When the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was held in upstate New York in August 1969, it was billed as “Three days of peace, love and music”, though nobody could have predicted that it would attract half a million people and become an enduring monument to the 1960s counterculture.
Starring the Who, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin and many more, Woodstock gave birth to the “Woodstock Nation”, an escapist alternative to the assassinations, racial conflict and Vietnam war casting shadows over the US. One of the key organisers of the festival was Michael Lang, who has died aged 77 of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“Woodstock came at a really dark moment in America,” said Lang in a 2009 Rolling Stone interview. “An unpopular war, a government that was unresponsive, lots of human rights issues – things were starting to edge toward violence for people to make their points. And along came Woodstock, which was this moment of hope.”
Not everyone agreed – the music writer David Dalton decried Woodstock as “an exercise in consummate narcissism” and “a hippy Disneyland” – but the festival’s significance as a benchmark of its era and a template for festivals to come lives on.
Lang had been promoting concerts in Florida and in 1968 had produced the Miami pop festival, featuring Hendrix and Frank Zappa, before he relocated to Woodstock in early 1969. Woodstock had its own community of musicians that included Van Morrison and Richie Havens, and Lang frequently attended the low-key performances by the local artists known as “Saturday soundouts”.
Lang became manager of a band called Train, and approached the Capitol Records executive Artie Kornfeld to try to get them a deal. Kornfeld did not bite, but the pair began throwing ideas around, including a proposal to build a recording studio in the town of Woodstock.
They approached the entrepreneurs John Roberts and Joel Rosenman – who had advertised themselves in the Wall Street Journal as “Young Men with Unlimited Capital Looking for Interesting and Legitimate Business Ideas” – to participate in the project, but Roberts and Rosenman were more interested in Lang and Kornfeld’s other idea of a Woodstock music festival, whose profits would fund the studio.
The foursome created Woodstock Ventures Inc, which would produce the event. However, the Woodstock authorities would not allow it in their town, and the burghers of nearby Wallkill were also loath to be swamped by the hippytide. A deal was then struck to rent Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm near Bethel for $75,000.
Nobody was prepared for the unprecedented invasion of music fans and the local police’s failure to make any arrangements for traffic management created a logjam of abandoned vehicles blocking local highways for miles. Lang, who commissioned the Woodstock logo of a peace dove sitting on the neck of a guitar, said: “Our vision was to create a very positive, a very sort of comforting environment for the audience, not to present confrontation in any way.”
He had devised a “Please Force” of unarmed officers to control security, but as the crowds expanded uncontrollably the army and the national guard had to fly in emergency water, food and medical supplies by helicopter. Lang and his partners had anticipated an attendance of about 200,000, a manageable number that would have guaranteed them a profit, but as attendees trampled over fences and swarmed on to the site, they abandoned the attempt to sell tickets.
The loss of ticket revenue left Lang and his fellow organisers millions of dollars out of pocket, but they were subsequently rescued when Michael Wadleigh’s film of the festival (in which Lang appeared prominently) became a lucrative smash hit the following year, grossing $50m in the US. The live albums from the festival also sold strongly. The event was memorialised in the song Woodstock by Joni Mitchell (who did not perform there), and in May 1970 it reached number 11 on the US chart in a storming rendition by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (who did).
Lang was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. His father ran a construction and heating installation company, for which his mother was the bookkeeper. Michael attended New York University to study business and psychology, but dropped out in 1967 and moved to Coconut Grove in Miami, where he opened a “headshop” selling drug paraphernalia.
After Woodstock, he became the manager of Joe Cocker, one of the festival’s featured artists, and their partnership lasted more than 20 years. He was also recruited at short notice to assist with relocating the Rolling Stones’ December 1969 free concert in California from Sears Point Raceway to the Altamont Speedway.
The event is now regarded as the tragic anti-Woodstock because of the killing of the audience member Meredith Hunter during the Stones’ performance. Lang considered it “a missed opportunity and the result of a lack of planning … what could have been a great day of music degenerated into a horror show”.
During the 70s Lang ran his own Just Sunshine Records label, releasing discs by artists including Karen Dalton, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Betty Davis (the former wife of Miles Davis), and in the 80s managed Rickie Lee Jones.
However, he remained dedicated to sustaining the legacy of Woodstock, devoting much energy to staging anniversary editions and at one point proposing an annual Woodstock festival at different sites around the world. For its 25th anniversary, Lang co-produced Woodstock ’94 in Saugerties, New York, some 70 miles from the 1969 site. Artists included veterans of the original lineup, such as Crosby, Stills and Nash and Country Joe McDonald, alongside newer names including Nine Inch Nails and Green Day.
As a venue for Woodstock ’99, Lang found a former air force base in Rome, New York, to which 400,000 fans flocked in July that year. However, the event was scarred by violence, looting, sexual assaults and over-priced food, while extreme temperatures and insufficient free water caused widespread distress. Disgusted punters referred to the event as “Greedstock”.
In 2009 his memoir The Road to Woodstock (co-written with Holly George-Warren) was published, and also that year Lang was portrayed by Jonathan Groff in Ang Lee’s film Taking Woodstock. In 2019 he appeared in the two documentaries Woodstock: 3 Days That Changed Everything and Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation.
Lang battled hard to mount a 50th anniversary Woodstock festival in 2019, with the Watkins Glen race track in upstate New York the first proposed venue and funding to be supplied by the multinational media company Dentsu Aegis Network (now Dentsu International).
However, Woodstock 50 was plagued by delays and cancellations (and was relocated to Maryland), with grandiose plans to present such icons as Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney and a reunited Led Zeppelin all turning to dust. The project collapsed in lawsuits and acrimony, but Lang was unbowed. “What we did in 1969 was in 1969 and that’s what has endured and will continue to endure. We’re not going away,” he told Rolling Stone.
His first marriage, to Ann, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Tamara, their daughters, LariAnn, Shala and Molly, and sons, Laszlo and Harry.
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