Manchester center, vermont in 2009. Its wonderful for us to be here in a state where we feel the spirit of woodstock still lives, and we know there is a woodstock here too. I have to say, i kind of fit all three of the criteria you mentioned about people interested in the book. I was definitely interested in the topic from a historical, musical perspective for a long time. I wish i had been there, but i was 12 years old, living in North Carolina the time, so didnt get to go. Now, i feel like i was there because of getting to spend so much time with michael and working on the book and all the incredible people that weve i have gotten to meet that worked on woodstock with michael, whose stories are also part of the book. Tonight, what we are going to do is talk a little bit amongst ourselves for you guys to listen in. Be thinking of questions because we will have time for questions at the end, after we chat for a little while. Im going to go through a little bit of back story with michael because, like many people who were not at the festival, my impressions of woodstock were pretty much based on the film, the Michael Wadleigh film that came out in march of 1970. And come to find out when michael and i started working together on the real story i found out there was a whole lot more to it than what we got to see in that wonderful film. So were going to talk about that. I have one question before we start. Is there anybody here who was at woodstock . All right. Cool. I feel better already. [laughter] so, now, some people dont realize, but woodstock was actually not michaels very first festival that he put on. He was living in brooklyn and in new york city and ended spending time in the west village and getting involved in the music scene and becoming a fan and then found his way down to Coconut Grove, florida in 1966. So, michael, why dont you tell us a little bit about what the scene was like there, what took you there . I guess, you know, growing up i never really had a clear understanding of where i wanted to go with my life, and that is probably still true. [laughter] i was at nyu. I had been there for a couple years, and i remember sitting in Washington Square park, looking over at the school, and thinking, i am done. And so the next logical step, i thought, was to go to Coconut Grove and open a head shop, which is what i did. And it was it was the start of a really great adventure for me. The grove was a sleepy artist town in southern florida. It is the only tropical part of florida, and it is full of artists and musicians and it was in those days a very lazy town. A dog could sleep in the middle of the road for most of the day without getting disturbed with that kind of place. And so i opened the head shop and sort of changed all of that. [laughter] and in the process i started doing concerts at local parks with small groups, just local talent, parts of the beatnik movement. Tat one point, i came up with this brilliant thought because we were into loosening the drug laws in a way, in terms of use of marijuana in specific. I had met some of the local Indian Tribes and discovered, to my chagrin, that you could smoke marijuana on an indian reservation without getting arrested. Perhaps that was a place for us to hold our next event. [laughter] and so we spent some time talking with the indians and they kind of liked the idea too. For some reason, i guess they declined at some point. I became friends with a guy named ric obarry, who was the you probably remember flipper the dolphin. Flipper was a very popular childrens show in the early 1960s. Ric was the guy who trained the dolphins that played flipper. Interesting side story, ric at one point, when one of the dolphins started committing suicide, he realized he should not be responsible for starting this industry that he was responsible for, which was capturing dolphins and putting them in tanks and making them do tricks, and became an activist for freeing them around the world. He has been doing that for 40 years, and this summer there is a movie called the cove coming out in about a week and a half. It is an amazing, amazing movie. I encourage everybody to see it. It is about ric and his story and what he is doing today. It is exciting. It is just a wonderful film. Anyway, so ric and i decided, because we were both fans of the monterey pop festival, that we would put Something Like monterey together, and, with a couple of other people, in particular a guy named marshall brevetz, put the money together. Marshall had a club called the blues image, which was the Big Rock Club in miami, and he also had some partners with squashed noses and [laughter] so that is where his financing was coming from. So marshall had one condition, which was we had to do the show in three weeks. There began my career as a festival producer. I flew to new york and met with an agent and we managed to put together a pretty interesting show. Jimi hendrix was the headliner. But it went from chuck berry to John Lee Hooker to local jazz musicians from the grove to the crazy world of arthur brown. Its a pretty eclectic show. And we hired gulf street park to do it. It was a real lesson in improvisation for me. Improvisation is probably sort of how i get through life, frankly. I dont know a lot about anything in particular, but i can figure it out as i go along, it seems. So we did this show and the first day was absolutely amazing. We had had a long drought in miami that spring. Actually, it was getting kind of dangerous, but we decided to forgo the rain insurance because there was no chance in the world it was going to rain. [laughter] i mean, you know, wed been 60 days without a drop. So, you know, saturday came along and it was perfect. It was blue skies and dry as a bone. And sunday morning we read that they had seeded the clouds over the everglades to end the drought and the skies opened up and that was my First Experience with heavy rains. [laughter] so ric and i tried to recoup our losses for about a month. We had planned two additional concerts, i think ravi shankar and steppenwolf. Of course, the