It was a frenetic time in American history. Political and cultural upheaval, war and a mammoth generation gap. All of it defined the late 1960s.
But perhaps nowhere was the clash between the establishment and the counter-culture so clearly delineated than in the ideas of a few 20-somethings who planned a rock concert in Bethel, N.Y.
The passage of time, 30-plus years, has painted that concert, Woodstock, with a romantic sensibility, an oasis of peace, love and tie-dyed T-shirts in a society that some feared was unraveling at the seams. Woodstock has established a lasting impact that even its original producers — John Roberts, Joel Rosenman and Michael Lang — could never have imagined. Last year, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating the weekend’s 30th anniversary.
“Nineteen sixty-eight was really a scary year in this country,” says Roberts of the time leading up to the concert. “There was all that under-30, over-30 stuff. There were two major assassinations (Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.). There were the Chicago riots. A lot of people who’d never really voiced fears about this sort of thing before were wondering if the whole goddamn society was coming apart.”
Roberts remembers one particular moment in which the concert could have turned ugly.
“We made a number of decisions in producing over the course of that weekend that I think contributed to the good feeling that was there. One stands out. Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, wanted to send in the National Guard, and I spoke to him on the phone.”
Rockefeller said he was sending in the National Guard to get the half-million people under control, but Roberts argued against it.
“I said, ‘Please don’t do that. Everything’s under control here. All we need is for these kids to see other kids their age with rifles pointed at them and things might get out of control.’ He said, ‘Well, anything that happens is on your head.’”
It was a defining moment for Roberts, and for Woodstock, because had Rockefeller sent in the Guard, who knows what Woodstock’s legacy would have been. Instead, Roberts and his staff took crowd control matters into their own hands.
“We were of the same age and we were pretty much in tune with our audience,” Roberts says. “I think a situation could have spun out of control and been violent and unpleasant. But as a result of not only the temper of the crowd and the music and the feeling within the crowd, but to some extent also the decisions we made, it worked out well.”
Although there are some serious differences between the two events, it was less than a year later that four students were killed on the campus of Kent State University when Gov. James Rhodes did send in the National Guard for crowd control.
“Woodstock, at the end of the day, was a very reassuring experience for most people, even though they may not have understood the style, the dress, the fashions, the music and the other things that adults are perpetually scratching their heads about when it comes to their kids,” Roberts says. “One thing that those kids did show that was reassuring is that they were fair-minded, and they shared and believed in community. In essence, they espoused a lot of the values their elders espoused.
“They may have gone about it a little differently, but they did value the same things.”
Those kids may have had more in common with the establishment than they realized. According to Roberts, now a venture capitalist who remains partners with Rosenman, the goal of the concert was to raise enough money to build a recording studio in Woodstock, N.Y.
SBN recently sat down with Roberts to get the real story behind last century’s greatest rock festival.
What was the impetus for creating a music festival in the middle of nowhere?
The story behind the original Woodstock was actually a little odd. My partner, Joel Rosenman, and I were building a recording studio in New York City. We met a lawyer, as one does sometimes when pursuing an activity like that, and he said, “You know, I’ve got a couple of clients who are interested in building a recording studio in Woodstock, N.Y. They’re about your age.”
Joel and I were both sort of preppie Ivy League guys. (The lawyer) said, “They’re sort of different than you guys. They’re more sort of in that avant-garde, hippie mold. But they’re very bright, very nice fellows, and I think you’ll like meeting them. Would you mind meeting with them and talking about their idea for a recording studio in Woodstock, N.Y.?”
These two guys walked in. One was Michael Lang (one of the original producers). They had a proposal that was pretty much written on a napkin, but the germ of their idea was that a lot of artists lived in Woodstock, N.Y., and hated coming down to the city to do their recording — most notably Bob Dylan, but plenty of others. And that a recording studio up there would probably be a great success.
We were involved in building one in New York, and were disinclined to build another one, but attached to that proposal was the following fairly riveting statement. It went something like, “When we’re ready to open, we’ll probably be able to prevail on some of these local artists to come and do an opening concert for us, to give us some publicity. We think that would be a great kick-off for the studio.”
I had just seen Monterey Pop, which was a movie about this festival out in Monterey that had taken place in 1967, literally like a day or something before these guys had come up. I said, “God, that looks so great.” And so when I read this I said, “So you mean like sort of a Monterey Pop.” And they said, “Well, nothing like that big. But maybe just have locals there.”
We decided we would have a concert and not build a recording studio. They said, “All right, sounds cool to us.”
