Original subtitles

(logo whooshing)

- What happened at White Lake this weekend

may have been more than an uncontrolled outpouring

of hip young people struggling, as they did, to survive,

first the 20-mile traffic jams and five-mile hikes,

then the intense heat and sudden rain,

the thirst and hunger from the shortage of water and food,

just for the opportunity to spend a few days in the country

getting stoned on their drugs and grooving on the music.

(helicopter humming)

- [Richie] 100 million songs gonna be sung tonight.

All of them are gonna be singing about the same thing,

but I hope everybody who came came to hear, really,

and it's all about you, actually, and me,

and everybody around the stage,

and everybody that hasn't gotten here,

and the people who are gonna read about you tomorrow.

Yes, (audience applauding)

and how really groovy you were.

- So there we are.

We have a stage.

We have microphones.

We have a sound system.

But we don't have any performers.

Every now and then we'd spot one, (laughs)

and someone would go off and round this guy up,

and he'd come up on.

That's how Richie showed.

That's how Richie played.

Richie was supposed to play in the evening.

- I knew for a fact, immediately,

Tim Hardin wasn't going on first, period,

and I was supposed to be fifth on the bill.

It dawned on me

that there wasn't anybody else there to go on but me,

and they started to come at me like,

"Richie, would you go on?"

I'm saying to myself, "Oh no,

"this thing is about two hours and 15 minutes late,

"and people are gonna throw beer cans at me,"

and I'm freaking out. (laughs)

So, all of a sudden Michael's there,

"Please, Richie, please,"

so I went up on the stage,

and the minute I got up there I knew that it was okay

because they wanted something to happen, period,

you know what I mean,

and it was wonderful to start off and do the set,

and two hours and something later

I start walking off the stage,

and they go, "Go back, there's nobody here yet,"

and I'm going, "Oh no,"

and I go back on the stage, six times I think,

and I'm saying to myself, "Oh, come on, guys."

What am I gonna sing the next time I go (laughs)

I don't even know what I'm gonna do.

So, I started strumming the guitar,

and I started tuning it at the same time

because it was out of tune,

so once I started strumming it

I really didn't know what I was gonna sing.

I was fishing. (laughs)

I really was.

I was fishing for some song to come to me,

and I just started singing "Freedom"

because that was what was running through my mind

at the time.

I just started singing "Freedom."

* Freedom, freedom

* Freedom, freedom

- Richie was the first act 'cause Richie was there,

and Richie, of course, played his whole set and came off,

and I said, "Great, great, wonderful, man.

"Play an encore," 'cause we still didn't have anybody.

I think he played three encores,

and that's how the "Freedom" song got invented.

I mean, he literally had nothing more that he could play.

He didn't know anything more.

- It was comical because you figured he's done,

let's see who's next, and Richie came out again.

Well, then he'd go off and it was like let's see again.

No, here's comes Richie Havens again, yeah, yeah,

and there weren't announcements indicating that it was just,

we waited, and he came back,

and he came back, and he came back,

but I remember when he finally went off,

that the entire outfit that he was wearing

was just drenched in sweat.

("Freedom")

(audience cheering)

- [Announcer] Mr. Richie Havens.

What better way to start

than with the beautiful Richie Havens.

- It got to the point where people just showed up

and we didn't know they were there.

People just arrived.

They had been told where to go,

Holiday Inn, Best West, whatever it was,

the hotels in the surrounding area.

We told them where they were,

and they showed up there.

Everybody would show up at the Holiday Inn.

The people who had been working in this office

were at these places

to make sure that there were enough rooms and enough keys.

Well, obviously,

twice as many people showed up as were going to.

- We suddenly realized

that we did not have any way to get any artists in,

that they were in the hotels, that they'd checked in,

but the roads were totally jammed,

and I literally turned around to Annie,

my then-wife, and still good friend,

and said, "Look up helicopter in the Yellow Pages

"and hire every single goddamn one

"you can lay your hands on."

We had, in the end, I think,

counting some of the others, the military ones,

we ended up with something like 23 or 24 of them.

- Et cetera, et cetera,

but we can't get through that way for the time being,

so what they're gonna do is they're try and raise the gate,

and get the helicopters to come over here to this field

and pick us up, and hop us over to the gate,

and we'll leave the cars, essentially, here.

- So, what we had was this empty stage,

and we couldn't find anybody,

and this is before cell phones.

This is you go to the trailer,

you call the hotel on the phone,

somebody yells out the window a piece of information,

which is, "I can't find anybody,"

or "They can't get through,"

or, "We don't have anybody,"

so, who we got?

- My manager came up to me and he said,

"Leslie, whatever you do, don't stay all together,

"'cause they need groups to go on,

"and if they see all you guys together,

"they're gonna get you on."

I don't wanna go on at four in the afternoon,

so I stayed in one area, and Felix was in another,

and it worked out.

- Joe McDonald had gotten in there somehow.

He just drove in with somebody,

and John says to me, "Can he play by himself?"

"I don't know.

"Hasn't done it in a while.

"Ask him."

- And I said,

"Remember we were in Amsterdam a couple of months ago

"and we were talking about doing it on your own.

"Now, please."

- Joe finally agrees to play,

but he says, "Well, I don't have a guitar."

We found a guitar.

We push him out there and he turns to me,

said, "What do I play?

"Do I do the cheer?

"Should I do 'Fixing to Die Rag'?

"I was gonna do it on Sunday."

I said, "Go ahead and do it."

Said, "Ah, shit," turns around, yells,

"Give me an F!" - Give me an F!

- [Audience] F!

- It was loud.

"Give me a U!" - Give me a U!

It gets louder.

By the time he says, "What's that spell?"

It's really a kind of a interesting thing

to be out there in the middle of nowhere

and here fuck being yelled back at you

by all these people for the first time,

and from that point on we had to keep putting people on.

We pushed John Sebastian on because he was there.

He wasn't even, we didn't even know he was there.

Somebody said, "Oh, I saw John Sebastian."

- Felix got up there and he introduced me to John Sebastian.

Was tie-dying everything in sight.

Somebody walked by and they got, (imitates whooshing)

ripped into their tent,

and they came out with all kinds of colors on them.

I think he was tripping his nut off.

That I know for sure, and he was enjoying himself.

- [Announcer] John Sebastian.

- The press can only say bad things

unless there ain't no fuckups,

and it's looking like there ain't gonna be no fuckups.

This is gonna work.

("Coming Into Los Angeles")

* Coming in from London, from over the pole *

- There was a bunch of state cops on the

the helicopter with us,

and they were just talking to each other and talking to us,

and we were just sitting there wondering what's going on

and how come we gotta fly in here?

And then I remember just looking out

'cause the door was open or something like that,

and you could just look right out there,

and it was an amazing thing.

You know, when you look at all the pictures,

all the aerial shots of Woodstock,

you see the fields completely filled with people,

but that was a tiny, tiny part of where the people were.

There was people for a long time that we were flying,

there was people underneath every leaf of every tree

and every rock that we was flying over,

and I was supposed to play at some point,

some time later than I actually did,

and because I was just hanging out

I felt free to indulge in some substance abuse.

I mean, nothing big, but, you know,

and so I was standing around

just admiring the colors and all the people,

and all of a sudden

this guy comes up to me and says, "You gotta play."

I said, "What?"

"Yeah, you gotta play, man.

"You gotta play now."

I'm going, "Now?

"Now I gotta play?

"I'm not ready to play now, man.

"I can't play now.

"I can't walk now,"

and it was like I couldn't believe it,

and so there was this sort of tinge of, like,

uh-oh (chuckles)

that I really didn't wanna deal with this at the moment.

- [Narrator] But while Arlo was having a good time

and it seemed like the crowd was having a good time,

the producers were on the phone with Rockefeller's office

trying to convince the governor

not to send in the National Guard.

- Rockefeller's office wanted to send in the National Guard

to stop the festival,

and all conversations with those people were,

"This is impossible.

"You'd really have a riot if you tried to do this."

I'd come back to my office and start fielding phone calls.

They were incredible phone calls that would be coming in

from everybody from state government to police.

They would say, "Can you give us some information

"about this disaster?"

and I'd say, "What disaster?

"Everything is great here.

"We're getting along fine.

"We don't need anything.

"Everything's fine.

"It's great.

"Everybody's having a great time,"

and I would just keep putting that out,

and to tell you the truth, on my walks everything was fine.

Everything was holding.

- [Narrator] Everything had held,

and so from Richie, Tim Hardin, Arlo,

and finishing with Joan Baez,

the first of three days of peace and music

came quietly to a close.

* Home

- Amen.

(energetic rock music)

- [Narrator] John Roberts,

heir to the Polident denture cream fortune,

and Joel Rosenman,

an ex-lounge singer and ambivalent Yale Law grad,

were looking to write a pilot for a television show.

- 1967, it seemed likelier

that I would be a TV screenwriter than a lawyer,

and John was intrigued by this profession as well,

so we concocted a TV show,

a sitcom about two guys

who get into nutty business ventures every week,

and in order to find plot material for our TV show

we took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal.

The ad read something like,

"Young men with unlimited capital

"seek interesting and legitimate business propositions,"

which went fine for quite a while for our TV show,

until one idea that came in seemed reasonable to us,

in fact attractive.

