the audience was friendly, there "wasn't a lot of
peace and love backstage'' because "there were a lot of managers''
there. And Henry Gross of the group Sha Na Na talks of being offered
Jack Daniel's at 9 a.m. by Jimi Hendrix, then pot from Jerry Garcia
that afternoon. "Between Jim's hooch and Jerry's hemp, I'm
hallucinating,'' he recalls.

The promoters lost money, since most of the crowd attended for free,
but the resulting Woodstock movie went on to make $50 million and win
an Oscar. Warner Bros., which released it, cleaned up, Lang says, but
it was too late to do him much good. Lang and Kornfeld were bought
out for $31,750 each by Woodstock Ventures, which they helped form.

Perhaps singer Graham Nash sums up the Woodstock mystique best,
saying "as we get into the future, the legend, the myth of Woodstock
becomes greater than the actual reality.'' No argument there.
--

Steve Morse, a former Globe music critic, can be reached at spmorse@gmail.com.

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1969 Fast Facts: Woodstock

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,533823,00.html

Sunday, July 19, 2009

• Woodstock Music and Art Fair took place August 15-17, 1969

• Woodstock was described as an "An Aquarian Exposition, Three Days
of Peace and Music"

• Woodstock drew 400,000 young people to Bethel, New York in the
Catskill Mountains.

• The festival created massive traffic jams and extreme shortages of
food, water, and medical and sanitary facilities.

• No incidents of violence occurred at the Woodstock festival.

• Most of the 80 arrests at Woodstock were made on drug charges
involving LSD, amphetamines and heroin.

• Marijuana smokers, estimated to be the majority of the audience,
were not arrested at Woodstock.

• Three accidental deaths were reported at Woodstock.

• The Festival had been scheduled to be held in Walkill, New York.

• After Walkill townspeople objected, it was moved to the 600-acre
farm of dairyman Max B. Yasgur.

• The organizers of the festival, John Roberts, Michael Lang and Joel
Rosenman, had originally estimated expenses, to be covered by
admissions fees, at $750,000.

• The crush of spectators, however, caused ticket-taking to be abandoned.

• Ultimately, Woodstock Ventures, Inc. spent $2.5 million while
collecting only $1.5 million.

• The $1 million debt was to be offset by a film of the festival and
recordings of the music.

• Acts at Woodstock included Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful
Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Santana, The Who and a nascent
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

• Festival featured 33 musical acts

• Janis Joplin was paid was paid $7,500 at Woodstock.

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Mountain's Leslie West Remembers First Woodstock, Looks Forward to Next

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,533861,00.html?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a16:g2:r1:c0.180321:b26534074:z0

July 19, 2009

Leslie West is a founding member of the group Mountain. The band
played at the original Woodstock on the festival's second day, August
16, 1969. He told FOXNews.com his memories from that day, 40 years
ago, and the special reason he's looking forward to playing Woodstock
again this year at the 40th Anniversary show at the original concert site.
--

"It's hard to believe when we play there on August 15th this year, it
will have been 40 years since we played there the first time. We went
on after the Grateful Dead and before Creedence Clearwater Revival.
It was Mountain's third show ever ­ third or fourth. Jimi Hendrix's
manager was our manager, so I guess he said if you want Jimi, you've
gotta take Mountain, too!

"The Grateful Dead did four songs. And it wasn't the Grateful Dead
like we know them, with this big caravan of people following them
around. It was just some band from San Francisco ­ nobody knew who
they were really. And I guess the Dead didn't like their set because
they wanted a do-over. Mountain did 13 songs, and I don't remember
half of them. I was young, I was nervous, but I wasn't high. I was
afraid to touch anything then. My friend John Sebastian, who played
earlier, was making tie-dyes backstage, and I asked him if he took
acid or something, because he was just tie-dying everything and he
said 'I'm not sure, I ate a chunk of something.'

"We rented our own helicopter to get up there, and we saw all of
these thousands and thousands of people on the ground watching the
show. But the pilot wouldn't fly back out after our set because it
was dark, and he was afraid of all the surrounding mountains.
Backstage afterwards was pandemonium. They ran out of everything, no
food, no water. For some reason, my manager's wife Gloria told us
beforehand 'There's not going to be much food up there ­ here, take
these barbeque chickens.' So we packed up all this chicken in a
cooler and brought it with us, and we were the only ones with food!

"So we stayed the night, and I watched The Who and Sly and The Family
Stone. They were amazing, man. When people put up their Bic lighters
for the Sly encore, that was the first time I ever saw people do that
at a concert. First time! We left around daybreak the next morning.

"After that it was festivals every weekend. Atlanta, Detroit, Watkins
Glen ­ Woodstock started the whole thing. Our set didn't make the
Woodstock movie, or we would have been even more famous! But I just
saw the new DVD and some Mountain footage is on that ­ it looks great.

