Anniversary of the woodstock Music Festival which affected half a Million People to a dairy farm in up state new york. Next an interview with woodstock cocreator Artie Kornfeld. He recalled how the concert came together, how he signed the Musical Artists and the business arrangements for the documentary film. This is half an hour. I wanted to be a baseball player but i always loved music and my mother always had Benny Goodman of the lombardos. Not guy lombardo, but the two brothers. They both had bands. One of the two guys who had the big bands. Anyway, she listened to big band music and my uncle loved jazz. And he was always listening to jazz. That was the influences i had. Then was your mother a pianist, a performer . No, my mother founded the freedom rides and became a very famous shes a founder of the freedom rides. If you get my book, youll see the letter that will blow your mind about shirley kornfeld. Shes a star in my family. Not me. Today you are the star. Im just a representative of a hope of a dream. Capitol records was a new concept at the time and you took a pretty commanding position there. How did that come about . Actually, my good friends who just sold stock in Martha Stewart and was chairman of the board of mi records for 15 years, we met if you read my book. We met by accident in a snack bar Queens College night school. And he had just taken over the job working for Donnie Kirshner and al nevins for Nevins Kirshner music. I had already had a record out when i was 16, you know. I was signed when i was 16. So i had a record out and it died and nothing else happened. And i ran into charles and you read the book, youll crack up. The story, its hysterical how it all happened. So we met. Next day i go in with a demo i made and i played it for Donnie Kirshner. Here i am now signed to all the music. Brian wilson, great writers all around. And there i was. We were just selling screen gems at the time. It was so simple. You wrote a song and you played it for Donnie Kirshner because he was the boss. If kirshner liked it you got a budget to go in and into bell sound not bell. In those days we went to the smaller studios. Im trying to remember the names. I dont remember. We go into dick charles. It was a big place to go to make demos. You get your three hours and you do three songs in three hours. That included the vocals and everything. We learned. I dont know if it was twotrack at that point. I think it was twotrack. And we were cutting twotrack. Jerry and carol put out locomotion which was a twotrack demo, and then they put out hey girl. Little ava was the housekeeper and Freddie Scott was a handy man and he sang hey girl. And i did a song called tonight youre going to fall in love with me where they just opened up shirley over my demo. We got so good at making demos that a lot of us went into producing records, you know. Kind of after you left capitol and you asked about capitol. Before capitol, i had already run mercury. Capitol was the third label. I was the first Vice President of rock in the music business history. Thats the way the pr went out. Vice president of rock. And rock was just coming in. And it was about 1965 or 66. It was going out of pop into rock. Its when i was hanging out with the moby grape and i signed quick silver. That was the start of rock. Ill talk to you later about moby grape. Their manager is a total lunatic. He used to drink his own urine. He did. And he had his daughter do it too and he believed that was the key to longer life. Anyway, thats a private story. Sorry, matt. So he lived near malibu. Thats how i know. He tried what was that Tipping Point that sort of said, gee, im going to create this Company Called the woodstock music and arts festival. I was running capitol. I was very successful. I ran the east coast. There was no i had no budgets. The president loved me. I probably signed the first deal where i had no limits. Nobody could say no to what i wanted to do. I was in the studio with debby harry at the time. I had axelrod who was producing lou rawls, linda ronstadt. Things were happening in the company. And when just one day i was known as having an open door for everybody. And my secretary said theres a kid out here with long hair, which i had never seen, so i did have burt summer who i produced three albums with who had hair. And i knew the guys who wrote hair. She said his name was michael lang. I said does he have an appointment . She said no. I said ask him if he can come back tomorrow. He said to tell you hes from benson, hes from the neighborhood now. I brought him in. Now his story is i was sitting on my desk smoking hash and that is so bizarre because i hadnt even gotten high yet. Hes the one who got me into grass. John sebastian, when i had the spoonful, John Sebastian gave me a joint one time. That was the extent of my drug experimentation. And lang had just lost his head shop. The Police Closed him down in florida. I was already living in the tallest building in the manhattan, in the penthouse apartment. Just still in my jeans and still with my wife. I had a new baby and life was wonderful. And capitol paid everything. It was really even more wonderful, you know. And so this guy michael lang came in and we became friends instantly. He didnt have money and so i supported him for a year and a half. And one night while we were shooting pool. We were playing bumper pool. I was on the 40th floor. And i looked out over that was the highest residential building at the time. And you could look out over the whole city. And michael said, youre tainted. You dont go to concerts anymore. And i said, michael, ive been doing this since 1956 and ive seen i played in so many clubs. Ive seen so many concerts. Im in the studio all the time and i write and you dont do that stuff. Your way of getting connected to music is to see it. Mine is to make it. And i said what if we took a broadway theater and had and made it free. We use my money because you dont have any. When we run out of money, well close it down. Well