We looked at it

the same way we had some other business ventures,

only this one, with some modifications,

seemed like a good idea.

We called it Mediasound.

We started building it in '68,

and built what came to be

the place to record on the East Coast for over a decade.

- Joel and I were building a recording studio in Manhattan

in the summer of 1968,

and we met a lawyer at that time named Miles Lurie,

and Miles called us up, I guess, maybe February of 1969,

and said that he had a couple of clients

that were interested in building a recording studio

in Woodstock, New York,

and he wondered if we would sit and talk with them

about their project

and share with them our experience

in doing such a project here in the city,

and we said, "Sure,"

and so Mike Lang and Artie Kornfeld

showed up one morning in February

to talk about building a recording studio in Woodstock.

- [Narrator] Michael Lang grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

After dropping out of NYU, he headed to Miami

and opened one of the area's first head shops.

Artie Kornfeld, also from Bensonhurst,

was already a successful songwriter and record producer,

and the first vice president of rock at Capitol Records.

One day Michael Lang came calling,

looking for a record deal for a group he was managing

called the Train.

- First meeting with Michael is I was standing on my desk

smoking a little hash.

Okay I said that?

- [Interviewer] Yeah.

- Well, it's over seven years ago,

and my secretary said,

"There's someone out here to see you named Michael Lang,"

and he said, "You don't know him,

"but he's from the neighborhood, Bensonhurst,

"and he'd like just a minute of your time."

So, I said, "Send him in."

He had just lost his head shop in Miami.

I think he lost the battle with the police

and they closed it 'cause that's what Michael was:

he was a head shop owner in Miami.

- (laughs) Yeah, my recollection,

although it's probably embellished over the years

is of Artie perched on the end of his desk

about to fly off into the room.

He was a very delightful character, as I recall, Artie.

At our first meeting we sort of became friends instantly.

He was from the same neighborhood I was in Brooklyn,

and it was sort of like a kindred spirit.

(energetic rock music)

- We were given a proposal for a recording studio.

30 of 31 pages dealt with finding the site,

they already had a site, in fact they had it under option.

They had plans for the recording studio.

They had rough sketches.

They had a budget for the recording studio.

They had the recording studio project.

They had solved the problem of anonymity

by suggesting in the last page of this proposal

that on opening day of the recording studio

we have a big press party.

There's even a chance, this proposal read,

that we can get some of the local talent to perform,

and the local talent was Bob Dylan, and maybe Janis Joplin,

and Tim Hardin, and John Sebastian.

I thought, "Wow, once they hear that Dylan is performing

"we'll get people from all over.

"We don't have to bus recording studio execs up.

"We can just sell tickets,"

and so we came back to Michael and Artie

with that suggestion.

We don't like this recording studio project

because we're in the dark

about our own project in Manhattan.

We don't know how well that's going to do.

We're hoping, but it seems that the one up in the woods

has some built-in drawbacks,

but we think this is very exciting

if we turn it into a festival idea,

and we actually had to go round and round.

We drew the line at doing another studio,

they drew the line at doing a festival,

and eventually we suggested, "How 'bout if we do a festival,

"and then with the profits from the rock 'n' roll festival

"we'll finance the recording studio,"

and we struck a deal on that basis.

Was a compromise.

(energetic rock music)

- [Narrator] Shortly after,

Michael turned his attention to staffing.

He contacted sound engineer Stan Goldstein,

who he'd worked with in Miami.

Goldstein agreed to help

and suggested they offer the position

of director of operations to Mel Lawrence,

who had produced such legendary festivals

as Magic Mountain, Newport Pop,

and Miami Pop, in December of 1968.

- As soon as we began talking about staffing,

it seemed to me that Mel was an ideal guy to have involved,

and so I chased him down.

- And I get a call from Stan Goldstein,

and Stan said, "They're planning to do a number in

"in New York.

"Are you interested?"

and I said I was,

and he said,

"You've gotta do this

"because this is gonna be really a big one."

- I'd left Fillmore East,

and I'd worked on a couple of small projects,

and one day Chip, Bert Cohen,

and a couple of other people came and saw me in my house,

and talking about the project and what it was gonna be,

and I was sitting there thinking it was never gonna happen,

(mumbles dismissively)

and they came back within a week

and said, "This is what we're doing.

"We're gonna go ahead and do this big festival.

"We're gonna try to do an East Coast version of Monterey,

"and it's gonna be three days.

"It's gonna be in Woodstock.

"It's gonna be duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.

"We need your help.

"Do you wanna do it?"

There was one answer,

that was, "Yeah, sure, please, let me, yeah."

- Long story short, what actually happened is

I called Anne Weldon, who was Anne Morris at that time,

John Morris's wife,

who became a principal figure in Woodstock,

and I said, "My I share your Liberty prints, please,

"and a bit of your wine so I can bring Michael here

"because I think we've got something going,"

and Michael and I seemed to hit it off,

and John decided he was going to be co-producer,

which was the only error of the evening, (chuckles)

but beyond that everything was perfect.

- The idea was that

the first day would be a folkie-like-type day,

that the second day would be

more of an English, stronger-type thing,

and that the third day would be the American strength,

I mean, because don't forget,

you had the English acts were major factor at that point,

and then there were the California,

San Francisco, and rest of the Bay Area.

- "Michael, have you signed any groups yet?"

"Oh yeah, it's together,"

or, no, he wouldn't say yes 'cause he wasn't lying about it,

he'd just say, "Oh, it's all together.

"It's together.

"Don't worry, it's together."

Not one group had been signed (laughs) at that point.

- I had agonized

over whether we would ask the Rolling Stones

to be part of the talent roster,

and their hit at the time was "Street Fighting Man,"

and while there was, to have the Stones on your talent,

in your talent package would have been very powerful,

it contradicted one of our basic principles

of trying to keep this festival peaceful.

We just didn't want anything that would stir up the crowd

to that kind of anger.

- There's, "No, I don't know we should have the Doors.

"Yeah, I think Sly's dangerous

"'cause there's been riots everywhere he's played

"in the last 10 years."

That's why certain groups were not invited.

At that point it was just inviting them and they'd come,

just for expenses to get there.

- Ian Anderson and I had a real long conversation

about how he never got over the fact,

and just never could understand

why Country Joe and the Fish were at Woodstock

and they weren't.

He never forgot that.

I mean, he was really pissed about it.

That summer I had worked for the Doors.

I did some dates in Mexico with the Doors,

and Jim Morrison would not appear

because he was afraid he would be assassinated.

I mean, that was his line.

I mean, he thought he would be killed.

- Yeah, Joni Mitchell.

She was begging to come,

but she wanted to come and Michael said no.

He even asked me at the time, "What about Joni?

"What do you think about? (mumbles)"

I feel really bad about that. (laughs)

Feel guilty.

- Bill Laudner from the Jefferson Airplane called me

and said, "Bill, those rooms are really small, man.

"I mean, like, how we gonna get there?"

Said, "Well, you just get to Liberty

"and we'll take it from there."

- Actually, Michael says that it is his fault

that Dylan didn't come.

They evidently didn't lock in some way.

Something happened.

- The Who had turned us down.

We kept after them and after them after,

and they turned us down,

and Frank Barsalona, who runs Premier Talent,

finally said, "Okay, there's only one way to do this,"

and we had Pete Townshend to dinner at Frank's apartment,

and we got Peter up there.

We fed him a spaghetti dinner.

We chatted.

We talked.

We started pouring wine in him,

and pouring wine in ourselves,

and Peter just kept saying, "No, no, we don't wanna do it.

"We wanna do Tanglewood and go home,"

and at about five o'clock in the morning

Peter is sitting down in the corner

all scrunched up like this

saying, "All right, all right, I'll play the thing.

"Can I go to sleep, please?"

We wore him down and tricked him into it.

Not tricked, well, we tricked,

yeah, he would say we tricked him into it.

They published on the Live at Leeds album,

if you look on the album,

the contract from Woodstock's on it.

- The phone rang in this production office,

and someone hands me the phone and says it's Stephen Stills.

They really didn't wanna do this show

because there were gonna be too many people,

nobody's gonna know who they were,

they were really unsure of themselves,

and right about that time, for some weird reason,

Hanley was testing the sound system,

and one of the very popular records

that everybody was playing that summer

was the Crosby, Stills & Nash first album,

and "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes."

It's blaring over the sound system.

I stick the phone out the window

and I told Stephen, "Okay, Stephen,

"they're playing the song.

"Everybody knows it.

"You should come,"

so he yells at Crosby,

"Crosby, they're playing 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes'"

and he said, "We'll be there,"

and so they were gonna show up,

but there was this sort of apprehension.

I mean, there's lots of people who really won't cop to it,

but it is true that I think there reached a point

in the late summer

where everybody who wasn't on the bill

really wanted to be on the bill.

(anxious music) (birds chirping)

- Our first choice

was a piece of land in Saugerties, New York,

700 acres right off the Exit 18 of the Thruway,

absolutely beautiful, gently sloping land.

- We met with the owner, a fellow named Schaller,

shortly after that to start hammering out a lease,

and we didn't even get to hammer any little

one bit of that lease before Mr. Schaller told us

that he had no interest in renting to longhairs.

