Max Yasgur was the biggest dairy farmer in the area. Turned out he was having a bad summer for hay, and he needed money to feed his cows.
—Michael Lang
Kornfeld, Lang, Roberts & Rosenman: their name might lack the rhythmic flow of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but they too left an indelible mark on American culture in 1969. All four of them were younger than David Crosby but older than Neil Young, and, like Stills and Young, two of them had been working together since 1966. There the comparisons ended, but without the daring and drive of KLRR, there would have been no Woodstock festival—and no legend to shadow the legacy of everyone who was there.
The maverick of the group, and the enduring symbol of everything they achieved, was Michael Lang. He had moved out of New York City to Florida in 1966, at the age of twenty-one, to open a head shop. Inspired by what he’d read and heard about the Monterey festival, he had the reckless ambition—or “stupidity,” as he joked in later years—to stage a similar gathering in his adopted home state. As co-promoter, he enlisted Ric O’Barry, best known for training the dolphins seen in the TV show Flipper.
The result was the May 1968 Pop Festival in Miami, headlined by Jimi Hendrix. “We did it at a race track called Gulfstream Park,” Lang recalled. “The Saturday was magical, we had about forty thousand kids. And then on Sunday it rained, and we had to call the whole thing off. But what impressed me was the effect the festival had on the audience. Miami was off the circuit in terms of what was happening in music, but it really transformed the kids who came.”
Later that year, Lang was managing a rock band named Train. Looking for a record deal, he arrived in the Capitol Records office of writer-producer Artie Kornfeld. The A&R man had solid pop credentials, as the co-writer of three American Top 10 hits in the 1960s: Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve,” Crispian St. Peters’s “The Pied Piper,” and the Cowsills’ “The Rain, the Park and Other Things.” He and Lang were from the same neighborhood in Brooklyn and struck up an immediate rapport.
Together they conceived the idea of establishing a festival site and a recording studio in Woodstock, a quiet town in upstate New York that had attracted unwelcome notoriety as the home of musicians such as Bob Dylan and the Band. In early February 1969, they met John Roberts and Joel Rosenman at an apartment on New York’s Upper East Side. Roberts and Rosenman were engaged in building Media Sound, a recording studio in central Manhattan, and had a far firmer grasp of financial reality than the idealistic Lang and Kornfeld. They also shared a background in writing TV comedy, which perhaps gave them enough of a sense of anarchy to be able to handle Lang’s utopian visions for a festival. The new quartet’s multimedia fantasies were focused on a corporation called Woodstock Ventures, Inc.—whose first task was to stage the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, over a weekend in mid-August 1969.
As its name suggested, the festival promised to deliver more than a rock concert. The corporation claimed it would encompass “a mammoth open-air exhibition of contemporary painting, sculpture and photography.” But the ethos of the event didn’t stop at the creative arts; the festival would also offer a lifestyle. The site would become a hippie holiday camp, filled with food stalls and craft booths, meditation tents and head shops, everything required to transplant the festivalgoer from Nixon’s America to the first glorious dawn of a utopian future. But such a lavish venture required a home, and rural New York wasn’t keen to open its doors to an invasion from the city. “The festival was planned for Saugerties, which was about twelve miles away from Woodstock,” Lang explained. “Then we looked at Wallkill, which was nearby. It was not an ideal site, but it had the essentials—it had water, it had access, it had enough ground, but it also had a very concerned citizens’ committee.” They began to mobilize local opinion against the very idea of the festival.
While Lang and his partners were struggling to get the necessary permits, they were also assembling a roster of musicians. “There were some artists we wanted to have but couldn’t,” Lang recalled. “The most notable was John Lennon—because he wasn’t allowed in the country. But part of the fun for me was discovering new talent, which we thought would resonate with the audience.” In late spring 1969, Lang was hanging out at the office of his friend, booking agent Hector Morales, when a young manager named David Geffen burst into the room and shouted, “Wait till you hear this!” “Then he played us the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album, before it was released,” Lang remembered. “I thought it was amazing. To hear those guys playing together knocked me out. By the end of that meeting, Geffen and I had already shaken hands on a deal that CSN would appear at the festival. As far as I knew, it was going to be their first ever gig.”
With tickets on sale, and ads in the underground and mainstream press, the Woodstock promoters faced an abrupt change of venue in July 1969. “The town fathers of Wallkill passed a law which basically made it impossible for us to do the festival,” Michael Lang recalled. “The miracle was that the next day we found the site on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, which was perfect.” With less than four weeks until the festival was supposed to open, the entire site had to be uprooted, transported fifty miles, and reconstructed. “Nothing on this scale had ever been done before,” Lang said. “The organization was mind-blowing—there were so many different levels to consider, from publicity to transport to security to keeping people alive. We even had to work out how many Port-O-San toilets we would need. I sent people down to public places, like basketball games and train stations, and they timed how long it would take people to go to the bathroom. Then we multiplied that by two hundred thousand!” That figure was guesswork, however, as initial ticket sales were sluggish, and the promoters feared that they might have overestimated the pulling power of the festival. It was only when upstate traffic started to clog the roadways that Lang and his team realized they had created not just a rock festival, but a logistical nightmare.