Woodstock Message To Love
The rock festival that crowned a decade-long musical revolution took just six months to organise. And like many 60s happenings, Woodstock was launched on a flood tide of peace and love – with a fishy glint of money-spinning ambition not far beneath the surface.
The festival was originally intended as a profit-making venture – and only became a free festival when it became apparent the gig was attracting hundreds of thousands more people than the organisers had readied themselves for. The final straw was when the fence was torn down by desperate swarms of ticketless fans.
But, for the four men who put the festival together, that was all in the future. They were John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang – and the oldest was just 26. Together, they paid an estimated $50,000 to rent around 600 acres of Max Yasgur’s farm in an out-of-the-way corner of the Catskill Mountains in New York State. Heir to a drugstore and toothpaste manufacturing fortune, John Roberts paid for the event via a multimillion-dollar trust fund and a lieutenant’s commission in the army. It was typical of the era’s naive optimism that John had only ever seen one rock concert (The Beach Boys) before he set his sights on staging the musical event of the decade.
Meanwhile, the landowner who rented the site to them, Max Yasgur, had studied real estate law at NYU before moving back to the family farm in the 40s. At the time of Woodstock, he was the biggest milk producer in Sullivan County. Joining forces with the four young men to stage a festival was thus both an unlikely partnership and a magazine, in 1969, that he’d made a ‘deal’ with promoter Lang. “If anything went wrong, I was going to give him a crew cut. If everything was okay, I was going to let my hair grow long. I guess he won the bet, but I’m so bald I’ll never be able to pay it off,” he joked. The wager was accepted, however, and Woodstock concert tickets went on sale at $6 a day (and were due to sell for $8 on the gate), while three-day advance tickets were priced at $18. The price at the gate was set at $24.