Not that John and I looked like longhairs,

but he had already seen Michael,

and for an elderly guy

he really had his ear to the ground. (laughs)

There was no question in his mind

what we were gonna use the property for,

and he just would have none of it.

It was his farm and he loved it.

So I think we were getting a little desperate

about real estate, John and I,

and at a certain point we jumped in our car

and just started roaming around.

I think we got off the Quickway

and saw a sign saying, "Property,"

and "Real estate for rent,"

or "sale," or whatever, "inquire,"

and we inquired.

- And the Mills property

was the second or third place we came to,

and it was appropriate.

Wasn't great, but it had the virtue

of being owned by someone who was willing to rent it to us.

- I'm sitting in my office with my accountant,

and three gentlemen walked into my office

and said that they wanted to rent the property

for a small concert, maybe 5,000 to 15,000 people,

similar to what they have up in Massachusetts,

and would I be interested in renting it to them?

Well, at the time I could see no harm in it,

so I made an agreement with them, and they left,

and as they left, my accountant's out there and says,

"Where are they gonna find 5,000 damn fools

"to sit in the grass and listen to music?"

- The Mills property was a move of desperation. (laughs)

It was nothing like what I wanted.

I wanted someplace that felt natural, and open, and free,

and the Mills property

was land that had been misused,

chopped up,

and Mills' job was to make it right again.

It probably would have looked pretty good, I think,

by the time that we finished with it.

Mel got a pretty good crew together,

and did a lot of work,

and laid it out pretty well,

and I think it would have been green and pleasant

by the time August rolled around,

but it was not the ideal by any stretch of the imagination.

(rustic blues music)

- [Narrator] Having to settle for a less-than-perfect site

wasn't the only problem facing the producers.

Wallkill officials were told the concert

would feature folk music and arts and crafts,

but some of the townspeople weren't buying it.

- Well, we were having political problems in Wallkill.

The town, which had initially welcomed us

and given us the various permits we needed

became concerned as the summer,

the spring and summer of 1969 wore on,

that this was going to be a major disruption,

and my sense was that

these were not people you could reason with.

I can remember going to one town meeting there

where Michael Lang, who had very long hair in those days,

stood up to talk and there were catcalls

'cause he had long hair,

and some guy would say,

"Is that Miss Lang or is that Mr. Lang?"

That sort of thing,

and there was a sense that they didn't like us generically.

- We attended many, many kinds of meetings where,

since I was the straightest-looking member of the group,

I would do a lot of talking

to these town meetings

about what we planned.

I guess it was convincing enough

because a lot of those meetings ended

with a lot of shaking the hand and,

"Gee, we didn't know you knew about this kind of stuff,"

but then, when they'd go back,

they'd say like, "Wait a second.

"Wait a second.

"This is all too nice,"

and I think they went to bed that night

and said to their wife, "I don't know about that guy,"

or, "I don't know about those guys,

"no matter what they say." (laughs)

- The issue of whether or not

there should be a music festival in the town of Wallkill,

our only experience

had been what had happened in California,

and there was some violence,

and there were some drugs,

and so on and so forth,

and I think that we didn't feel that Wallkill was the place.

Even at that time

I think they were talking about 25 or 30,000 people

in the middle of this residential neighborhood.

It made no sense to us.

- At that point,

Dennis Cosgrove and several other individuals,

some state police officers in the area,

were quite concerned with the project.

They retained me and asked what they could do

to stop the project at that point.

- My secretary calls me, says, "The governor's on the phone.

"He don't sound happy,"

and I picked up the phone.

He says, "Nelson here.

"Howard, I don't know what the hell you're doing down there,

"but get rid of it."

That was the end of that conversation.

- At some magic moment

when Jack Schlosser, the town supervisor,

suddenly began to take sides

and said something about Richard Daley

having known how to deal with crowds of hippies,

I lost my temper

and there was a certain amount of shouting

going on back and forth,

and the meeting came rapidly to a close.

- Right after he gave that speech

I think is when he sat down next to me,

and the people behind us made that comment about,

"If any one of those kids comes on my land

"I'm gonna shoot 'em,

"and I have the gun to do it."

- The middle of the night, my wife gets a call,

"They're gonna burn your house down,"

and later on that night,

about three o'clock in the morning,

a friend of mine who I grew up with said

called me and said, "I have to meet you on a back road,

"and I don't wanna be seen with you."

I'd known him all my life

and I couldn't figure out the hell's going on.

So, I drove up there

and he told me that he'd been sitting at a bar

and overheard conversations

where they were forming a vigilante committee

to do away with me.

- They passed a law that we felt was fairly definitive

in terms of foreclosing our ability to use that town.

Well, we felt about the only organization

that could comply with these laws would be a monastery

whose members had taken a vow of silence.

This law was designed not very artfully,

but very effectively,

to preclude us having a festival there.

If you have a law that says no noise can emanate

more than 10 feet from the property line,

you pretty much have foreclosed

children playing in the backyard or anything else,

let alone amplified rock concerts,

so we knew, when that law was passed, that we were dead.

- I thought, in fact, that we had reasonable grounds

and ought to try to stay there rather than just abandon it.

However, that wasn't part of anyone else's idea

of the right thing to do.

So, folks scattered looking for sites.

- And the night we lost Wallkill,

Michael came over and we sat there giggling about it,

see, 'cause to Michael,

even at that point when we lost the site

it was still like we laughed about it

'cause we knew it was gonna come off anyway,

and that's what was supposed to happen: lose Wallkill.

- And when we lost the Wallkill site,

we realized we had lost it,

although there was a great deal of panic

and disappointment for a few days,

it was always there's a better one out there

and we're gonna find it,

and we did.

- [Narrator] With time running out

and no legitimate prospects for finding a new site,

a call from an unlikely ally would steer the guys

to Sullivan County and the town of Bethel,

just 50 miles west of Wallkill.

- We got a call from Elliot Tiber the weekend after we,

that weekend, during the weekend of our discovery

that we were no longer gonna be in Wallkill.

- He said, "I have the permits

"and I have the perfect place."

- And Elliot said that he had read about this,

what happened to Wallkill,

and he said, "I have a big property.

"Come and see it."

Goldstein and I shot up there.

- The site that he had to offer

was connected to a motel

that was owned by the Tiber family,

and Mel and I went up to take a look at the site,

which turned out to be a swamp.

We wound up in mud up to our knees,

and just covered with shit.

- And it was like this giant bowl

with all these trees around it,

and Stan and I are looking at it

and saying there's a lot of trees,

we'd have to cut down all these trees,

but let's go down to the bottom and see what's happening.

We went down, it's a swamp, a total swamp down there,

and we said, "This is impossible,"

and we said to this guy Elliot,

"What did you expect us to do a show in a swamp?

"Put up a stage and everything?"

and all these trees,

and we were sort of pissed off at the guy,

and we left.

- Well, but then there was another call that came in,

and Mel and I went up together,

and we went to see Elliot.

We were meeting him and a real estate agent

at his motel.

- And we met Yasgur,

and then he jumped in the car,

and it was the middleman,

and Yasgur, and Michael, and myself,

and we went driving around Yasgur's farm,

and the piece that he showed first

was this huge field, but flat as a board.

I look at Michael and I say, "Wow,"

and 100,000 people, they're not gonna see anything,

and then Max said something like,

"Well, do you want something with a little contour to it?"

and we said, "Yeah."

- And we came down Hurd Road,

and came up over the crest,

and there was the bowl,

and we knew immediately this was our new home, somehow.

- The two of them stand there

without any assistance from the Realtor or anybody else,

and all of a sudden Michael says,

"This is where we have to be.

"What's the deal next?"

"Well, you'll have to clean up after yourself."

"We certainly will."

My cables are still buried four foot underground.

We couldn't get them out with a bulldozer. (laughs)

Anyway, there's power there for anything that you want.

Just let me know.

I'll tell you where it is.

- Yeah, Max actually found us.

Max was 50 miles away.

He'd been following the accounts of our battles in Wallkill,

and when we were thrown out he called us,

and Mel and Michael

went up to see him,

and looked at the land,

and called me, and said,

"You've gotta get up here and take a look at this

"and make a deal with this farmer,"

and I hopped on my motorbike

and got up there as quickly as I could,

and I made a deal with Max, and we hit it off very well.

He was a delightful, charming guy.

- I'm sure that went through his mind was,

"Hey, I don't have these prejudices.

"I don't mind kids on my property.

"I don't mind a rock 'n' roll festival.

"I think that'd be fun."

- The Yasgurs were decent,

gentle, caring people.

They came to our rescue.

There would have been no Woodstock

without Max and Miriam Yasgur.

(crowd chattering)

- [Announcer] We have a gentleman with us.

He's the gentleman upon whose farm we are, Mr. Max Yasgur.

(crowd applauding)

- This is the largest group of people

ever assembled in one place,

(crowd applauding)

but above that,

the important thing that you're proving to the world

is that a half a million young people can get together

and have three days of fun and music,

and have nothing but fun and music,

and I God bless you for it.

(energetic rock music)

- [Narrator] But some of the people in White Lake

didn't share Max's vision,

and opposition to the festival being held in their community

began to mount, just like in Wallkill.