rain never stopped. We lost the rest of our money. And so i decided miami was over for me and headed north back toward new york. I remembered woodstock because my parents had taken my sister and i on lots of trips to canada when we were kids. She liked to stop and look at the Art Galleries on the way back. I knew the town somewhat, and it was very famous for its musician residents, particularly bob dylan and the band and later janis joplin but at the time Paul Butterfield and van morrison i think was living there then. In any case, i decided to move to woodstock, which is what i did, and take it to the next stop. Ok. So, you know, woodstock did have this history really going back to the early 1900s of being an Arts Community that attracted not only independent freethinkers but musicians and artists and seemed like the Perfect Place for michael to be, having these interests and being in Coconut Grove. And he did, of course, end up hanging out on the scene, meeting people, but also participating in some events. Michael, why dont you tell them a little bit about the sound outs there that also kind of added to your idea of an outdoor festival after your miami experience . Sure. There was a woman named pam who was a local realtor and owned a farm just outside of woodstock. Every weekend, she ran these sound outs, which were concerts out on her farm. We had a stage that was six inches off the ground. It was very lowkey and very sort of casual and informal, but an amazing way to see music. I mean, shed get a crowd of 300 or 400 people. I think it was 2 or 3 to get in. People would come and camp over the weekend if they wanted to, or theyd come and go from town. Most of the music was local, but local was van morrison and it was it was guys from the van and it was Paul Butterfield and it was the holy modal rounders and ellen mcilwaine. It was an amazing array of talent. And so comfortable and it felt so natural to be in that environment. Whether you spent the night or not, it kind of occurred to me then that this was really the best way ive ever experienced to see music. So i started to think about a series of concerts based on that but with larger crowds, and somewhere along the line that summer, i started to manage a band called the train. I say manage. I mean, who knew what management was . [laughter] my friend don keider was in the band, said, would you manage us . I said, sure. And i became a manager. [laughter] but i knew that the manager was the guy that did the business. I figured i had that responsibility. We needed somebody to support the band and maybe help us get them recorded. The drummer, a guy named abbey rader, was aware of or friendly with or had some connection to artie kornfeld, who was the Vice President of capitol records. And artie was a writer, really successful writer. He wrote dead mans curve for jan and dean and a bunch of the rain and the park and a bunch of hits. And was from my neighborhood, which abbey, you know, informed me of. So when i called his office to get an appointment, i said, its michael lang. Whos michael lang . I have no idea who michael lang is. Tell him im from the neighborhood. Ok, have him come up. I went up and artie was, you know, charming and funny and we became instant friends like wed known each other all our lives. During the early part of the fall, we were talking late into the night, every night, about these ideas of producing concerts. Artie was a studio guy, not really very familiar with the rock scene and hadnt been out at concerts. So i would drag him out to see shows and get him into sort of the right frame of mind. It also had occurred to me along the way that woodstock was becoming a mecca for musicians but there was no place to record. People would have to go into the city to do their albums, and it seemed that was the perfect answer. Build a Recording Studio in woodstock. We could come and spend time in the country and record at your leisure. So we proceeded to try and put that together. So we were following these two paths and i hired a local realtor, jim young, to help me look for sites for this idea of a festival which, according to artie, sprouted one night around 2 00 in the morning. I dont remember the actual night, but at some point we decided, ok, instead of this concert series, were going to put it all together and do the biggest event anybody had ever seen. So we proceeded along those lines to try to finance these two projects. I think our target was 200,000 people, although the biggest show i had been aware of was my festival in miami and i think we had 40,000 people the first day. We picked 200,000 because we figured we were in the northeast corridor, theres lots of People Living around. If we only get 1 of 1 , wed have 200,000. That was our target. Thats sort of how we began that road. Then you guys found some partners, john roberts and joel rosenman, who became more or less the financial backers and handled some of the business end of it with oh, theres someone going to woodstock right now on that motorcycle. Found, started working on some of the business aspects of it while you were concentrating on the booking and also looking for the actual site because originally you did want to have it in woodstock. You found one area, winston farm, that wasnt available for leasing, and so you looked and looked until you found a place called wallkill. Can you guys imagine the wallkill generation . Anyway, why dont you tell us a little bit about how wallkill came about and then you segued from wallkill to white lake, bethel, max yasgur . Originally, woodstock was supposed to be in woodstock. When we couldnt be in woodstock anymore, i wanted to take the name with me because i thought it really gave everybody the idea of what we were doing in kind of a nice, concise way. But i wanted to be close to woodstock, so we looked in expanding circles from the town and found the Perfect Place to do the festival in saugerties, which was 10 miles out of town. It belonged to mr. Schaller, who was the owner of Schaller Weber meats, an old, sort of a wellknown german meatpacking company. I