try to get the biggest acts we can and well make it free. And he said, well, i started to work on a thing in miami called miami pop but what happened is it rained and folded. It was called a festival. That stuck in my mind, festival. And then my late wife, may her soul rest in peace, said, what if you guys took it outside. And the bell went off. And then i actually saw the field. And i said, yeah, i said, well, if we took it outside, michael, suppose we had hendricks and joplin and all these people, how many people would come. Michael said, oh, about 50,000. And i said, no, there would have to be 100,000. And my wife said, there will be more than 300,000, just like that. And i swear to god, i looked off that terrace and i actually saw that field. Thats when im interviewed in the movie, everybody says you spaced out. I said, of course, i was spaced out. I was looking at a dream that came true. And i had seen it a year before. We talked about it for four or five months and then we met john and joel and they wrote in the book, michael didnt say a word, artie did all the talking. And i talked them into the 250 grand. That was the start. Location, location, location. We were always going to call the woodstock, even though there was no land big enough to have it in only because our friends lived there. I had the band at capitol. They lived there. Richie was living up there. Everybody was living up in woodstock or in coconut grove, florida, or in sausalito, california. That was just the way it was, you know. Location. Michael did a real stupid thing. He built a site with no permit from the town. That wiped out the whole budget. I ran the ad that brought in a million and a half dollars with tickets. I didnt even think it was going to sell tickets. I was shocked. And we when it was all over, we were a million four in debt. It cost 2. 4 million. The original budget was 250,000. Michael went 600 over budget, i went 60 over budget. But i had two Million People on the road still. I promoted it and i didnt promote it very heavy. I planned it out. I knew i had to promote records. I had been writing songs for these people for so many years and they were buying my songs. I knew the audience. I knew them. And i knew the Program Directors and i got time buys that people couldnt get. I got disk jockeys talking about it, you know. So it was a it was really it was like bruce mosher who lives here. He said woodstock was not your greatest promotion, Tracy Chapman was. And hes right. Woodstock was easy for me to promote. I just knew exactly what to do. It wasnt me. I was a messenger. I was not the creator. I just knew exactly what to do. How did you end up with the farm . The real story is im sitting in my apartment and my cousin lived on 57th street and she had a neighbor who was a gay interior designer. His uncle was maxi yasgur. The whole elliot thing is all lies. All lies. Totally. I get a phone call from this guy. He says, mr. Kornfeld, i live next door to your cousin lenore and my uncle maxi yasgur has a cattle farm and hes going to lose it. He needs 60,000 desperately. So i said, well, let me have his number. And i called michael. I said, michael, theres a guy named maxi yasgur this is the true story. Not michaels story. This is the honest truth. Theres witnesses to this story and its even in my book people who heard the conversation. And michael went and met with max and made the deal for the farm. What was the rent it was 60,000 originally. When i got up there, i couldnt believe it. I just got up there from closing the movie deal and we left right from Warner Brothers to get up there and michael says to me, artie, take the motorcycle. I rode all over these farmers lands and theres 12 farms here and we have 40,000 people on the land. And i said, why didnt you get releases . He says, well, you have to do that. I said, michael, first of all, i dont even ride motorcycles. Second of all, you should have taken care of this. Thats your part of the trip. Im on the other side of the fence. Im in new york getting people there. So i went from door to door. I drove the motorcycle and i went with a pad and i just i had the right to sign for woodstock ventures. If you had your whole life invested in this farm and all of a sudden everything was getting trampled, if you said i want 60,000, i wrote down woodstock ventures, 60,000 to be paid within 120 days. And i did that to about 16 farmers. And i went to every farm and cooled them all out. And some were very nice. I ended up having coffee and a piece of pie. And some of them came to the door with shotguns. That was my greeting to woodstock after i got totally wasted with jerry heart and mickey garcia. I noticed that one of the things you were able to get the acts, because you paid them 12,000. Was that thats all bull shit. Thats not true at all. There was no set price on anybody. The first act to sign was sly stone. And really his manager was a friend of mine. People could say how sly got into it this and that. But i knew him 10, 15 years before woodstock. He was in the music business and so was i. No, there was no set price on anybody. Thats a fable. Did you have your selected the mere bands that were selected there, did you have your a list and b list . No. What happened that was really good is that we got in touch with bill graham and bill graham brought his whole crowd, his whole San Francisco group. In reality actually, sweet water and nancy nevins, the singer, they were the first band to ever get a deal out of San Francisco, a major deal. They never really happened. That brought in santana. That brought in the dead. That brought in sweet water. That brought in the starship or the airplane at the time. So it was that group. And then i was talking to different managers that i knew and different producers. So i knew others. I put in burt summer because i produced him and melanie was a friend of mine. I got her a record deal. And i put her into woodstock. And michael we both had a friend named Hector Morales. When i was a singer