- Max was a pretty important person in that county,

and he had a lot of good contacts there,

and we sort of felt

we were going to generate some opposition

once people realized what was going on there,

but that if we moved forward

with a sort of surge of inevitability,

that we might just squeak through

before the opposition could marshal its forces and stop us,

and that's in essence what happened.

I mean, as I say, Max had some good friends who helped us,

and the opposition never really developed

quite enough power to stop us.

They came close.

We had one huge problem.

We had sold about a million dollars worth of tickets

for Wallkill,

so we had to make sure that everybody knew

that anyone who had bought tickets for Wallkill,

those tickets would be honored in White Lake.

The press had been carrying accounts

of how the festival was dead and there wouldn't be one,

so we had to counteract that.

We had to continue to work with our ticket outlets

to make sure they continued to sell tickets,

so it was a nightmarish problem

for that roughly 30-day period

to make sure that ticket sales went forward,

and that people who were confused

about where this festival was going to be

knew where it was going to be.

- Well, it's two guys

in a straw hat and overalls

with blunderbusses

saying, "Stay out of town."

We didn't consider ourselves to be that at all.

We're a pretty rural area here,

but we didn't consider ourselves to be country bumpkins,

but they certainly painted us to be.

- I thought it was exactly what we were dealing with

in that town, and I was all for it.

- I didn't like the ad.

It just struck me that an ad

featuring two obvious rednecks

with blunderbusses, I guess it looked like, is that right?

I seem to remember these sort of caricature shotguns.

It went over the line for me

in terms of the anger and the confrontation element in it.

I just didn't want anything like that

associated with the festival.

I was outvoted.

- We got to White Lake July 15th

and the festival was August 15th,

so it just moved forward like a enormous tidal wave,

and we, by the time that festival started

we had 1,000 people hammering, and building,

and constructing, and what have you, and it was

it had a sort of inevitability about it.

- I felt that if we were gonna do a project like this,

that we needed a technical director like Langhart,

and to work with Chris for 15 minutes

was to figure out this was the greatest genius.

This was this strange, Ichabod Crane-looking guy

who just understood what everything was made of,

so I campaigned very, very heavily to bring Chris in,

and I was right.

- We're standing on West Shore Road looking towards Bethel

at about where the bridge was overhead,

and over this way was Phillipini's Pond,

and coming back through this way then

you come to the heliport,

and then further down in that low spot

where the office trailers were, my office was,

and the payroll office

where the people gathered in the morning

to discern which tasks they were gonna have,

and then coming across here we had,

mostly this road was blocked up with people walking,

and overhead was the bridge.

We had a couple phone poles here

and a couple phone poles there,

and we had some, I don't know, 12 by nines or something,

whatever could be found locally,

to span the road

because I felt that the performers

on the way from the heliport to the stage would get mobbed

if there was all this walking road business.

We had to have some way

to keep the performer pavilion, which was on that side,

from the stage, which was on this side.

Over here is the stage.

There's this kind of flat place here,

and then the hill rises up,

and then there's a kind of a dip,

and then it goes on again,

and so the stage was quite high compared to modern concerts

because you have a situation where if it wasn't,

then everybody that was caught in the dip

wouldn't be able to see the performers,

so we had no option here except to make the stage real high

so that the people who were down front were looking up

and the people further out were looking across,

and the people from the top were looking down.

It also extended the field

because you could then see, from much further back,

the stage as a result of being high enough

so you could see it.

- A lot of people were getting cold feet

because they'd heard that the festival site

had been shifted.

They heard that there were problems.

There were rumblings in the press

that things weren't going well,

that the construction on the festival was lagging behind.

It was all true,

and nobody really knew what was gonna happen.

- Most of that month it rained,

and that hampered our ability to prepare the stage,

and build the gates and all the concession areas,

and the roads, and the power.

I mean, there was just an enormous amount to do,

and we were down to literally 28 days to do it.

(raunchy blues-rock music)

- (laughs) It was an enormous undertaking.

The plots and plans that had been made,

and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds

of thousands of dollars,

and hundreds of man-hours

had been put into the previous site.

The Yasgur site was just gorgeous.

It was just head and shoulders

for sheer beauty,

so much better than the Mills site.

It was as though it had been designed for the job

except that there were no roads, there was no water.

We had to dig wells.

We had to bring in power.

Power had existed at the other place.

So, suddenly utilities

became an enormous undertaking,

whereas previously

utilities had been a very small, simple consideration.

- There were 650,000 watts of lights

sitting underneath the stage rusting.

Nowhere to hang it.

There was another 20,000 watts on the Joshua Light Show

at the backing or the rear screen.

The rear screen couldn't be hung

because we couldn't find a stable enough position for it

with those five trusses.

The roof was never finished.

- It was a complex stage structure to support the lights,

an exotic overhead structure which, once it was in place,

would have been quite extraordinary.

Unfortunately, getting it in place

required the choreography of enormous quantities

of people and heavy equipment, a couple of cranes,

and this and that, and this and that.

We had to lay roads, enormous roads,

prepare road beds and so forth,

and all of that working around Max's harvest schedule

and milking schedule.

Electricity didn't get there till the last moment.

Telephones didn't get there till the very last moment.

And so it was a haul every last minute of the time.

(energetic rock music)

- First of all, they pulled enormous all-nighters for days

to try and finish this.

The Thursday before the Friday of the show

they were just barely getting the sound down.

I remember Hanley showing up with all this stuff

and just rolling his eyes and saying,

"Where am I gonna put the sound system?"

- No, I didn't wonder.

I designed and laid it out to begin with.

We stopped the car and get out of the car,

and I went walking up, looking the whole thing over,

and found these dips in the land,

and so I laid the stage out

and designed the V and the security thing

from all the festivals that I had done and watched,

had learned from those beforehand

because nobody was really out to make the concert

more like what you might hear in the recording studio

when you're doing a mixdown:

fidelity, full frequency response

as best we could at the the time,

and then mixing it together,

and we were trying to do that

so that everybody could hear and understand

what was being said to the last seat in the house.

(raunchy blues-rock music)

- We didn't obtain an actual permit

to do the show in White Lake

until, probably, hours before the show.

In the meantime,

the local building inspector

was very conscious of the fact

that if we didn't proceed

with our work

that in fact we were not gonna be in a position

to accommodate the crowds

and/or some other bad things would happen:

the stage construction would be even further behind

than it was.

And so we simply made a little backdoor arrangement

that when we were enjoined from working

while waiting for our permits,

while making our final appeals

on this and that and so forth,

and stop-work orders were issued,

he would come by, wake me up, I would go get my car,

and then he would start a journey around the site,

posting stop-work notices,

and I would follow along behind him

and remove the stop-work notices.

I was not one of the four partners,

so I was the most easily sacrificed of the big names,

and so I,

what are you laughing at, Duke?

It's true, it's true.

Subject of midnight meetings:

Who gets arrested on this one? (laughs)

- I had the checkbook,

and there were people

who signed John's name who were not John

to those checks,

and suddenly we were paying

what amounted to ransom, sky-high ransoms,

to get these things done at the very last minute.

- [Announcer] Can you dig that?

New York State Thruway's closed, man. (laughs)

- Well, there's really a hard any way to explain how it was.

There was no firehouse over there at that time,

with just a little grass and some bungalows,

and we went to bed on Thursday night.

There was no noise.

We got up Friday morning,

and this whole road that you see vacant now,

all the way up through, cars, people, jammed,

just one lane going all the way up to the site.

- We had, oh, I think it was over 500 acres,

might have been 600 acres, for parking alone,

and we had people on that property

who could guide people in and get them off the road,

but the state police didn't get there,

didn't deploy their people

until hours after they said they would,

and by the time they did, 17B was a parking lot.

- Well, the state police didn't do anything wrong.

What happened, really, was

if we'd had the 100,000 people we were expecting,

that would have been 20,000 to 30,000 cars.

We probably could have handled that without too much trouble

'cause we had hundreds of acres of parking lots.

But two things happened:

One, we had four to five times as many people show up,

so you had four to five times as many cars.

Two, it rained,

so many of the parking lots were a sea of mud.

- Obviously, we knew then and there

that we couldn't put people in parking lots,

and so we began to just hope to seal off perimeter areas

way far away, miles away,

stop the flow of traffic into the festival,

try to keep one lane open in most of the roads

for emergency services, primarily medical.

- I stood out on the Thruway,

or on the access road from the Thruway,

with the state police,

trying to get traffic to turn around at the exit.

It was impossible to get cars to turn around.

I mean, they were strewn everywhere.

- By Friday afternoon, there were cars on every road,

in every field, for miles and miles and miles.

In fact, I don't even know if everybody ever got their car.

I mean, it's the thing I always wondered.

I said, "Well, okay,

"did anybody just give up and abandon their car?"

I mean, there were cars everywhere, literally everywhere.

- Frankly, the traffic jams and all of the baggage,

and the impedimenta,

and things that kept people from coming,

had we had another 100,000 we would have been in deep shit.

("Black Magic Woman")

- I mean, when you had 60,000 people in a field

a day and a half before the show was gonna start,

we knew that we were in for something.

There was no question about it.

- There were 500,000, 600,000 people in the field.

There's another million and a half people

physically trying to get in.

We're jumping to hiring helicopters.

We're desperate to keep water moving, the rest of it.

