Return to Trevor

Taking Woodstock

Demitri Martin, Imelda Stauton

“Now, my friends, I wasn't there. I'm sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time.” - Presidential candidate John McCain on Sen. Clinton's earmark for a proposed Woodstock museum.

With those words the Arizona Senator with great humor tried to reignite the culture wars because those wild-eyed flower children with their free sex, drugs, rock-n-roll music, tie-dye, and scandals are the real sleeper cell trying to destroy America. Papa Roach Clip and Mama Mountain Love are just waiting for the right moment to convince your daughter to burn her bra and your son to turn on, tune out, and think Patchouli oil smells good.

The 1969 Woodstock Music & Art Fair represents many things to many people. On the surface, it was a three day music festival in upstate New York held from August 15th to the 18th,1969 with between 100,000 to 450,000 in attendance. To the far right, it is an ocean of long-haired, acid fueled, half-naked, dirty, disrespectful, jobless, hedonistic kids, dancing in a muddy alfalfa field to what might be considered music, if a person is tone deaf. To former hippies and flower children, it is the last pure moment and the full flowering of the sixties, the coming together of a generation in a celebration of peace and music. Woodstock is a lot of things, but do not let anyone fool you, it was mainly about cold, hard cash. The Bethel, New York event is taught in music history courses, but every

business school in America should look also.

Almost everyone involved might have believed in free love, but they wanted a payday on the way to the hippie chick buffet. While all under 26 years of age, the four organizers of the concert, Lt. John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfield, and Michael Lang, look, on paper, more like the heroes

of a Young Republicans' Club than the image of flower children we have today. Roberts and Rosenman were a lot of things, but hippies were not one of them. In fact, today they might be called yuppies. They wore suits and enjoyed the Manhattan lifestyle. Roberts, the trust fund child of a drugstore and toothpaste fortune, and Rosenman, a law school graduate and son of a successful orthodontist, dreamed of being screen writers. They envisioned crediting a male version of "I Love Lucy" where two young men with more money than common sense would get into wacky misadventures by investing in ill-conceived projects and ventures that would blow up in their faces. To come up with ideas for potential episodes to pitch the television networks, they placed an ad in the New York Times, stating, "Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and

business propositions." They received thousands of replies.

What started out as a way to come up with wacky ideas became reality. Roberts and Rosenman began combing the letters and personal pitches for business opportunities. It was Arite Kornfield and Michael Lang who caught their attention. Kornfield was the Vice-President at Capital Records who, before taking that position, had penned over 30 hits including Jan and Dean's "Dead Man's Curve." Lang was the only one of the four that looked like part of the counter-culture, preferring to spend most of the time barefoot, but do not let appearances fool you, he was the most business savvy of the group. He was the owner of a very successful head shop in Florida, had managed several bands, and produced what had been the largest music concert to that point, The Miami Pop Festival, which an estimated 40,000 young people had attended. Befriending Kornfield, the two spent many late

evenings shooting the breeze about building a recording studio in rural New York, specifically near the town of Woodstock in Ulster County, where musical icons like Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin,

Jimi Hendrix, Tim Hardin, and The Band had taken up residence. Seed money for the studio would come out of a concert extravaganza, the largest ever held. Both pictured 50,000 young people getting back to nature and enjoying great music. It was then that they saw Roberts and Rosenfield's ad. It took them, Kornfield, and Lang three meetings to get Roberts and Rosenman on board and the four formed a corporation called Woodstock Ventures.