"I still don't know how we got through that set. I do know that I'm
going to make it through the set at our 40th anniversary show though.
I have to because I'm getting married near the end of it! We're going
to have a short ceremony onstage with a justice of the peace, me and
my fianceé Jenni, then we're going to finish up with "Mississippi
Queen" and have a party! You comin'?"

--------

Legendary DJ's book highlights music of Woodstock

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090719/LIFE/907190306/1005/LIFE

By John W. Barry • Poughkeepsie Journal
July 19, 2009

After 40 years, two anniversary concerts, countless books and endless
analysis, there might not be much new ground left to cover when it
comes to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

But legendary New York City DJ Pete Fornatale has found some daylight
and captured it in a new book about that historic music festival,
which was held in August 1969 in Sullivan County.

"Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock" is a compilation of
first-person accounts of Woodstock, many from radio interviews
Fornatale conducted during a decades-long, storied career in radio.
The book was published this month by Touchstone, a division of Simon
& Schuster.

On Tuesday, Fornatale will hold a multimedia presentation featuring
audio and video and a book signing at The Museum at Bethel Woods,
which is part of Bethel Woods Center for the Arts on the site of the
Woodstock concert in Bethel.

Among the stories Fornatale may recount Tuesday is a tale Roger
Daltrey of The Who told the DJ during a radio interview some years
ago. This story is featured in the book.

"The sun coming up to 'See Me, Feel Me' was the top," Daltrey said.
"As soon as the - the words 'See Me' came out of my mouth from the
end of "Tommy," this huge, red, August sun popped its head out of the
horizon, over the crowd. And that light show you can't beat."

Daltrey also told Fornatale during that interview, "I dreamt the
whole thing three weeks before it happened. And I thought I was in
Vietnam, because I had this dream about helicopters and towers and
fires and smoke. When I got to Woodstock, it was Woodstock. That was
extraordinary."

Fornatale is the author of "Simon & Garfunkel's Bookends" and can be
heard across the country on XM Sirius Satellite Radio's "Mixed Bag"
program and in the New York City area on Bronx-based WFUV (90.7 FM),
which can also be heard on www.wfuv.org. Fornatale might be best
known for the 20 years - 1969-89 - he spent at WNEW (102.7 FM) in New
York City.

"For four decades, Pete Fornatale has shared his broad music
knowledge and intelligent insights with New York radio audiences, and
we are delighted that he will be at The Museum at Bethel Woods to
share his stories of Woodstock with us," museum Director Wade
Lawrence said. "His new book is a great read, full of anecdotes and
behind-the-scenes stories that add greatly to the growing written
record of that world-changing event."

Fornatale's focus in "Back to the Garden" is the music because, he
said, "none of the books" about Woodstock "really focus on the music.
It's almost more about the back story."

Fornatale said the outline for the book became "about the music,
primarily, and chronologically, from Richie Havens through Jimi
Hendrix," adding "the back story, not chronologically, but along the
way, where it fits."

The first-person accounts in "Back to the Garden" come from
interviews conducted by Fornatale and were taken from his personal
audio archives as well as a wide range of other sources, such as
"Time" magazine, the Museum at Bethel Woods archives and the "Woodstock" movie.

Fornatale will play some of those recorded interviews Tuesday during
his multimedia presentation. If you attend, you might hear the very
first commercial he ever read on WNEW - a commercial for the
Woodstock festival.

Fornatale was hired by WNEW in July 1969 and, as the new guy, stayed
behind at the station while hundreds of thousands flocked to Bethel.

"I cringe a little when I hear it," he said of the commercial. "But
because it's history, I'm going to use it."

Dylan's influence cited

Other anecdotes in the book include a passage from rock critic and
author Greil Marcus about the impact Bob Dylan - who lived in
Woodstock but did not play at the festival - had on the festival.
This passage is a quote the book takes from Rolling Stone magazine
from September 1969:

"Willingly or not, Bob Dylan was the presence hovering over this
three-day jamboree ... he is the elder of this urban tribe ... the
tribally tom-tommed message of WOODSTOCK, Dylan's refuge, WOODSTOCK,
Dylan's turf, WOODSTOCK, Dylan's bringing it all back home, was as
much responsible for moving this massive surge of humanity onto a
600-acre farm as any advertisements, promotion, publicity."

And there is a very interesting comment from John Sebastian, culled
from The Museum at Bethel Woods archive, regarding Stephen Stills and
Crosby, Stills & Nash:

"I'm an amateur drummer, and Stephen had said to me, 'This band is
gonna be a kind of odd thing with these vocals as the focal thing. I
don't feel like hiring a drummer, because he's gonna be insulted.
Whereas you, Sebastian, aren't formed yet as a drummer. You could
take this job on and kind of play into it. Then we'd have another
songwriter and another voice.' "

Needless to say, Sebastian turned Stills down.