I mean, we had a whole different thing

from this laid-back concert festival

that we're just gonna have and it'll all be gone,

and we're suddenly in the city management business.

- We spent a great deal of time

conceptually thinking about what we wanted to do here,

and the cornerstone of our thinking

was this concept of peace and music,

and peace was not intended

as some kind of code word for "get out of Vietnam."

Peace was a shorthand way of saying,

"A weekend of freedom from whatever is bothering you.

"Just come to the country and have a nice time."

And part of that, we felt,

was that the people that came to Woodstock

should feel that they were in a place that welcomed them,

that didn't fear them, mistrust them,

suspect that they were going to do wrong.

Part of the problem with other festivals that we'd seen

was that there was sort of a mutual antagonism

between festival-goers, say people 18 to 22 or 23 years old,

and those charged with keeping them calm,

and we felt this didn't have to be,

so we designed the site,

we designed our security procedures around the concept

of working with the people coming to the festival,

making them feel welcome and comfortable,

and Wes Pomeroy took a lot of credit for that,

and properly so.

- There was a bottom line.

We said, "You can't go any farther,

"and we're not gonna let you."

Well, we had never planned to do that at Woodstock,

and unfortunately never came to a test

because there was no gate.

There was nothing to defend,

but we had some very specific strategies

on what to do about that,

and it had to do with

everything from having Ken Kesey park his bus

right up next to the fence and dig a hole underneath it,

so we let people just had to fool us do it to my having,

planning to have a couple thousand tickets in my pocket,

and becoming the focus

if we had any confrontation at the gate,

and arguing, and negotiating, and finally giving in,

and giving tickets, and saying,

"Well, I expect you to help clean up,"

and that sort of thing,

knowing some would and some wouldn't.

From the very beginning

it was not going to be confrontational.

- It became clear to all of us,

just from watching newsreels,

that if the crowd wanted to be unruly it would be.

This was quite worrisome to us,

so decisions that we made about security,

about the National Guard,

about keeping the entertainment going throughout the night,

about creating a little baby animal zoo,

about naming our streets Happy Way and Groovy Path,

and everything we put out about this festival

had an element of neighborliness,

and peace,

and respect for your fellow man,

and responsibility toward society,

toward your society, your counterculture,

and I guess in a way

you'd have to credit, mostly, the audience.

- It wasn't a plan.

It was an accident, and some very good people.

Wavy, no teeth,

that was Tom Mix's cowboy hat,

it really was, that he was wearing,

you know, "We're gonna make breakfast in bed for 600,000."

The accident of the guru showing up,

and somebody coming in the office

and saying that this Indian man

would like to speak to the audience,

and thinking, "I haven't got any acts: Why not?

"Let's put him on."

And putting him on

with all his followers sitting around him,

and he and that high squeaky voice talking about peace,

you know, "All the people in the world should be nice,"

and he was fabulous, and he just leveled it out.

- [Satchidananda] But the time has come

for America to help the whole world.

- It's funny.

I mean, all of it went down very quickly,

but I saw some kids really getting hurt on the fence,

climbing over the fence,

and I felt

that if we kept these fences up

and tens of thousands of people were starting to arrive,

that it would be really dangerous,

and it would cause the kind of bad vibes,

a really bad scene,

and I started,

I told my guys to start taking down the fence.

- He had all these great plans.

Everything was gonna work like clockwork,

and then everything's gonna be fine,

but there were all these people,

and I mean, did anybody collect their tickets?

- And there were discussions

about how we were gonna get these people out,

and it was simple: We were just gonna go in there

and tell them to go outside so we can take their tickets.

I really think at that time

we thought we could just

get them to leave and be able to take their tickets,

or another thing that was discussed

was to take their tickets right in there,

but in any event, we were going to take the ticket,

and those who didn't have the ticket

were gonna have to go out and get one.

- The question was, do we call it a free show?

Do we cancel the show?

Or do we throw everybody out and collect the tickets?

- There was this conference

immediately in the morning on the early day,

and it was like, "What do we do?"

And Artie made the suggestion,

which I have never figured out,

"Why don't we do like they do in the Catholic Church,

"and get girls in diaphanous gowns

"and give them collection baskets,

"and we'll send them out in the audience,

"and they can get the money,

"'cause otherwise we're not gonna get any money."

- I thought it was a good idea.

I was a little spaced at the time.

I was hanging with Garcia and Hart for about seven hours,

and I wasn't quite my normal self.

I said, "Eh, let's pass a hat."

- And actually, the hat got passed a couple of times.

The bucket got passed,

and people actually threw money in it.

I don't remember how, I used to know.

I used to remember how much money got collected,

but I don't remember, but money did get collected.

- I can tell you made it a free festival.

The audience made it a free festival by being there.

I mean, there was no way we were getting that crowd

out of that field and bring them back in

through gates that didn't exist.

It just was.

They came early.

They came before we had a chance

to get the ticket booths up.

They came looking for places to buy tickets,

and they just weren't there when they arrived,

and so the crowd came in,

and there was no feasible way

to collect money for tickets,

and so it was really stating the obvious.

- So, we knew going in

that if people came without tickets

we weren't gonna be able to stop them,

and it was part of the philosophy of the festival.

There wouldn't be armed people there saying,

"You can't come in,"

and so Friday morning when we woke up

there were 50,000 people sitting in the performance area,

and it was a fact of life

that we weren't gonna be able to collect tickets.

- What then happened was I went to the office,

sat down, picked up the phone,

called John and Joel in the White Lake office,

and said, "Look, I mean,

"the obvious is the obvious.

"There are vast numbers of people in that field.

"There is no way

"we are going to move them out of that field.

"It's a free concert,

"and I think that we would set a tone

"by going up on stage and announcing the obvious."

John and Joel said, "Go for it," so I walked on stage

and told everybody what they already knew.

This is one thing that I was gonna wait a while

before we talked about,

but maybe we'll talk about it now so you can think about it.

It's a free concert from now on.

(audience applauding)

That doesn't mean that anything goes.

What that means is

we're gonna put the music up here for free.

What it means is that the people who are backing this thing,

who put up the money for it,

are gonna take a bit of a bath, a big bath.

That's no hype, that's true.

They're gonna get hurt,

but what it means is that these people have in their heads

that your welfare is a hell of a lot more important,

and the music is, than a dollar.

Now, let's face the situation.

We've had thousands and thousands of people come here today.

Many, many more than we knew

or even dreamt or thought would be possible.

We're gonna need each other

to help each other to work this out

because we're taxing the systems that we have set up.

We're gonna be bringing the food in,

but the one major thing you have to remember tonight

when you go back up into the woods to go to sleep,

or if you stay here,

is that the man next to you is your brother,

and you damn well better treat each other that way

because if they don't then we blow the whole thing,

but we've got it right there.

(audience cheering)

- There was no sense that this was a free festival.

We were sparing no expense, really, to make it

to make it perfect, to make it just as we had advertised,

so it's kind of amusing to hear that it was a free festival

any more than it would be free

if I gave your camera to somebody, (laughs)

or your TV camera.

It's free to them, but it sure wasn't free to you.

(energetic rock music)

- Free stage?

There was only one stage.

It was like, "No, there was two."

We were just tucked over to the side.

We were hired on to play for the overflow,

and who'd have thought

the overflow was gonna be like 100,000,

and so we did our thing day and night, day and night.

- We knew that some people were gonna come without tickets.

I mean, '69, because it was sort of part of the culture,

and we prepared for those people.

We prepared free kitchens,

and free campgrounds, and free stages,

and put a sound system from the main stage

in the free campground.

- They decided to set up the free stage

at the bottom of that little hill

and make it better

with a little wooden stage and everything,

and until the festival

really started cooking

with all the big-name attractions arriving,

we were basically it.

There was one particular afternoon, early afternoon,

our wonderful friend, Joan Baez,

showed up at the free stage area,

and she wanted to take part in the entertainment there,

and she sat there,

I would think for at least a couple hours, maybe more.

- We didn't have any idea

of the historical event that it was gonna turn out to be,

and so now, 43 years later,

I'm saying, "Jeez, I was glad to be part of it."

Every time I'd catch a glimpse of the "Woodstock" movie

I just feel good.

- There's a really funny story that

that not many people know about.

I forget the name of the guy,

but there was a gentleman

from the New York State Health Department

who was supposed to come

and inspect the health facilities on Friday,

and this guy came directly to my office,

and I was to send one of the people that worked for me

around with him to show him the johns,

the hospital setup, the water treatment,

all the kinds of things that,

all the things that they were concerned about.

He came with his daughter, who was about 15 years old,

and while we were talking in the trailer,

my office,

his daughter went outside and disappeared.

Why, I'll never know,

but that guy spent the next three days

looking for his daughter.

He never inspected the health facilities,

which he could have shut us down,

and I don't know what happened to the daughter,

but she may have saved the whole festival. (laughs)

- The first words, in fact,

said at Woodstock publicly over the PA

were, "holy shit."

Chris Langhart and I were standing on stage with Bill Hanley

praying that the sound system was gonna be finished.

I turned around and the sun was starting to come up,

and I looked out,

and the whole damn field was full of people,

and without thinking

I broke the vow I'd always made to my mother,

never swear on stage.

I just said, "Holy shit."

