WOODSTOCK: A NEW NATION part 2

Book excerpt from "Aquarius Rising" by Robert Santelli

The Woodstock festival was, first and foremost, a business venture. John Roberts and Joel Rosenman had absolutely no ties with the counterculture. Mike Lang and Artie Kornfeld wore their hair long, spiced their conversation with "groovy, man" and "far out," smoked dope, and were involved in rock music, but their motive for staging the Woodstock festival was quite similar to that of Roberts and Rosenman. None of the four promoters ever even remotely envisioned the power and significance behind their event until the festival was in full swing.
Kornfeld, Lang, Roberts, and Rosenman hoped to attract fifty thousand young people to their festival, which they scheduled to take place in August of 1969. In the early part of that year, it was decided to use a substantial amount of money to begin advertising the event. Ads were placed in underground newspapers across the country, in rock music periodicals, and on progressive rock radio stations. Most of the advertising was done in the Northeast, with special emphasis on New York City. But ads were also placed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and other large cities, and judging from the different license plates seen at the festival, the ads worked.

The bank that sheltered the trust fund of John Roberts permitted him a huge credit line. All he had to do was guarantee the bank in writing that the withdrawal of money would be balanced by a lien against his inheritance. Because of this, Woodstock Ventures had virtually unlimited capital. With fi­nances established, the promoters went searching for a festival site.

The village of Woodstock was out as a potential site. Nowhere within its limits could a suitable area capable of accommodat­ing fifty thousand people be found. Instead, the promoters checked nearby Middletown, where the township of Wallkill, fifteen miles from Woodstock, was located. The most appro­priate site they found there was the Mills Industrial Park. The property was owned by Howard Mills, who told the promoters they could lease the land for $10,000 provided they got approval to stage the festival from the Wallkill Zoning Board. It was agreed that Mills's land would need some work to make it conducive to a rock festival, but otherwise the fallow fields and gently sloping hills would make for a fine location. There was even a grove of apple trees that the owner would put at the festival's disposal.

Lawyers representing Woodstock Ventures explained to the Wallkill Zoning Board that the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was to be mostly an art festival that would have musical enter­tainment. Most of the performers would be folksingers or jazz artists, they promised. The Wallkill officials liked the idea of hosting this sort of cultural activity and granted Woodstock Ventures permission to begin preparations on the site. Within a month the promoters hired crews to pave roads, erect fences, and design the general festival site.

Things were working smoothly until the middle of July, when a rebellious group of Wallkill residents known as the Wallkill Concerned Citizens Committee demanded that the Zoning Board abrogate the permission granted to Woodstock Ventures to hold a festival at the industrial park. They cited evidence that the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was a cleverly disguised title for a large hippie rock festival. The lawyers who had originally represented Woodstock Ventures at the zoning board meeting had not been instructed by the promoters to resort to mendacity to obtain a permit. The promoters did intend to pre­sent an art fair and some folk music was to be played. Woodstock Ventures argued its case before the zoning board, but the irate citizens had presented a petition of some two hundred signa­tures that demanded an immediate repeal of the permit. Not only did the residents feel they had been deceived by Woodstock Ventures, but they also feared a general disruption in the town if more than fifty thousand hippies invaded their streets. The town, they argued, could not cope with the traffic that would undoubtedly snarl local streets and highways.

The Wallkill Zoning Board bowed to the pressures of its citizenry and obtained a court injunction that banned the festival. To make doubly sure that the festival would not occur, the local governing body passed a resolution regulating the assembly of persons in public places.
Four weeks before the festival was to take place, and after the sale of fifty thousand tickets at a price of $18 for the entire weekend or $7 per day, the event was without a site. The thought of canceling the festival was briefly discussed, but too much money had already been spent. When word leaked out that the festival's organizers were looking for a new site, offers and ideas from people all over the country inundated their headquarters in New York City. According to Roberts and Rosenman, they were offered "riverfronts, mountainsides, wil­derness areas, ski jumps, and even airstrips. One guy went so far as to suggest draining a fifty acre lake on his property and selling it to us. He said it would make a real nice amphitheater."

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