OODSTOCK WAS A TRIUMPH
of persistence, and it began
with Brooklyn-born Michael
Lang, who in 1969 was a
cherubic 24-year-old
ex-head-shop owner and
neophyte promoter with a broad grin, luxuriant curls,
and bottomless reserves of chutzpah. At the time, large
all-star concerts were just becoming a thing. In 1967,
the Monterey International Pop Festival in California
had been wildly successful, featuring the U.S. debuts
of the Who, Jimi Hendrix, and Ravi Shankar. The next
year, Lang himself had promoted the Miami Pop
Festival, with Hendrix as the headliner. “That
experience was enlightening,” he recalled. “It was clear
that the relationship that my generation had with
music was different from the previous ones. So, it was
decided to do something bigger.”
Lang had moved up from Miami to the quaint
Catskill Mountains town of Woodstock, New York,
which was an emerging bohemian mecca, attract-
ing edgy and up-and-coming young musicians and
artists. Bob Dylan briefly rented a room at a local
espresso shop; his manager, Albert Grossman, had
a sprawling estate and recording studio in nearby
Bearsville. A stream of folkies and rockers passed
through regularly—Joan Baez; Richie Havens; The
Band; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Hendrix; Janis Joplin.
“The big turning point was when the rifle shop
turned into a psychedelic shop,” resident George
Quinn would remember. “By ’68, it had just mush-
roomed and you started seeing some really famous
people walking along town.” Inevitably, music hap-
pened—notably the forerunner to the Woodstock fes-
tival, a series of open-air jams called “Sound-outs,”
held in the neighboring town of Saugerties on a farm
owned by Woodstock deli owner Pan Copeland. The
likes of James Taylor, Tim Hardin, Don McLean, and
the Mothers of Invention appeared at these gather-
ings. Fans would camp out and either make their own
food or patronize a concession stand (and toilet facili-
ties) built from converted chicken coops.
Once back in his native New York, Lang bonded
with another Brooklyn guy, songwriter and Capitol
Records producer Artie Kornfeld, who was two years
older than Lang. (“Michael was my second hip-
pie,” Kornfeld remembered. “I had signed Debbie
Harry... and her band the Wind in the Willows,
so they were the first hippies I’d met.”) The two
Brooklynites hatched a plan to hold a festival that
would raise funds for them to open a recording
studio in Woodstock (which never happened). But
first they needed a source of capital—which they
12 LIFE WOODSTOCK
COOL,CALM, AND BECURLED,
Michael Lang seemed to be
everywhere at once behind the
scenes during every day of the
festival, which he’d created at
age 24. A year later, the film
Woodstock would reveal the
unflappable promoter as a
cultural folk hero.