- [Announcer] Wheat Germ,

Holly has your bag with your medicine.

Please meet at the information booth

as soon as you can, please.

Helen Savage, please call your father

at the Motel Glory in Woodridge.

Helen Savage, please call your father...

- Early on,

it became evident to me

that we could not provide the PA

to give all these messages.

At first we tried,

but then there were just too many of them,

so we set up a message board,

and that was between people who were at the festival.

- The warning that I've received,

you may take it with however many grains of salt you wish,

that the brown acid that is circulating around us

is not specifically too good.

- I thought those announcements were fairly important

for the individuals who made them or who asked for them.

- [Announcer] Please be advised that there is a warning...

- And it also gave us something to fill with.

It was a far more personal attribute

than it was to just play music.

"Joel and Jody, would you please meet each other

"at tower number four because she has your insulin."

Right, he wants to get high, Jody's got the dope,

and frickin' you know what they're doing,

but it's just, right, what do you say?

It just has to be read,

so they became stars in their own right.

("Raga Puriya-Dhanashri/Gat in Sawarital")

- At some time,

maybe it was around one in the morning on Friday morning,

Joel and I decided to take a ride

to visit the parking areas,

which had been fairly muddy that day from the rains,

but at some point we crested a hill,

must have been a mile from the actual site of the festival,

and we stopped our bikes,

and I can remember just looking out over the hills

towards where the festival site was,

and all you could see were campfires at that hour,

and I had the sense

of this sort of massive army before the battle,

waiting there, and I don't know, it just

it reminded me of Henry V, for some reason,

before Agincourt,

and of an army

waiting to go into battle the next morning,

and it was a very still, almost misty evening,

and Joel and I just sort of looked at each other with this,

there's this look,

that great expression that Keats has:

"With a look of wild surmise." (chuckles)

What does all this mean for us,

and what will the morrow bring?

And then we went back to the rest of our lives,

but it was really a wonderful, still moment there,

which I'll always remember.

- When dawn hit,

I, after catching a couple hours of sleep

in my office on the floor,

I went for another walk,

and I walked around,

and everybody was sleeping, everybody:

the crew, the security, the hospital people,

all the people who had come to the show,

everybody was sleeping.

It seemed like I was the only one awake.

I also knew

that elsewhere in the United States and New York State,

they thought that we were in

this area of devastation,

and when the sun started baking,

and I forget what time it was.

It could have been 8:30, nine o'clock,

I found one of the people from Hanley Sound.

I forget who it was, but I said, "Could you turn on the PA,

"'cause I wanna talk to these people."

I said, "I do wanna say good morning to you

"and say wasn't that an incredible night last night,

"and everybody, 'yeah!'

"and I just wanna tell you

"that today is gonna be even more incredible,"

and I read off the list of talent that there would be,

and then I said, "We got a couple of hours

"before the show starts,"

and it was sort of this,

"Everything is okay.

"Don't worry about a thing.

"The show is gonna go on.

"We're not gonna stop this thing,

"and everything's secure."

- What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000.

(audience applauding)

Now, it's not gonna be steak and eggs or anything,

but it's gonna be good food,

and we're gonna get it to you.

- I asked for $3,000 from the festival to buy the food,

and when I went to town,

within a day and a half I'd spent 3,000.

I went into the office in New York

and got another 3,000 just like that,

and we bought all these giant cleavers from Chinatown,

these big cutters,

and we bought 35 garbage pails

to put all the food in

so we could serve it,

and we had giant stainless steel pots,

and five different stoves were cooking at once,

and the booths were five booths

with 10 serving sides to them,

and they were always had lines, real long lines to them.

I ended up buying 160,000 paper plates,

forks, knives, and spoons, and about 30,000 paper cups,

and it's a good thing I did

because they all went, everything went,

so that's how I figured

that we fed between 160,000 to 190,000 people

at the Hog Farm free kitchen.

- There were bagels backstage,

and by the time I heard

that there were some bagels backstage,

they were all gone,

but my manager,

this guy they asked for too much money,

somehow his wife put half a dozen fried chickens

in the helicopter,

and at midnight he whipped them out.

Nobody had any food there.

There was nothing left backstage,

and all of a sudden I turn around

and I see all the guys in my group eating chicken.

I said, "Will you look at this,"

and there people like drooling over these chickens,

and it wasn't too appetizing,

I was too nervous to eat,

but I couldn't believe that all of a sudden

there was a barbecue back there

that we brought from the city,

and there were people,

it looked like people starving up there.

- The clear recollection of the difference

between how the performers were being treated

versus what we were hearing, or I was hearing

about what was going on in the audience was,

it was a very lavish performers tent if I seem to recall.

It was a big open area made out of poles

with a big tenting over it,

and it was a large, a large area with rows of tables,

and seated at this one table

was Grace Slick and Janis Joplin,

both kind of like turning around to each other

and picking at this food,

saying that the strawberries were already melting,

and somebody should take the helicopter

and go get more frozen strawberries,

and I just thought that was just a bit bizarre.

- I mean, people have always wondered what Bill Graham

what Bill Graham had to do with any of this.

Well, Bill didn't have anything to do with it, really,

but he kept his finger in,

just as a presence.

He happened to be at Grossinger's that weekend.

He happened to be there,

and he had convinced his sister, who was from New York,

to bring this freezer full of steaks

so that he could have a barbecue

out there on the lawn,

and he created this enormous barbecue,

and I remember some guys in the Band

and the guys in Creedence at this barbecue,

and on one hand you've got thousands of people,

and on the other hand you've got this guy barbecuing.

It was very, very, very portentous

of things to come in the future,

the division between the bands and the audience.

("Evil Ways")

- We knew we had to go with some new talent.

Santana was there

because I had seen them in San Francisco with Graham,

and I just was staggered.

They were fabulous.

I mean, they didn't have a record contract at that point,

but Graham was the power,

one of the major powers, certainly,

as a promoter in the country.

He was very against festivals.

Graham obviously wanted them there.

We wanted Graham's friendship,

and booking Santana, who he was very close to,

was a way of quieting him down,

so they were booked because they were a great band.

They were booked 'cause there was political advantage.

("Dreams of Milk and Honey")

- For nobody knowing who in the hell we were

we really got a good spot.

I think we went on Saturday night

just before the lights took effect.

And we used Sun amplifiers,

and Felix used four stacks with four 12s in each,

and I used four stacks,

but when I did my solo,

all of a sudden I heard the whole stage turn on.

My road manager hooked me into his stacks,

and all of a sudden I had eight stacks of these Suns,

and it scared me.

The sound is just the movement of air,

and these speakers were pumping,

and I felt a gust of wind push me.

I turned around, I said, "Wow, he turned them all on,"

and then I was off then.

You could hear me.

I thought we could have been much bigger

if we were in that movie.

I still haven't gotten over that.

- [Interviewer] No, and I don't know why

Mountain wasn't contracted.

It was just that at this point

things were not very well coordinated.

We were just rushing

to do what we could,

and I would imagine that our focus

was on getting the biggest names we could to release.

- [Man] We got down to the wire

with no camera crews at Woodstock,

with the exception of the crews that Michael hired.

- We had a call Wadleigh was in town.

I had to get Wadleigh to come in right away,

to have him come over to sign

that he was gonna direct it, okay?

And I just said to them,

"Hey guys, we've spent $2 1/2 million.

"Why don't you shoot craps with 100 grand

"so we could buy film?"

So they said, "Okay."

- The reticence on the part of some artists

was not even so much about money.

It was about, "Well,

"I wanna see what my performance looks like

"and what it sounds like before I release it,"

and that I could understand,

so I felt some of them would like to be in the film,

but they wouldn't be in it

until they'd seen their performance and how it was recorded,

and then some of them it was just money.

- Michael said, "Artie,

"you're the only one that could convince these people

"'cause of your name in the business.

"You gotta meet them at the helicopter

"and get them to sign that consent to be shot

"without us giving them the money,

"'cause we don't even have the money to pay for the show.

"You're gonna have to convince them

"that they're not gonna get 50% more

"to be shot for a movie."

Do you think it was easy convincing these groups,

to convince Janis Joplin to sign a paper to do a movie

when she was drunk?

To go to the Who

and convince them to sign a paper without getting paid?

- Having the movie was of great value to us,

even though John and I had a small piece of that movie,

it brought us back to even some time in 1980, I guess,

so it was lucky for us that there was a film.

- The only two acts that didn't play Woodstock

were Jeff Beck and Iron Butterfly.

Beck canceled well before the festival.

We knew he wasn't coming, that was it,

but if you go down the list

those are the only two that are listed that didn't play.

Iron Butterfly, whose manager I think I forgot

the minute I ever talked to him,

sent me a telegram,

and then called and informed me

that their plane would arrive in LaGuardia at X hour,

and that at that hour a helicopter would meet the band

and would fly them directly to the site,

whence they would go straight to the stage,

they would perform their set,

and they would be then loaded back into the helicopters,

and they would be flown from the site

back to LaGuardia Airport

so that they could continue on with their lives.

