Woodstock Music and Art Festival. Who started such a party? Why was it started? Did the promoters believe it would turn out quite like it did? What was the real Woodstock experience actually like?

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Woodstock Music and Art Festival

Sheena Cox

US107-07

Mr. David Briggs

16 Nov 2006


Woodstock started out as just a big bash and ended as a once-in-a-life-time occurrence.  The original Woodstock-goers share a bond and uniqueness that will be hard, if not impossible, for anyone to ever reproduce.  Who started such a party?  Why was it started?  Did the promoters believe it would turn out quite like it did?  What was the real Woodstock experience actually like?    

        Four very young and very different men sponsored Woodstock: John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfield, and Michael Lang.  John Roberts was the oldest, at age twenty-six.  Being heir to a drugstore and toothpaste manufacturing company, he supplied most of the money.  In 1966 he met Joel Rosenman, who had just graduated from Yale Law School and was playing guitar for motel lounge bands in the Long Island area.  By 1967 they shared an apartment and an idea for a screwball comedy show about two guys with unlimited resources who are always getting involved with crazy innovations.  While looking for new ideas to help the show, they essentially became the characters of it.  Artie Kornfield was the vice president of Capital Records and had written at least thirty hit singles. Michael Lang was the youngest in the group, at age twenty-three, and was the manager of a rock group called Train. In December of 1968 he met with Kornfield to discuss a record deal. They hit it off immediately and ended up sharing some similar ideas.  One for a cultural exposition/rock concert/extravaganza and another for a recording studio set one hundred miles from Manhattan in a town called Woodstock. Their only problem was getting the money to finance it. Their lawyer recommended they talk to Roberts and Rosenman.  In March of 1969, after a written proposal and a discussed budget of about half a million dollars, the four partners formed a corporation called Woodstock Ventures.

        The Woodstock Ventures team planned to create the world’s largest rock n’ roll show ever.  They wanted it to include the back-to-the-land spirit, yet still be easily accessible.  They ended up leasing an industrial park in Wallkill, New York (about twenty miles from Woodstock, NY), from a man named Howard Mills, for ten thousand dollars.  They planned the music and art festival to take place on August 15, 16, and 17, 1969. Over seventeen major acts were planned including Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Blood Sweat and Tears, and the Grateful Dead.  The slogan, “Three Days of Peace and Music”, and the symbol, a catbird perched on a guitar, were agreed on by the four because they thought it would help break the hype about the concert creating violence.  They hired Allan Markoff to be in charge of setting up the sound system, which at the amplifier’s lowest setting would cause pain to anyone within ten feet of a speaker.  Since they couldn’t entice a big movie studio to film the weekend, they got Michael Wadleigh, who had a strong reputation as a cameraman and director, to do the job.

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        The planning was not easy and Woodstock Ventures ran into a lot of problems.  Wallkill residents found out about the festival, which was estimating an attendance of about two hundred thousand people, and got scared.  They did not want hippies and rioters disrupting town life.  They held a meeting on July 15, 1969 and passed a town ordinance, which prohibited all events that would draw a crowd of more than three thousand people.  Joseph Owen, the assistant town attorney of Wallkill, made clear the penalty to such a violation, a fifty-dollar fine and/or six months in prison for each officer ...

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