Woodstock Memoir Marks 40th Anniversary

by Bob Bembridge in Honoring Lives, Literary / Publication Reviews, Reviews

There have always been two Woodstocks – the event and the myth.

Woodstock the event consisted of lots of rain, little food, bad acid, and sometimes bad music.  Woodstock the myth, according to festival promoter Michael Lang, gave young Americans “a sense of possibility and hope” that “spread around the globe.”

Lang’s long-awaited memoir, The Road to Woodstock, sheds new light on the event even as it offers more undeserved hoke about the importance of those three days at Bethel, NY in August 1969.

Although a zillion books and articles have been written about Woodstock, this is Lang’s first full-length account of the festival and the events leading up to it.  The book was released this summer to coincide with (and profit from) the festival’s 40^th anniversary.  Michael Lang was the hands-on manager of the festival and became the most recognizable face of Woodstock.  (Woodstock Ventures partner Artie Kornfeld was dropping psilocybin and escorting rock stars that weekend while partners John Roberts and Joel Rosenman were begging Governor Nelson Rockefeller not to send in the National Guard.)  

Lang begins the book just as the festival is closing on Monday morning.  Jimi Hendrix is playing the “Star Spangled Banner” to a crowd that’s dwindled down to 40,000 from 400,000 the day before.  Lang’s three partners have already left for New York to deal with the unhappy Wall Street bankers who want their money back.  Lang’s basking in the glow of the event is interrupted by a frantic message from New York – he’s wanted down on Wall Street pronto.   Woodstock Ventures’ $1.4 million loss, caused by the last-minute shift of the festival from Wallkill to Bethel, poisoned the relationships between the four partners.  It took 10 years before Woodstock Ventures (sans Lang and Kornfeld) showed a profit, the result of record sales and the film deal which Kornfeld struck with Warner Brothers the day before the festival opened.   

As the title implies, Lang’s emphasis is on his pre-Woodstock life and the events leading up to the festival.  Lang’s precocious childhood in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn – smoking pot while most kids his age were watching “Leave it to Beaver” – inclined him to join the burgeoning folk music scene in Greenwich Village.  After dropping out of NYU and conniving his way out of the draft, Lang headed to Miami and opened one of the South’s first “head” shops.  Inspired by 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival, Lang promoted a rock festival featuring Jimi Hendrix and the Mothers of Invention.  He also encountered the same problems that would plague him a year later at Woodstock – rain, more rain, and musicians wanting to be paid before they walked on stage. The Miami Pop Festival was a financial disaster that presaged Woodstock.

Chased out of Miami by hostile politicians and police, Lang moved to Woodstock, NY.  Woodstock had been a haven for artists and bohemians since the beginning of the 20^th Century, and Bob Dylan had settled there in 1965.  Weekly outdoor concerts in Woodstock gave Lang the idea to sponsor an outdoor rock concert to finance the construction of a recording studio.  On the recommendation of a musician friend, Lang introduced himself to a Capitol Records VP named Artie Kornfeld who, as chance would have it, also grew up in Bensonhurst.  Kornfeld agreed to audition the group Lang was managing and soon became enthusiastic about Lang’s plan for a concert and recording studio in Woodstock.   An entertainment attorney then introduced Lang to two young preppie investors, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman.  Roberts was a trust fund baby, and Rosenman was a recent Yale Law School graduate.  Roberts agreed to use his million dollar trust fund to secure loans for the project, and Woodstock Ventures was formed.  This match made in hell would lead to misunderstanding and mistrust and the breakup of the partnership only six weeks after the festival.

Woodstock was largely portrayed as a disaster by the press.  But don’t blame Lang or his three partners.  Lang describes the extraordinary efforts to accommodate the anticipated 200,000 concert attendees at an industrial park in Wallkill, NY.  Local hostility forced the festival promoters to relocate to Max Yasgur’s farm in nearby Bethel only a month before the festival was scheduled to open.  Lang’s frantic efforts to build a new concert site in only four weeks is one of the more interesting stories in the book.  Almost no one thought he could pull it off.  The inability to complete the site fencing and install ticket booths caused Woodstock to become a free concert.  Woodstock Ventures took the proverbial bath, but a myth was born, largely the result of the Warner Brothers film which opened in March 1970.

Lang, whose cherubic face looks the same as it did 40 years ago, intersperses his memoir with accounts from people who worked or played at the festival.  To Lang’s credit, he offers conflicting takes on the event.  Carlos Santana gushes in a back cover testimonial that “[w]hen the Berlin Wall came down, Woodstock was there.  When Mandela was liberated, Woodstock was there.” Who guitarist Peter Townshend wasn’t quite so enthusiastic: “The people at Woodstock really were a bunch of hypocrites, claiming a cosmic revolution simply because they took over a field, broke down some fences, imbibed bad acid, and then tried to run out without paying the bands.”

Perhaps former WNEW DJ Pete Fornatale had it right in a recent Newsday op-ed.  Woodstock is still significant to Baby Boomers after 40 years because it reminds them of their mortality.  Many of the rock stars who played there are long gone, and many of the festival attendees won’t be around for the 50th anniversary.

 Hyperbole aside, Lang’s book is still an informative and enjoyable read.  If you weren’t at Woodstock in 1969, reading The Road to Woodstock is the next best thing.