No use trying to ignore the 40th anniversary of Woodstock this August: the nostalgia machine is already in high gear. Newly arrived or en route are books, CDs, DVDs, even an Ang Lee film—Taking Woodstock, to be released August 14—based on the memoirs of an amusing bit player in the Woodstock saga. And more than a year has passed since The Woodstock Museum opened its doors on the hallowed concert site.
For once, though, the media deluge seems justified. Woodstock really was a seminal event for an entire generation—even for those who were nowhere near the festival itself (among them Joni Mitchell, who still managed to write a haunting song about it). In The Road to Woodstock, written with Holly George-Warren, festival mastermind Michael Lang describes the phenomenon: "Over that August weekend, during a very tumultuous time in our country, we showed the best of ourselves, and in the process created the kind of society we all aspired to, even if only for a brief moment."
Yet The Road to Woodstock is not so much about the big picture. It's the story behind the story, the nitty-gritty of how Lang and his three partners, all young and relatively inexperienced, pulled off a historic event—the "Three Days of Peace and Music" (the festival's official slogan) that attracted a crowd estimated at half a million strong. It's a story peopled by venture capitalists, talent managers, lawyers, county supervisors, town-board members, dairy farmers, security cops, construction crews, concert promoters, hippies, Yippies, and, yes, extraordinary musicians. It's about porta-potties and pesticides, good drugs and bad drugs, traffic jams and mud—lots and lots of the latter.
Lang's personal journey to Woodstock began as a Brooklyn teen drawn to the folk scene in Greenwich Village. After intermittently attending NYU, he moved to Miami and opened a head shop in Coconut Grove that attracted underground luminaries such as Timothy Leary and Jerry Garcia. Inspired by the Monterey Pop Festival, Lang and a friend staged the Miami Pop Festival (featuring Jimi Hendrix, among others), a kind of dry run for what was to come. Moving back to New York, Lang gravitated upstate to Woodstock, long known as a bohemian enclave and mecca for musicians. There he and Artie Kornfeld, a Capitol Records executive who would become one of his partners, hatched the idea of a festival, inspired in part by the Soundouts—open-air summer concerts in the area featuring three or four artists on a makeshift stage.
Michael Lang is an amiable companion on these pages, if not a particularly compelling one. But his story gains momentum as the problems that beset the Woodstock festival threaten to rage out of control. In the end, his account is an enjoyable read and a useful addition to the history of the counterculture.
In fact, Lang's mild manner would prove an invaluable asset in the harrowing run-up to the big concert. As one member of his Woodstock team says in the book, "Michael's demeanor remained unflappable through just about everything. You could rant and rave at Michael…and he absorbed it like a sponge and stayed cool." Perhaps the greatest crisis he faced came just weeks before the festival was slated to begin, when the good people of Wallkill, New York—fearing a hippie bacchanal—belatedly declined to host the event on their land. That necessitated a desperate last-minute search for a new venue, which ended when a sympathetic dairy farmer named Max Yasgur (immortalized in Mitchell's lyrics) was persuaded to hold the festival on his property in Bethel.