spoke to the caretaker. He said, yeah, it sounds interesting, and ill check. He checked, and he said, yeah, we would like to talk about it. Of course, they didnt know what they were talking about. [laughter] but it was a fee and they never used the place except for hunting. So i said, great, we have a site. We thought, you know, we would offer 5,000 and wed be off and running. In the meantime we, through an attorney that i was using, miles laurie, met with john and joel, john roberts and joel rosenman, to finance the studio idea. They were building a studio in new york called media sound, which for years was one of the premier studios in the city. So we went to meet them, and we they were very yuppieish and nothing like me and a little like artie, i guess, on the fringes. I kept my mouth shut and artie did all the talking. He talks very well. They seemed, you know, interested but not really convinced. At the end of the conversation, i think i may have mentioned this idea of doing this festival that was another project we were working on that might have some tiein to the studio. They seemed to perk up at that and asked us if wed come back talk more about it and come back with a budget. We said sure. We went away, and artie and i had been talking to a guy named larry uttal from bell records about the festival. He had called me and said he was interested in proceeding. So he called artie called john and joel back and said, im sorry, but the festival is already spoken for but wed love to continue talking about the studio. They had been bitten, so they were a little bit crushed by this news. Artie and i talked about it, and we said, well, if theyll do both projects, they both seem really nice and bright and theyre about our age and that would be kind of more fun than working with a big company so well do it with them. And thats what happened. Two weeks later, we signed a contract and started to go. I would say within three or four days of signing the contract i went back up to saugerties to try and pursue the site that mr. Schaller owned. And by then i think the District Attorney or one of the officials in Ulster County had gotten wind of what were doing and put something in the local newspaper saying, never again will we entertain an event in woodstock because they were having problems with the sound outs by then. So i guess mr. Schaller read that, and that was the end of the schaller site. So we started looking further afield for something that would fit. We needed at least 300 or 400 acres. We needed access, we needed power, we needed water, we needed actually a place where you could build a small city to support this crowd of potentially 200,000 people for three days. We werent finding it. One weekend john and joel were riding around in the catskills and saw a sign off route 17 which said, mills Industrial Site for rent. It was for rent. They went and they found it. Mills was willing to rent i think for 10,000, and they agreed on a spot. Then they called me and said, look, you know, weve agreed. We can always back out, but youve got to come and look at it. It may not be perfect. Its not exactly what youre looking for. Its not exactly what youve described. They went through this whole thing, so i knew i was in trouble. But i went up to look at it anyway and it was horrible. It was an Industrial Site and would require an immense amount of work to make it something bucolic and to give the feeling we wanted when people arrived. But it did have the advantage of being there and being rentable. It was off a throughway and it had water and power and all those other things. So we said ok. They were getting really nervous about that point. I think it was early march. So we proceeded to work there. Because they looked so straight, they were the ones that went to approach the town fathers with this idea. There were no permit requirements in those days. The only permits you really needed were Building Permits if you were putting up permanent structures. So they described what the festival was going to be. It was going to be folk and jazz and off wandering in the afternoon, maybe 20,000 or 30,000 people. [laughter] they came back to new york and said, weve got it. I said, great. And we started setting our crews up and i started, you know, i went up with i had hired by that point an amazing staff of people from all walks of life, engineers and construction people and guys who had most of the experience in the music business setting up big events. Big events were nothing like what we were planning, but at least they had some of that. And a bunch of just, you know, genius characters like chris langhart, who taught engineering, who could build anything that you could suggest to him. He would build it. So we put this Team Together and i sent them up there and we started to convert this Industrial Site into something very beautiful and interesting. As the weeks progressed, the town began to realize that, you know, how come all the people that are working here have long hair . [laughter] wheres all the jazz buffs . Acoustic guitars . None of that was happening so they found out what we were up to and got really uptight and afraid of, you know, these hordes of hippies that were going to come and overrun their town and rape their women and pillage their fields and steal their pigs. And were trying, i guess, to figure out a creative way to get us out of town. We were spending a lot of money in town, so the merchants were kind of on our side. I remember having many town meetings, where people were sort of whistling as i walked to the microphone and was able to get through to them in the beginning, but the resistance built really quite strongly to the point where they formed something called the concerned citizens committee. The ccc. That will give you some indication what they were about. [laughter] at one point, they started firing these occasional shots at our barn, which was our headquarters. So it was getting kind of intense and we started thinking, how are we going to bring people to this kind of an atmosphere . So i made sure that we didnt