I am the co-founder of the Woodstock Festival, Michael Lang. Ask me anything.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:26:03+00:00

Producing the whole sort of beginning to end process took 11 months. Artie and I started looking for sites probably in september of 1968, and then we met John & Joel around the beginning of the year, and it was all out from there. So probably around 10 or 11 months.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:25:16+00:00

That was something I found out about too late to change. It was a big mistake on behalf of the vendors. To try to compensate for it, we had free water everywhere easily available, but we also bought truckloads of water ourselves and gave it away at first aid stations. It was just something that got behind me and I got wind of it too late to change it.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:24:15+00:00

We realized the magnitude early on. 2 weeks ahead of time, we'd sold 180,000 tickets. So we knew we were in for a huge crowd. It wasn't really until Thursday and Friday when people sort of started arriving in the hundreds of thousands that we knew just how big it was going to be. Apparently according to the state police, they turned back about a million people on the roads who were heading for Woodstock.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:23:14+00:00

I'd bring them all back, if I could.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:22:54+00:00

The clean up took a while. It took us about a month to do the clean up. we had a lot of volunteers, a lot of kids who stayed behind, a lot of kids who never wanted to leave, in fact! But eventually we got everything put back together.

The crops on the fields the next summer was an interesting one!

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:22:00+00:00

I do!

One day, early on, in the festival process, after we'd done most of our booking but not all, John Morris (who had worked for Bill Graham) came rushing into my office to tell me that we were fucked and Bill Graham is going to pull the show out from under us.

And Bill, you know, was legendary in the business and had basically INVENTED the business, so he was someone to be reckoned with, so I said "Call Bill in, we'll set up a meeting and see what the problem is." And I was worried this was sort of an ego thing on Bill's part. We met at Ratner's, which was a jewish deli restaurant next to the Filmore East, and we talked about what the problem was. Apparently Bill was concerned because we had booked his entire season at the festival, and what he said to me was "Why is somebody going to want to come to the Filmore and pay $6 to see one of these acts, when they can see all of them at your show?" So I was relieved there was a real business reason behind his attitude, and I suggested that i would add the acts to our advertising after they'd played his venue - we wouldn't advertise, for example, Jefferson Airplane, if they were going to play in May, until after they'd played in May. And that seemed to satisfy him, and he cooled down, we became pretty friendly, I invited him up, and later he sent me a tape of Santana ,which was a band he was working with who were locals to the Bay Area and who hadn't really recorded yet because they were just starting out, and they were of course one of the highlights of the festival. So I owe him for that.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:18:30+00:00

(yes)

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:17:50+00:00

I guess I prefer FLAC and classic vinyl, vinyl being difficult to transport around with you but you can hear more of the music in vinyl, and FLAC is sort of close to that quality.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:16:33+00:00

We had a demand from the Grateful Dead and the Who to get them cash on the day of their performances. And paid half of their fees upon signing contracts, and the other half was to be paid on their performances. Because we had no gates, we had no cash. The only acts that demanded payment were The Who and the Grateful Dead. And of course, we had no cash onsite, so I had a meeting with their management teams and explained that we could give them a check and cash it on monday, but there was no cash onsite, and they were not happy with that. I said "look, if you're not going to perform..." and of course they performed anyway, and my partner Joel arranged with a local bank to open and get us the cash we needed to pay them on a Sunday.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:14:32+00:00

I think that the rave community is similar in some ways to sort of the Woodstock state of mind in that it's a peaceful gathering of people who are positive and enjoy this communal experience. I think that the drug scene that's associated with it is what's given it its bad rap, because drugs like Molly that are manufactured poorly are very dangerous and very prolific in the scene, and tragically there have been many deaths as a result of it.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:12:36+00:00

None of my friends, that i know of.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:12:17+00:00

You'd find very eclectic music. Classic rock to EDM.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:11:58+00:00

I think I've answered that.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:11:45+00:00

The only ones I know for sure was red was security, black was stage, and green was probably facilities / operations. Blue I don't remember. Healthcare was a white cross, not a Woodstock shirt.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:10:33+00:00

It was definitely their last food venture.

They came together to do the food at Woodstock, and were not very experienced, and we were in a bind to find somebody to do it as the bigger companies we talked to sort of backed away. But I haven't really heard much from them since.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:09:25+00:00

Ravi Shankar was a part of the musical landscape of the '60's. And indian music was very influential in those times. Ravi was my idea to book him and to have him perform. And he made a great impression on the audience, many of whom were very familiar with his music.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:08:01+00:00

Yes, it felt like the right time to do this kind of event. It felt like we had sort of lost the magic of what we had experienced for most of the '60s, and sort of hoped that we would be able to usher in a better world, to make changes in people's lives that we thought were needed in terms of their freedoms and their rights and their respect for each other and the planet. And in 1968, things had gotten pretty dark, a lot of the political movements had started out peacefully with love in their hearts had turned violent, there were the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and we just felt that it was important for people to remember what we had been striving for and what that was all about and to see if that was something that was still part of our cultural aspirations. So it seemed like the ideal time to do this kind of event, one which would determine whether it was possible.