The idea was structured to make enough money out of concert to have enough to build a recording studio after all. It was designed as a for-profit venture. Woodstock ’69 sold over 100,000 tickets. There were about 400,000 people there, so we didn’t manage to catch everybody in our net.
We had a movie that grossed $80 million and we sold five or six million double albums. There wasn’t any real concert merchandising business in those days, but if there had been, you can be sure we would have set some records there, too.
I’ve always kind of bristled when people said the original Woodstock was about love and altruism and the subsequent one was all about money and sponsorship. I always think, “You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. I was there. I paid for the first one and I know what we were doing and I know why we were doing it.”
This was a new idea. You must have made mistakes along the way.
In the beginning, all we thought about was the concert. We were pretty nave. None of us had any experience in this. We ended up paying what was considered at the time outrageous prices for our talent.
We paid like $9,000 for Janis Joplin. (Jimi) Hendrix was our top act. We got him for $18,000. These were considered unconscionable prices, but the only way we could establish our credibility was to overpay, I suppose.
As we went along, we said we should think about a concert album. We should think about a movie. We were learning as we went. Nobody had really ever done anything like this before. There had been open-air type concerts, but usually they’d been on racetracks or places like that. Nobody had rented a field in the middle of nowhere and said, “We’ll just have camping for three days. It’ll be like a great gathering of the tribes.”
The idea took off pretty quickly. We sold a lot of tickets. We did it all in-house. We had some outlets, what were called head shops in those days. They were not reputable retail establishments.
We got a volume of mail on a daily basis that was running into the hundreds of tickets requested, so we knew we had a pretty hot thing going. What put us over the top, actually, was the kind of town war that we engaged in with the people in Orange County. The zoning board granted us a permit for our festival. When our people started to move up there to actually build the site, the stage and the fences, they got a look at them and didn’t like what they saw: the long hair.
It was a real under-30, over-30 confrontation, and they revoked our permit for no reason on July 4th. That’s when Max Yasgur got into the picture.
What do you think brought those people together?
Woodstock became kind of an avatar of the under-30 (crowd). People said, “Whatever’s going on there, I want to be part of it. Show the flag. I didn’t make it to Chicago for the convention in ’68 so I’m going to be at Woodstock in the summer of ’69.”
Even when the press went national, I still had no idea. As of the Wednesday before the concert, we’d sold 100,000 tickets. We were beginning to think we might get as many as 150,000 people, which we were prepared for. I remember going to sleep Thursday night. I had a room right along 17B, which was our major access road. It was a starry night and the moon was out. There was no traffic on the road.
I woke up at 6 o’clock Friday morning and the road was literally a parking lot. People weren’t sitting in their cars anymore. They had, some time in the middle of the night, abandoned their cars. They (the cars) were turned every which way. Overnight, literally hundreds of thousands of people had gotten there.
What was your thought at that moment?
Holy shit. What anyone’s thought would be.
I couldn’t believe it. I knew that something remarkable was happening here, and I wasn’t clear why. It took me a long time to figure out for my own satisfaction what happened there, and what significance, if any, it had. The interesting part was that 400,000 people got there. According to the state police, there was another million on the road that couldn’t get there.
It (the concert) touched a chord, and I think that chord had a lot to do with the temper of the ’60s. In a way, we proved, maybe not to our own happy satisfaction, that you couldn’t really touch that chord again in 1994 and in 1999. We weren’t really trying to, though. I think that was a sort of misunderstood view.
We weren’t trying to recreate Woodstock ’69. We recognized that the culture and times had moved on. What we were trying to do was franchise this sort of once-in-a-generation large rock festival. And there hadn’t been one in this country in a hell of a long time that was like ours. We tried to do it again.
Of course, people said we were trashing our own legacy and it’s commercial. What was in our hearts at the time was simply to rent another field and throw another festival and see what happens. And try to organize it a little better.
What is the legacy of Woodstock?
There is a community of people, and it’s not that small a community, that really believes that something important was learned at Woodstock about sharing
and community and about how to relate to each other. Built around music, I suppose.
I don’t take a great deal of pride of having produced it. The real sense of pride that I take is that we ensured its legacy. In a way, we sort of kept faith with the crowd that was there the first time by making sure that the aftermath of the original Woodstock was a positive one.
We did the right thing. I’m proud of that.
How to reach: John Roberts, (212) 399-4041, or www.woodstock.com
Daniel G. Jacobs ([email protected]) is senior editor of SBN.