Woodstock Diary

Please walk on the side of the road!

Okay hold it there Mustang!

You, alright let’s go.

Lets go.

Umm maybe borrow Hugh’s bicycle, and like,

um you are going to find that it’s faster even walking than

riding a car.

Give me an "F"! F!

Give me a "U"! U!

Give me a "C"! C!

Give me a "K"! K!

The 1969 Wall Street Journal, God.

I might be able to find some of my old stocks in there.

Wednesday January, oh God it’s our ad probably right?

Holy cow.

I’m looking, I’m looking.

Business opportunities.

I need to go get my reading glasses.

ah Capital wanted.

Here it is.

Young man with unlimited capital looking.

Let me see it.

Right down here.

Right where I’m pointing.

-Oh my God! -Young man.

You mean that story was true?

Legitimate and interesting.

Interesting investing opportunities and business

propositions.

But the word legitimate just leaps out at you!

We were writing a show for television about uh two young

guys with more money than brains.

The only thing we didn’t have was plot,

we couldn’t figure out what kind of nutty business ventures these

two young men would get into.

In desperation we took an ad out in,

the, in the Wall Street Journal, claiming to be a young man with,

quote, unlimited capital looking for business propositions,

and they had better be legitimate business propositions

because we didn’t want any.

Any conmen to be like...edible golf balls and uh...

Power sources from the eighth dimension.

That was a good, that was a good idea.

Well you liked it.

I would’ve invested in that one.

We did actually invest in one, uh,

toward the end of, uh, what was a torrent of psychotic ideas,

uh, there came a letter which we thought was actually an

interesting business proposition,

in its own right, and we did something that in retrospect was

probably the beginning of our careers.

We stopped being an anonymous box number and we contacted

this, this fellow and began to investigate a business venture.

Our first venture turned out to be,

well actually a year or two later,

uh, the creation of a recording studio here in New York called

Media Sound and it was through Media Sound that we met

Mike Lang and Artie Kornfeld.

Michael had long hair and wore leather jackets with

fringes and, uh, bellbottoms.

So when we first met it was kind of like,

you know, what are you?

What are you?

I thought that they were, um, very straight,

uh, suits, huh, basically.

Nice guys but, you know, didn’t have a clue as to what

we were talking about doing and uh but I knew that they were

sort of tickled by it.

I was living in Woodstock and was thinking about doing a

series of concerts in Woodstock.

Eventually that sort of evolved over a course of months into a

recording studio.

What caught our eye in their proposal was that really at the

bottom of it was two lines and the lines were Woodstock being

the home of all these artists, we think we can prevail on some

of them to give, kind of, an opening day concert.

Hey, if we can get Dylan out of his house and we could get a

couple of other of those famous artists who lived up in

Woodstock, to appear at, at a catered cocktail party,

why don’t we get them to a concert?

we’ll charge admission we’ll, uh,

make a fortune with this.

This is a real no brainer.

It was a no brainer, but in another way.

I laid this out to my father, uh,

why I was doing this and he, he said "You’ve rented a field a

"hundred miles from New York city,"

he said, "and you’re going to expect fifty thousand people to

"come up there to listen to rock music,

"alright, and you’re going to put your own money into this

"venture?" And I said, "Yeah Dad I am,

"I, I really think it’s a great idea,

"I mean there’s a whole new thing going on in the world,

"Hey man this is the Sixties!" And he said,

something like, "I just knew it. I just knew it.

"I just knew that the minute you got your hands on your

"inheritance you would do something like this."

So we went back and, uh, we made a deal.

The fact that we’d gotten thrown out of Wallkill had thrown our

plans into the waste basket and tried to explain,

to what by then was, uh, fifty, sixty thousand people who’d

already bought tickets, that it was still going to be a festival

and why we had moved it from one community to another,

which was that we weren’t welcome and we didn’t want to

throw, uh, three days of peace and music where we

weren’t welcome.

We were pretty stressed out.

It was on a Friday and we moved everything over the weekend.

We went riding through Bethel which is ,uh,

back roads and, and, uh, came up over this hill and there it

was, this amazing bowl, and I

said stop the car this is it and

we jumped out of the car and we went into the field and,

and uh, the agent said it belonged to Max Yasgur as part

of the Yasgur farm so we went over to Max’s house and picked

him up, and went back to the field and Max meanwhile started

telling us about his other properties,

he had a lot of land in the area, and we cut a deal with him

right there on the spot.

And we were walking out to the middle of the field and I asked,

I said what do you want for the field and he said

"Well, I don’t want to take advantage of you guys and..."

you know, like and started figuring out what

his crop was going

to cost and how much it was going to cost to reseed and we,

uh, settled on a price and called everybody up and said

we’re moving.

Had to pack up Wallkill and I think the next day John came up

and went to see Max to firm up the deal.

About twenty seven or twenty eight days before the show.

Hold on...

Ah, Michael jumped in with both feet and soon was running things

like General Patton.

Are you clear on all of them?

You know from the point of view of the production on the site,

he was, he was, uh, an impressive,

uh, guy.

We worked feverishly for five rainy weeks to put this thing

together and about a week before,

we realized we weren’t going to make it.

And we had a meeting and we were told by our construction people

that we could either have a stage for the performers or we

could have fences, but we couldn’t have both.

If we don’t have a stage this is not...

no we can’t not’ve a stage.

It’s-- well if we don’t have tickets collected,

if we don’t charge admission, with what we know now,

with-- with having to rebuild the entire site,

we’re going to lose millions of dollars.

Well I don’t have millions of dollars.

So we-- we, faced with this impossible choice,

we decided to sleep on it.

My father, calls me up and says, "Your brother and I’ve decided

"to pay a visit to the site with you."

To visit the site?

Can’t be reassuring to the old man.

Um and so we drove up together in what was a reasonably

quiet ride.

And when we crested the top of Hurd Road and we saw what looked

like somewhat primitive preparations maybe appropriate

for an event that was going to take place over Christmas.

My father said something like, "Oh my God."

I said, "Oh my God,"

My brother said, "I didn’t have a hand in this Dad!"

And I got out of the car and um, I could look before me into what

was to be our performance area where we were to,

in theory, admit people having collected their tickets or their

money and there sitting there were fifty thousand people.

This was Wednesday.

It was at that moment that a light went on in my mind and I

said we’re not going to be collecting the tickets.

One, One, Two, Three.

One... One...

By Friday we realized that this show had grown from a projected

hundred thousand to maybe five times that number with another

million we were told, on their way there.

I had to come here because I know a lot of people are going

to be here and I’m trying to run into ’em.

I’m not really too interested in the people that are playing the

music, you know, and I’m not really too interested in

the people.

I’m just-- I’m just here.

You don’t even have to bother bringing your tickets or

anything ’cos they aren’t going to collect them,

there’s no way they can.

They’ve got a fence that’s like half up and there are people

just sitting in that field.

It’s really beautiful.

You know that half of these people don’t have tickets and

there are people five miles away sitting on the highway with

tickets who’ve driven two or three thousand miles.

Whatever has to be done to make it right,

this is wrong.

So it’s not for me to say how to do it,

but there are ways to do it.

I would never want to find out how to do it,

’cos I would never do one of these.

We are still waiting for the arrival of Group One.