Real estate agents scoured the countryside for the perfect location and the foursome thought they had found it, even though it did not have the back to nature feel they wanted, just outside of the sleepy town of Wallkill, a 300 acre location called Mills Industrial Park. One little problem, most of the residents were not too pleased with the notion of 50,000 young people causing all sorts of chaos, and town officials quickly concluded that the foursome and their staff had no clue what they were doing. Still, everything was going forward. Without an established record as promoters, the most popular musical acts were reluctant to perform at their event. In turn, they had to pay a king's ransom to get them to show up, at least double their usual asking price. Jefferson Airplane were the first to sign for $12,000, then came The Who for $12,500 and Credence Clearwater Revival for $11,500. They quickly spent $180,000 on talent alone. It was then that a stroke of luck (or misfortune) happened. Wallkill decided they did not want the concert. One month before hand, the town's zoning board passed a law requiring that a permit was needed for any event larger than 5,000 people. For a community of only 3,900, the purpose was clearly to make it impossible for Woodstock to be held. All of a sudden, the proposed concert was the talk of the nation, wall-to-wall radio, newspaper and television coverage, the kind of publicity that could not be paid for. Scrambling to find a new location, it was Elliot Tiber, the owner of the nearly vacant resort outside of the town of Bethel in Sullivan County, who came riding to the rescue. Seeing the festival as an answer to both their problems, Tiber needed his rooms filled and and he had the one thing the four concert promoters needed, a permit to hold concerts, which he had used to hold small gatherings of less than a hundred. While his property was not big enough, he suggested that a friend of his, named Max Yasgur, had an alfalfa field that would be perfect.

The old dairy farmer knew some marks when he saw them. Yasgur held them up for $75,000, $43,000

more than headliner Jimi Hendrix was getting. Money was going out at a astronomical rate. The communal group The Hog Farm run by Hugh Romney, more famous as his clown persona Wavy Gravy, were hired to be a kind of hippie police for the three days. The Merry Pranksters also showed

up for a payday. Abbie Hoffman, head of the Yippies Youth International Party, shook the promoters down for $10,000 by threatening to disrupt the proceedings. Prominent citizens of Bethel also showed up for kickbacks in brown paper bags. All the publicity produced more people showing up than expected. Kids began appearing in Yasgur's field 24 hours beforehand. The New York State Thruway became clogged, producing one of the worst traffic jams in American history. With kids already camping in the field and the toll booths unable to be moved into place, all of a sudden the organizers found their money making operation going up in smoke. Except for their pre-sold tickets, they were now overseeing a free three day concert. Not only that, but many of the performers, located in hotels and motels in the surrounding area, could not get to the event until, ironically, the U.S. army stepped

forward to help the "3 days of peace & music" by providing a helicopter to shuttle the performers and provide airlifts of food.

Things got so bad that Governor Nelson Rockefeller threatened to call the area around Bethel a disaster area. Even so, Richie Haven, who opened the festival had to perform for three hours until the next act could get there. Performers like Country Joe McDonald and John Sebastian, formerly of the Lovin' Spoonful, had to be recruited out of the audience to entertain the crowd. Those performers who showed up were often blasted out of their minds, not following their play lists and performing whatever they felt like. Even Jimi Hendrix had to report to the medical tent, as he was tripping so badly on some unknown substance. Pete Townshend of The Who clubbed a whacked out Abbie Hoffman over the head with his guitar, when Abbie tried to jump on stage. The only thing higher than the entertainers was the audience, some of whom had unknowingly ingested Acid when handed free koolaid. 5,162 medical patients were seen over that weekend. Even mother nature was not working with the promoters. At the end of the first day, the skies opened up and five inches of rain poured down in less than three

hours turning the bowl-like field into a mud pit.

If those problems were not enough, the management of Janis Joplin, The Who, and The Grateful Dead, knowing they had the promoters over a barrel head, demanded that they get paid in advance or none of them would take the stage, causing a midnight run to wake up the local President of the bank to

cut some cashier's checks. When everything was said and done, the cultural event of a generation cost $2.4 million, $1.3 million in the red. The two most lasting things to come out of Woodstock are tie-dye

(Sebastian wore some) and granola (Wavy Gravy mixed up some oats, peanuts, and other grains as an emergency way to feed the crowds).Director Ang Lee (Eat Drink Man Woman, The Hulk, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) recreates most of this story in Taking Woodstock, based on the book by Elliot Tiber. So is it a great movie? Ang Lee makes great movies. Yes. Does it matter? No. Much like Woodstock, movies are about making money. Older people, people who even have a clue what Woodstock was about, do not go to movies. This thing is going to lose money. Liberal Hollywood is about making money just like liberal Woodstock was. Those are values a conservative like John McCain could get behind.

Verdict: A Home Run For A Film, A Miss At The Box Office