and had the pied piper out, Hector Morales was an agent. He was never mentioned by anybody. And he got most of the acts. He was living in puerto rico and i dont know what he was doing for a living. Whatever it was, he was in puerto rico. But he had a lot to do. And i mentioned him in my book and no one ever mentioned him. Also, no one ever mentions steve cone who was really the stage manager of woodstock. Steve cone is never mentioned. Hes mentioned in my book. The pressure on him so was intense that he flipped out and i had to sit with him for four hours and talk him down. He lost it. The pressure got to him. He couldnt take it. When the rain hit, michaels stage wouldnt turn anymore. To change the acts if you took too much time with that many people, big chance for a riot. You couldnt have people sitting there for 45 minutes in between acts. So how this when i watch this crew work, i was mesmerized and i wanted to kiss every single one of these every single one of these guys working. I even started to lift amps myself because i saw what they were going through. Without the turntable. They were doing changes in 20 minutes for big name acts. That was amazing. That was really amazing. Its not true that jimi hendrix wanted to close the show because he was the headliner because if you listen go into the archives of the Artie Kornfeld show, youll hear my interview with jerry the percussionist of the band the gipsies. And theyll tell you the whole story of jimi hendrix. Jimmy said to me when he came off of the stage, i said, jimi what did you think . Because jimi and buddy miles were friends of mine years before woodstock. Jimi said, if i could have played at 9 00 when i was supposed to, to a half a Million People, he said i was so tired and worn out, i did the best i can. It was only average. And it was. Because i had heard jimi play before and it was only average. Thats what jimi felt and thats what i felt. Were there bands that you couldnt entice . No. No, no. I dont know what michael was doing. I was really busy, you know, doing the word of mouth. I was meeting with the black panthers, the weathermen, i was traveling the country hitting every group that could cause trouble and making deals with them. The only deals we made was well give you medical assistance, Legal Assistance if youre busted and well give you food if you dont have. Those are the deals you made with those groups. With all those groups. And they accepted it. When they showed up, no problem. Obviously there was a fear factor of you dont read that much about the fact that all of those groups were going to possibly take advantage of that situation. Well, you dont read about it because i didnt have a pr person and i didnt push that out there. But its in my book. Yeah. Yeah. Such a fascinating concept of it all. Well i knew what i had to do. Michael said to me on the phone last week, i said, michael you went 600 over. He said artie, i didnt know what i was doing. Think about that concert, there was no real opportunity for a lot of sound checks. No. But to tell you the truth, when the rain hit, michaels crew came through. Michael did pull his weight. It took the two of us and my wife to come up with the idea and it did take michaels staff because he went and he bought the best he could get. Chip monk was doing lights. He was the best in the world. Handily was doing sound. He was the best in the world. Steve cohen was an incredible stage manager. Everybody was top drawer. He covered himself. And i was proud that he that it held. When the rain hit, it was a threat to everybody and thats when the miracle happened. When the rain hit, the miracle happened. We had the threat of being in jail for the rest of our life for committing manslaughter if someone died and everybody on the field just was so up about it and then when my friend barry the fish, hes a lawyer, you know. He never lost a case and he was a public he was a public defender while he was in the fish. A very great lawyer. He started chanting no more rain, no more rain, and the rain did stop. I even did the mudslide. Did you do that . Yeah, i did. I wanted to see what they were doing. I wanted to enjoy it. I walked up on the field. I didnt go to the very top. I walked to the shops because the one that says smoke shop, that was one of my best friends from college i played basketball with. Yeah. The movie, which is iconic, you were instrumental in making that happen. Well, according to the president of Warner Brothers, i was the only reason it happened. And honestly, thats true. And im not being egotistical. Its a fact. If i didnt produce what happened was, when i was at mercury, freddie owned the bitter end came and i spent 80 grand and i produced his act. When i was getting ready to go up to woodstock three or four days before, freddie becomes Vice President of films for Warner Brothers. So i call freddie and he says, artie, i picked up youre not going to talk to you about that crazy thing youre doing up state. I said, yes, i am freddie, and you owe it to me. Thats why i went over and we sat for 35 hours. And he even wrote about it in his book. His book is out. As a matter of fact, in my book, theres a letter from freddie stating how the woodstock movie happened. It was a handwritten after 35 hours it was over. Ted came and fortunately ted was my agent when i was producing. So i had ted and freddie and may both owed me. And after 35 hours they said, you know, lets forget it. Movies are not were almost bankrupt at Warner Brothers. Documentaries are doing nothing. And then i said out of nowhere after 30 hours, what if its a disaster and 100,000 kids die. This thing will be the biggest movie in history. And they started laughing like crazy. And then freddie turned to me and said, okay, what do you think . Lets get a couple of secretaries down and we sat there for another ten hours and we wrote a handwritten contract. And i signed it. I call michael. He flew wadly in. He was up there with no film with 18,000 photographers and no film. He flew to