Michael_Lang

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...

Hearing that song for the first time was amazing. I was in LA, and I was riding down the Sunset Strip, and Stephen Stills pulled up next to me in a car, a convertible, motioned me over to the curb, said "I have something you need to hear, follow me back to the house." So I followed him back to the house, and he and Dallas Taylor played me the Woodstock song for the first time.

And it was completely mind-blowing.

I was so moved by it, because it was like an anthem for what we had lived through.

I was just terribly moved.

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.

My job was meeting everybody on the Bank on Wall Street to sort of figure out what we were going to do next. We had been through an incredible experience, and of course with the coming of Monday afternoon, with the show being over and the festival behind us, we had to deal with the financial reality.

I had no real expectation of what - the amount of work it would take to put Woodstock together. Only that it was going to be an all out effort and we all had to give everything we had to have it happen. My partners and I really understood that we had to put all of ourselves and everything, all the focus that we could for this to come to fruition. And it was just a question of giving 100% and hoping you got to the end. And that when you did get there, the festival would be something very special. And the necessary pieces would be in place. We lost the site we had been working on for months. We lost the festival site in Wallkill, New York. About a month before the festival was to happen. That was devastating. The miracle of Woodstock is - the day after we lost that battle, we found Maxi Asger and the site in Bethel, which was really the site we had always hoped for. Wallkill was something we had to make do with - we had been looking for a site for months and running out of time, Wallkill was an industrial park that had to be made over to create what we were hoping for, which was a bucolic setting in the country. And when we found Bethel, it was just a miracle.

It probably would have been John Lennon. And we really tried to get John to Woodstock in 69 but he wasn't allowed in the country. We felt he embodied everything that Woodstock was all about. So I'd have to say John Lennon. Yeah.

Here's a clip of him talking about the Festival.