Yeah, sure. (laughs)

So, I called Western Union,

and I got this operator on the phone,

and I said, "Look, I know it is illegal in a telegram

"to say profanities,"

and this lady and I developed a way to write

"For reasons, Unto,

"Clarification, Know,"

and we managed to send them a telegram which basically,

as you read it and it was printed, had no swear words in it,

but going down

said "F-U-C-K, space, Y-O-U,"

and we devised it, and we sent it,

and I have never, and it is, what, 24, 25 years later,

heard another word (laughs) from that band,

and it gave me the greatest pleasure in the world.

* I want to take you higher

* Gonna take you higher

- Bill came to me and said,

"Sly's not ready to go on yet, man.

"He doesn't feel the vibes."

Well, by this point I didn't feel the vibes either,

and so I went to the trailer and got by Sly's manager,

and asked Sly to come down to his tour bus

down the steps to the tour bus,

and he came down to this tour bus,

and I reached up, and I grabbed him,

and I slammed him up against the thing,

and I lifted him up in the air,

and I said, "You low-life (grumbles gibberish).

"If you're not on the stage in three minutes

"I'm gonna take your head off your goddamn shoulders

"(grumbles gibberish)," and dropped him,

and he just looked at me,

and his eyes were the size of basketballs,

and he walked to the trailer,

and he said, "We're on," (laughs)

and they went on, and they did a fabulous show.

* Tried to raise me better

* But her pleading I denied

- [Narrator] But Sly wasn't the only band causing trouble.

The Grateful Dead wanted a do-over.

- For some reason I remember them coming off

complaining about something,

and they wanted to go back on,

and this is all new to me.

I didn't know if you were allowed to do that.

- [Narrator] And the Who refused to play

until they got paid in cash.

("Summertime Blues")

- The artists all wanted to be there.

I mean, no one left and refused to perform.

Okay, the Who.

- If the Who don't get paid, the Who aren't going on.

- The business side of it

was of great concern to John and me.

Sometimes it preoccupied us

because it seemed like a life-or-death situation

for the festival at that moment.

An example would be

that Saturday night incident that you heard about

with a couple of bands that refused to play

unless they were paid in cash,

and there we had a wonderful relationship

with Charlie Prince that came to the rescue.

Charlie Prince was our banker in Sullivan County.

That night Charlie got into a helicopter in his pajamas,

and was flown to his bank at midnight,

and rummaged around,

and found me some cashier's checks

that had by accident not been locked up in the time vault

so that I could bike to the festival site

from the command center

and pay business managers or groups

who refused to let their

their musicians go on stage.

* There ain't no cure for the summertime blues *

- Have this vision of Pete Townshend

sitting on these Who amplifier cases

swinging his legs back and forth, holding his guitar,

waiting for Wolff to tell him it was okay to play

'cause he'd gotten all the money.

- That's why I do not like the Who

because I was at that meeting.

How could you not wanna play?

How could you risk a riot because you won't go on?

When these are the people

that gave you everything that you have.

They love you, and you're gonna hold them up

for a couple of bucks.

- Hendrix was the only act that was booked to play twice,

and he was the most expensive.

He was the highest-paid act: $35,000. (laughs)

Hendrix circled the festival for two days.

We were unable to get him in.

- What I remember is being in the trailer

and getting a phone call

from one of the local little airports,

and it was from Hendrix,

and he was at the airport,

and he wanted to know if we could pick him up,

and I tried to explain to him

that it was really complicated,

and I said, "There's just no way I can do that."

"Is there anything you can do?" he said,

"I really wanna get there,"

and I said, "Well, is there anybody around

"that you might be able to talk into driving you out here?"

And he said he saw, there was a station wagon,

hang on, clunk, and then he came back,

"Yeah, I think I got that covered,"

and, "I'll be there soon," click,

and two hours later or something like that,

down the little road behind the stage,

there's a Ford Falcon and a station wagon,

light blue Ford Falcon, stops,

and Jimi Hendrix in full Jimi-Hendrix-ism

emerges from the car,

and they unload his stuff,

and that's how he got there.

He flew in in a private plane.

He flew in in some kind of small plane,

and he paid some kids to drive him to the show,

and I mean, I remember that happening,

but so much stuff was going on

that it seemed really difficult to relate to

at the time.

(crowd murmuring)

- [Announcer] Looks like we're gonna get

a little bit of rain,

so you better cover up.

- Woodstock and rain, Woodstock and rain,

Woodstock and rain,

I mean, they're all the same thing in my mind.

(thunder roaring)

- The thunderstorm, tornado,

or whatever it was that blew through

when Cocker was performing

scared the living daylights out of us.

I mean, a whole bunch of things happened at one time.

- Well, the winds were whipping up,

and they were whipping these canvas things

that they had tied up,

and so guys were, it was kind of like a ship,

and suddenly a storm coming on,

and the guys quickly furling the sails and stuff.

I mean, guys were scrambling around

trying to cover amps and take down things

that were in danger of being blown away.

- It was getting a little dangerous

in that John Morris had jumped on the microphone,

and he was a big hero then

because he sort of calmed people down.

- The towers, which were scaffolding towers,

had four or six Super Trouper follow spots,

which weigh somewhere 500, 600 pounds apiece,

on top of them,

and because of the wind the damn things were swaying,

and those follow spots were moving back and forth,

and they were not chained down,

and it's one of those things we forgot.

The immediate concern

was to get people away from the towers,

and all of a sudden I've got this mic,

and I'm saying, "Move away from the towers.

"It'll be okay.

"Everybody just hang on.

"We're gonna ride this through.

"We've been through everything else."

Please come down off those towers, gentlemen.

Hey, cut the power off here, all right?

The real answer is I don't know what else I could have done.

Somebody had to relay.

Somebody had to talk to all of those people.

We had some kind of symbiotic relationship at that point,

and you couldn't walk out on it.

(mournful blues music)

- And then I remember the sun came out,

and there was this incredible stench that came,

you remember that?

There was this stench,

and it was very uncomfortable for people.

There was debris all over and everything,

and people were sliding around in this mud,

and sort of like caking themselves up in mud,

and all of a sudden the mud became an activity.

- The New York Times,

I mean, or the Daily News: Hippies Mired in Mud.

I didn't see hippies mired in mud.

I saw it rained, and there was a lot of mud,

and people having a good time.

- And the light at that point was down in the sky,

and the clouds were overhead,

and it was, everybody was silhouetted,

so when you looked, you're seeing people up close,

you're all kind of backlighted and silhouetted.

- The rain created something

that nothing else could have done,

and what it did was it equalized everybody at that festival.

Everybody was full of mud.

Everybody was wet.

Everybody was cold.

Everybody was together.

Everybody experienced the same thing at the same time

and had to make it work,

so I don't know how many people have told you that,

but I thank the Lord for that rain.

- Without a unifying factor like that

it could have been particularly difficult

to try and take a small city of 400

and perhaps close to 56,000 people

and allow them to coexist for that period of time.

Music went continuously.

Where did you eat?

Where did you shit?

Where did you sleep?

It didn't seem to bother anybody.

- John Morris called the telephone building in White Lake,

which was our headquarters,

and spoke to Joel,

and told Joel that we had a rather nasty

and potentially dangerous problem,

that the crowd was scraping the dirt

off the power lines that had been buried in the ground,

and the rain had washed away some of that dirt,

and there was some concern

that unless we could divert the power,

that there would be an accident.

- "What I have in mind," he said, "is to work a bypass

"around the area that I'm worried about,

"and that will take me some time,"

but when I heard how much time it would take him,

it didn't seem that dangerous.

I mean, he said he could probably do it

in a matter of minutes.

This wasn't hours or days,

and we agreed that that was the way to proceed.

- On the face of it, one would have said,

"Well, let's stop everything until we divert the power,"

which was our suggestion,

but John advised us that the Who, or the Grateful Dead,

or one of the groups most keenly awaited by the audience

was just coming on stage after a rather lengthy wait,

and that the crowd was restive,

and they'd been rained on,

and they were angry,

and that another delay of 45 minutes or an hour,

whatever it would take,

might lead to violence,

so we had a decision to make:

could we divert the power and keep it on at the same time,

and run the risk in the next 45 minutes

there might be some calamity,

or should we shut it down and invite an immediate calamity?

So, we went for the potential calamity

rather than the sure calamity, (chuckles)

and so Joel and I conferred,

and we decided that we would take the risk

of leaving it on and diverting it,

and that worked, fortunately.

- They're like massive little tiny

snapshots of events.

There's the "The stage is sinking!

"The stage is sinking!"

See, everybody would get up, wanna be on stage.

I mean, it was really cool,

so everybody wanted to be up on stage.

There reached a point after the rains

that the stage literally started sliding down the hill,

so they'd throw everybody off stage

so there'd be less people on stage

and they could save the stage.

("The Star Spangled Banner")

- People started leaving on Sunday evening.

It was supposed to be over at midnight, tops,

maybe 11 o'clock or something,

but it went all night long Sunday night.

Jimi Hendrix, for whatever reason he had,

wanted to close the festival.

Being that it was at night, and people leaving,

you had really no idea how many people were gonna be left

when dawn came up,

and as that gray dawn came up,

there was Jimi Hendrix

in this resplendent white outfit with fringes on it,

and being an incredible Jimi Hendrix fan myself,

I wasn't gonna miss that performance.

