Woodstock

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Douglas Cooke

In the 1960s, the small town of Woodstock, New York, 40 miles north of New York City, nourished a small but growing community of folk musicians including Bob Dylan, the Band, Tim Hardin, and John Sebastian. In 1969, Michael Lang, a young entrepreneur who had promoted the Miami Pop Festival the previous year, decided to open a recording studio for the burgeoning music community of Woodstock, which would double as a woodland retreat for recording artists from New York City. Lang pitched his idea to Artie Kornfeld, a young executive at Capitol Records, and Joel Rosenman and John Roberts, two young entrepreneurs interested in unconventional business propositions. Together they formed a corporation, Woodstock Ventures, to create the studio/retreat. They also decided to organize a Woodstock Music and Arts Fair to promote the opening of the studio.

As their festival plans grew in ambition, they realized that the small town of Woodstock could not accommodate such a festival, and a site in Wallkill, in the neighboring county, was chosen for the three-day weekend event. Throughout the summer of 1969 the project snowballed as more and more artists were signed to perform. It was decided that day one would feature folk-rock artists, day two would spotlight the burgeoning San Francisco scene, and day three would be saved for the hottest acts. By the time Jimi Hendrix was signed for $50,000, most of the major American bands were involved in Woodstock, as well as major British groups like The Who and Ten Years After. The music soon eclipsed all other aspects of the festival, such as the arts fair (which is almost forgotten) and the recording studio (which never materialized).

Woodstock Ventures spared no expense to cultivate a hip, counterculture image for their three days of peace and music. They advertised the event through the underground press--which was rapidly mushrooming into a national network of anti-establishment groups--to put the word out on the street that this was the happening event of the summer. The Wallkill site was chosen for its rustic scenery and laid-back atmosphere, but the name Woodstock was retained to convey the bucolic theme of the event. A pastoral craze of "getting back to nature" had been growing in 1968 and 1969, reflected in the country-rock movement spearheaded by Bob Dylan, the Band, and others. The lure of nature was celebrated in films like Easy Rider (1968), which depicted hippies cruising across the country, living off the land (more or less), and visiting communes. Woodstock Ventures hired the Hog Farm, a New Mexico hippie commune, to prepare the festival campgrounds and maintain a free kitchen for those who could not afford to buy food. The Hog Farm also set up a bad trip shelter called the Big Pink for the inevitable freakouts that were expected. A group of Indian artists were flown in from Arizona to sell handicrafts. An impromptu organization called Food for Love was hired to run concession booths. Wes Pomeroy was enlisted as Security Chief. Pomeroy was renowned for his enlightened attitude towards youth and crowd control. He had witnessed the riots of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, and had developed theories about peaceful crowd control. For Woodstock he organized a non-aggressive, non-uniformed, unarmed security team, the "Peace Service Corps," to unobtrusively dissuade undesirable behavior such as riots, vandalism, and theft, while overlooking non-violent activities such as drugs, sex, and nudity. New York City police officers were recruited, and had to undergo intensive screening to demonstrate their ability to understand and peacefully cope with young, hedonistic, anti-authoritarian crowds. Unfortunately, almost all these groups eventually betrayed Woodstock Ventures. The town of Wallkill voted to drive out the festival a month before the scheduled weekend, and a new site was found in Bethel, New York (although some townsfolk offered resistance there, too). The Hog Farm turned out to be opportunistic and irresponsible, stealing watches and wallets from the Woodstock staff and clashing with anyone whom they perceived as establishmentarian, including the medical staff. The radical activist and showman Abbie Hoffman, a self-styled "cultural revolutionary" who was charged with inciting riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention, threatened to sabotage the festival with his influence over the underground press if Woodstock Ventures did not pay him $50,000. He claimed that the promoters were growing rich off the people, and he felt that Woodstock should return the money to "the people" by financing his own political mission, including his mounting legal debts from the Chicago Seven Trial. Hoffman also threatened to put acid in the water. The Woodstock promoters knew that Hoffman had the audacity and the influence to arouse anti-establishment animosity toward the festival, and they paid him $10,000 to appease him. But such was the reactionary nature of the times that many radical papers nevertheless portrayed Woodstock as a capitalist venture promoted by "straights" trying to profit from "the people."