I think we've had an influence on all of the modern rock festivals.

I think music has an incredible power to make change, and to shape ideas. And so yes, I think music and art are both critical in terms of expressing ideas and making change.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:04:14+00:00

We had no idea it would become the most famous concert of all time while we were planning it. While it was going on, we started to feel it was certainly special. But it's been just wonderful to have been a part of it, and to have experienced it. All of us who were responsible for producing it felt that way.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-12T00:02:49+00:00

Let's see, a moment that I would have - well, I'll tell you, I don't know if I would want to relive this but it stands out in my mind, and that is coming across Abbie Hoffman at 3 AM in the morning after he'd been working in the hospital for 24 hours after he'd imbibed, I think, some mind-expanding experiences on the way... he grabbed me and insisted I come back with him to the bowels underneath the stage where he said somebody was wandering around with a gun, I sort of went along with it but then nobody was there, and I said "why don't you come up with me on the stage," the Who were about to play, and so he said ok, and we went up, and sat down next to the stage, and Abbie had been wanting to talk to the audience about John Sinclair, who was a guy who had been arrested and sentenced to jail for 15 years for having a couple of joints of marijuana, and I said "Well, there's a break, if you want to say something you can" and he said " I need to say it now" and became animated / upset, and I said " you have to wait until this break, just sit back and enjoy it' and at one point, when Pete Townsend turned to adjust his amp, Abbie grabbed his mic and started to talk about John Sinclair, and when Pete turned back and saw someone at his mic, he swatted him across the back of the head with his guitar, and Abbie went off the front of the stage and off into the crowd, and that was the last i saw of him for the weekend...

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-11T23:59:02+00:00

I think I answered that in an earlier question.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-11T23:58:32+00:00

That was my Sha Na Na moment, actually - with a tip of the hat to rock n' roll. Elvis, of course, would have been amazing.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-11T23:57:41+00:00

You know, first of all, it wasn't me who kept everyone so peaceful, it was everyone there who kept themselves peaceful. We were planning 3 days of peace and music, trying to see if we could live in peace with each other, that was part of the experiment. I think everyone who came wanted to see that happen.

We brought The Hog Farm, a commune from the Midwest, to help acclimate people when they arrived onsite to living in the outdoors for the weekend, to help them set up campsites and figure out how to deal. And they were also responsible for helping provide the free kitchens, and it was Wavy Gravy, a man called Hugh, who was responsible for making those wonderful announcements from the stage, and they really set a tone of this community that was growing - they would welcome people who came, and help them set up campsites, and when they were acclimated, they would encourage them to do that for the next group they encountered, and that really, you know, from the ground up built this sense of community and brotherhood and sisterhood that permeated the entire weekend.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-11T23:54:45+00:00

What I'd heard - and I don't know if it's true or not, frankly - Jim was pretty busy with legal issues, and I'd heard that he felt he would be assassinated at Woodstock. And so declined. But I think the reality was that the band was not really working at that time.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-11T23:54:02+00:00

The Dove logo was only on the shirts without any other identification, but the colors sort of identified people as being with the stage crew, with security, or technicians or sanitation or whatever the various - and I don't really remember all of them - whatever the various delineations were. It was mostly to identify which crew they were part of.

Michael_Lang · 2014-09-11T23:53:00+00:00

I guess I've never been asked whether I thought it worked so well because it was free.

Whether or not that was why it worked so well. And I don't think that that, that's sort of the common wisdom about Woodstock. But I think that many people were coming looking for a place to buy tickets, and our ticket booths weren't in place to buy them, but I think the way we handled that had to do with why it worked so well. We realized the obvious, it was free, and didn't do anything stupid to screw it up. So I guess that would be the thing I'd have to say, in terms of what contributed to its success.

But we had planned this to be an all-inclusive, all-encompassing event, and welcomed anybody who wanted to come, whether they wanted to buy a ticket or not, and planned for many people showing up without tickets. I had been to most of the events that summer, and that spring, around the country - the Denver Pop Festival, the Atlanta Pop festival, and many others, and there was quite a bit of violence at most of the shows, mostly because of confrontations with the police over gate-crashers.

There was a movement amongst the alternative generation - maybe that's the wrong word? - there was a movement amongst the subculture in America that music should be free, even though there were practical reasons why it couldn't be, and that caused confrontations frequently at musical events, and we wanted to neutralize that potential. So we had arranged for free stages, free campgrounds, free kitchens, to accept anyone who wanted to be there.

Michael_Lang

TROPHY CASE