Just seeing the people wandering off slowly in this

sort of surrealistic scene,

and hearing "The Star-Spangled Banner"

played in the manner that it was played,

that's the way the festival ended for me,

but there was a lot of work to do after that,

but I kind of forgot about it at that moment.

I just took it in, smoked a joint,

and relished in it,

and said, "We did it."

(raunchy blues-rock music)

- You'd see people wandering around

amidst all these old blankets, and paper,

and lumps of stuff laying around,

and people walking around picking through it,

and kind of scavenging through it.

- It looked like a Civil War battlefield,

in those old photographic plates they took

right after the battle,

where you'd see dead bodies laying around,

and all the equipment that they left behind,

and the other amazing thing was there was a tremendous smell

that, of course, you can't get from the movies,

or the pictures, or anything.

It was a horrible, rancid odor

rising from all this muddy debris

that had been left behind.

I mean, and it went on for acres and acres.

- I remained behind,

and a lot of other folks did, as well.

Some of them were hog farmers,

stayed for a couple of days to clean up,

and so there were simply folks who didn't wanna leave.

They wanted to stay there forever.

They had put tents in the wood.

They had built households,

and of course had

had no means of maintaining their lives:

no food, no water, no nothing, no services.

We took damage claims from the neighbors,

insurance claims, releases, complaints,

and it just went on and on and on

for weeks and weeks and weeks.

- A lot of the piping just got buried,

and the electric got left,

and the phone company came, took all the phones away,

and the poles got taken down that they were mounted on,

and the boards,

and everything just kind of went back to normal slowly.

- I knew that what they had done to the,

what we had done to the ground

was nothing couldn't come back

'cause they stayed, cleaned everything up,

and then replanted it,

which is an agreement they had had with the Yasgurs.

- If you were technically oriented,

and were used to a level deck,

and life as you dreamed it might be,

if you went through those three days

it would have totally destroyed your concept of order.

- We knew we were in the middle of a financial disaster.

We knew that some things had gone on

that we could never make right,

and then we had begun to hear

what turned out to be fabricated reports

of dead bodies in the woods around the festival site.

- Jim Mitchell told me

that there were bodies all over the site amongst the trash,

because that's what it was:

it was a gigantic dump site at that point,

and we were charged

with finding the dead bodies.

- I was at the bank in New York

talking to a bunch of panicked and angry bankers,

and Jim Mitchell,

who had been charged with cleaning up the site,

called me at the bank and said,

"They're going through the woods.

"My crew is going through the woods,

"and they're finding bodies,"

and I said, "Find out the details for me,"

and he called back about an hour later

and said, "I was mistaken.

"There is one death."

They found one body,

and apparently he was accidentally run over

by the machine that was compacting and gathering the trash,

and it was pretty emotional.

Joel and I were both at the bank,

and it felt like our world had sort of collapsed,

and then this information

that this boy had been killed accidentally at the site

felt like the last straw,

and I remember feeling pretty broken up about it.

- John had really gotten way over his credit line,

and the manager of the local bank was so distraught he was,

we were afraid he was gonna commit suicide

'cause he extended so much credit to us,

and we had people coming in saying,

"I have 10 acres here,

"and people have been tromping all over it

"and staying in it,"

and we'd say, "What kind of crops did you have?"

By the time we got through

we knew how to estimate an acre of alfalfa, or corn,

or something like that, and we paid them off.

- I spent a good bit of time

for the next, oh, number of weeks

coordinating what cleanup activity was going on

at that time,

returning people's lost property.

There were a lot of wallets, purses, things,

and we had a lost and found,

and we sent stuff back out in the mails.

We took damage claims from the neighbors,

insurance claims, releases, complaints,

and it just went on and on and on

for weeks and weeks and weeks.

- John was in a situation

where he had gotten himself into doing something

and behaved at all times as an absolute gentleman.

Looked at his options, knew he was done,

and said, "We're gonna go through this.

"We're gonna take care of it,"

and after the festival the same thing with the debts.

He could have gone bankrupt, gone belly-up.

The whole thing could have been over.

He could have walked away from it.

He chose to make sure that absolutely everybody got paid.

Lot of respect for him.

- I believe that.

I mean, that was something my father felt strongly about

was that you can regain lost monies,

but lost reputations are forever.

- It cost us $3 million, and it was particularly expensive

'cause we didn't have $3 million at the time.

When it was over,

we were a million and a half dollars in debt, or more,

and no real prospect for repaying it.

It worked out that we were able to,

but it took us quite a long time.

- We'd spent well in excess of a million dollars

over the receipts.

The newspaper accounts of Woodstock the morning after

were not friendly.

The Times had headlined it Nightmare in the Catskills.

We had bankers, and creditors, and just about everybody

breathing down our necks that morning,

and when the smoke cleared Monday morning

the banks said, "My God,

"we've paid out well in excess of a million dollars

"over the original $250,000,

"and we have no documentation to support it."

- One of the bankers picked up our folder, I remember, and

in an attempt of emphasize the points he was making,

and he was making points

about how irresponsible and stupid we were,

he began to slam the folder on the table,

and in so doing out popped some of the papers

from this manila folder,

and one of the papers was the personal guarantee form

obligating John and me

to whatever debts we had rung up over the weekend

by writing all these bad checks.

The guarantee form was unsigned, just evident.

You could see that the signature part of it was blank,

and this fellow stopped in mid-tirade,

and everybody at the table looked down at this form,

and looked at each other,

and then, (laughs) and John and I looked at each other.

It was such a wonderful moment, especially because

the period of time, that Monday morning,

was such a leaden period.

- And we said,

naively perhaps, but we said it,

"Well, it was our intention to honor these debts,

"and we'll sign whatever papers you ask us to sign

"to memorialize that."

- And I'm not sure that legally we could have done anything

other than just honor that commitment, that obligation,

but it did make the bankers a lot friendlier

right at that moment.

(melancholy piano music)

- Michael and I have a very interesting relationship.

We can't be too close, but we can't really be too far

because we had a child together,

and that was Woodstock.

- I left the site, I guess around noon on Monday,

and John and Joel I guess had left the night before,

and Artie had left early that morning,

and as I was leaving,

they were in Wall Street, they were in a meeting at a bank,

and I got a phone call

that said you had to come down right away,

and one of the last helicopters was just leaving.

The guy offered me a lift, and it was the first time I

I'd never seen it from the air,

and I thought what a great idea, see it from the air.

There were 50 or 60 kids left on the field,

and they were collecting garbage,

and I remember as the helicopter took off

I saw that they were dragging the garbage in bags,

and old clothes,

and they were piling them in this huge peace symbol

in the middle of a field,

and that was the last image I had as we left.

That was the first time I'd seen it from the air,

and that was the image that stays with me always

is that that's what was left at the end of it.

- I mean, it was the seminal experience in my life.

It was a major factor.

Would I like to go do it again?

Yeah, it won't be the same,

but it was fascinating.

I would love to walk on the stage

and say, "Get off the towers.

"It's not a free concert,

"and I quit if anybody gives a good goddamn," (laughs)

and call it done.

- It happened because of the good vibes in planning it.

It happened because of the dedication

of everybody that worked on it.

It happened because of the weather.

It happened because all these variables came together.

The time was right.

Everybody agreed, the music, the peace,

everything was just perfect for that.

- When the festival was over

and all this

trouble came down:

the dead boy, the lawsuits,

the pillorying in the press, the loss of money,

the Yasgurs were steadfast friends.

They didn't call and say,

"You didn't clean up this acre or that acre.

"You didn't do this.

"You didn't do that."

They called up and said,

"Look, anything we can do to help, we'd love to help."

We did clean up their land,

and Max called me, oh, about a month after the festival,

and he said, "You know,

"I can't imagine what you're going through.

"I mean, I know you're only 24 years old.

"You must be having a nightmare of a time."

He said, "I've got a great idea."

He said, "Why don't you come up here for a month

"and milk cows," he said,

"and no one has to know where you are,"

he said, "You get in good shape.

"You'll get tired.

"You go to bed at night.

"You'll sleep well.

"You can forget about Woodstock for a month."

I almost took him up on it, (laughs)

but I'd met a girl and I was 24,

and my

my romance took precedence over milking cows,

but I married her, too. (chuckles)

- Well, I don't think you can plan to have a Woodstock

if by that you mean a spontaneous mass gathering

of tremendous energy and goodwill

at which people have a great time.

I think you can offer it.

You can set the framework up for it,

but having it happen is,

it's a miracle.

- Let me tell you this.

Didn't matter how I went into it and came out of it.

Didn't matter how anybody else came into it

and went out of it.

We wouldn't be having this conversation today

if it didn't mean something

to millions and millions of people who weren't even there.

We wouldn't be standing here with this camera,

and these questions,

and you wouldn't be making a film

unless this thing historically meant something

to a lot of people above and beyond

what it meant for those people who were there,

and above and beyond anybody's

what they brought to it or brought away from it.

It's a singular event in history.

- So that what was learned at White Lake

was not that hundreds of thousands of people

can paralyze an area and break the law,

but that in an emergency, at least,

people of all ages are capable of compassion,

and while such a spectacle may never happen again,

it has recorded the growing proportions

of this youthful culture in the mind of adult America.

Walter?

- And that's the way it is, Monday, August 18th, 1969.

(wistful acoustic rock music)

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