"I felt like my audience," Sebastian is quoted as saying, "might have
trouble making that many jumps from the Spoonful to John's solo to
CSNS or whatever it was gonna be."
--

Reach John W. Barry at jobarry@poughkeepsiejournal.com or 845-437-4822.

---------

Happy 40th, Woodstock Baby

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/07/17/entertainment/main5167360.shtml

Hippie Birthday: Elusive Woodstock Babies Turn 40 This Year, If They
Really Do Exist

Jul. 17, 2009

Welcome to middle age, Woodstock Baby _ if you're really out there.

The babies reportedly born at the Woodstock festival 40 years ago
remain the most enduring mystery from that chaotic weekend that
defined a generation. Depending on the source, there was one birth on
that patch of upstate New York farmland between Aug. 15-17, 1969. Or
two. Or three. Or none.

There is some tantalizing evidence. Singer John Sebastian is captured
on film announcing that some cat's old lady just had a baby, a kid
destined to be far out. A couple of surviving eyewitnesses say there
were births. The concert's medical director told reporters at the
scene there were two births: one at a local hospital after the mother
was flown out by helicopter; the other in a car caught in the epic
traffic jam outside the site crowded with more than 400,000 people.

But no one has come forward with a credible public claim of giving
birth to a Woodstock baby or being born there. No one has produced
proof that it happened. If babies were born at Woodstock, they have
lived their lives ignoring _ or unaware of _ the fact that reporters
and researchers have been on their trail for decades.

"I've searched, I've spoken to the doctors and nurses from the main
hospitals that were there," said Myron Gittell, who wrote the new
medical history, "Woodstock '69: Three Days of Peace, Music, and Medical Care."

Like many before him, he found nothing.

"Almost statistically, you'd think if there are a half-million
people, and half of them were women, and 95 percent of them were of
childbearing age, and fertile, and active. Just statistically,
someone would have had to pop a baby."

Problem is: No one has been able to dig up a birth record.

Rita Sheehan, town clerk for Bethel, which hosted the concert, said
there is no local birth certificate on record. Still, it's possible
the birth was recorded in one of the surrounding towns. Gittell says
there were births recorded in neighboring towns in that period, but
the records are sealed under state privacy laws. There's no way to
check whether the birth mothers were locals or out-of-towners (the
likely pool of Woodstock Moms).

That leaves a few eyewitness accounts, like that of Gladys Devaney,
who was a member of the volunteer ambulance corps in nearby Liberty.
She answered an ambulance call to a tent at the festival and saw a
young woman in labor. Her overriding concern then was that other
medical workers took her stretcher as they rushed the woman away. But
Devaney knew labor when she saw it.

"I heard her screaming," Devaney said. "I didn't get a good look at
her, she was thrashing."

Devaney never found out whether they took the young woman to a
waiting helicopter or somewhere else.

Elliot Tiber, the subject of Ang Lee's new movie, "Taking Woodstock,"
tops Devaney. He says he helped deliver a baby that weekend.

Tiber, who has a reputation for being a raconteur, said the woman
gave birth at his parent's hotel near the site, which _ like the
entire area that weekend _ was mobbed. The woman wore a leather
jacket, came in on a motorcycle and just flopped down.

"I see she's starting to give birth," Tiber recalled. "It was like
the quote from `Gone With the Wind': `I don't know nothing about
birthing no babies, Miss Scarlet' ... I was screaming, just
screaming. Everybody was standing around stoned saying, `Yeah,
groovy!' They thought it was cool."

Tiber said the baby was taken away, though the mother came by in a
cab a few weeks later with her baby in a blanket. He didn't get any
names. He never heard from them again.

After four decades, the Woodstock baby trail has gotten colder. The
young people who packed into Woodstock are retirement age now. A
number of the emergency and medical workers involved, including the
concert's medical director, Dr. William Abruzzi, are dead. And if a
baby was born onsite, there are curious gaps in the record.

Press accounts at the time mentioning the births did not provide
names. Abruzzi wrote an exhaustive account of the event in which he
tallied six pages of medical incidents over the three days (11 rat
bites, 16 peptic ulcers, 707 drug overdoses, among them). The paper,
now in the collection of the Museum at Bethel Woods, the onsite
museum, does not mention a single childbirth.

"It could be one of those myths that grow out of major events," said
Bethel museum Director Wade Lawrence. "It could be like the story of
the New York State Thruway being closed. It wasn't."

Maybe the best argument against a Woodstock baby is that no one in
the past four decades has stepped forward to publicly and credibly
claim they were born or gave birth at Woodstock. There is a theory
that neither mother nor child particularly want Woodstock to define
their lives, and have chosen to keep their distinction a private matter.

But it bears saying as the 40th anniversary of Woodstock approaches.
If you are a Woodstock baby or a Woodstock mother, please consider
contacting The Associated Press at woodstockbaby"at"ap.org.

People have been looking for you.

.