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The 300-acre Mills Industrial Park offered perfect access. It was
less than a mile from Route 17, which hooked into the New York
State Thruway, and it was right off Route 211, a major local
thoroughfare. It has the essentials, electricity and water lines.

The land was zoned for industry; among the permitted uses were
cultural exhibitions and concerts. The promoters approached the
town planning board and were given a verbal go-ahead because of
the zoning. Nonetheless, Lang was unhappy with the site. It was
missing the back-to-the-land ambience Woodstock Ventures was
selling. "I hated Wallkill," Lang said. Ventures set to work on the
Mills property, all the while searching for an alternative. 

Rosenman told Wallkill officials in late March or early April that
the concert would feature Jazz bands and folk singers.  He also
said that 50,000 people would attend if they were lucky. Town
Supervisor Jack Schlosser throught something was fishy. "More
than anything else, I really feel they were deliberately misleading
the town," Schlosser said. "The point is, they were less than
truthful about the numbers. I became more and more aware, as
discussions with them progressed, they did not really know what
they were doing. I was in the Army when divisions were 40,000 or
50,000 men," he said. "Christ almighty, the logistics involved in
moving men around... I said at one point, 'I don't care if was a
convention of 50,000 ministers," I would have felt the same way."

In the cultural-political atmosphere of 1969, promoters Kornfeld
and Lang knew it was important to pitch Woodstock in a way that
would appeal to their peer's sense of independence. Lang wanted
to call the festival an "Aquarian Exposition," capitalizing on the
zodiacal reference from the musical "Hair". He had an ornate
poster designed, featuring the water-bearer.

By early April, the promoters were carefully cultivating the
Woodstock image in the underground press, in publications like
the Village Voice and Rolling Stone magazine. Ads began to run
in The New York Times and The Times Herald-Record in May. For
Kornfeld, Woodstock wasn't a matter of building stages, signing
acts or even selling tickets. For him, the festival was always a state
of mind, a happening that would exemplify the generation. The
event's publicity shrewdly appropriated the counterculture's
symbols and catch phrases. "The cool PR image was intentional,
"he said.

The group settled on the concrete slogan of "Three Days of Peace
and Music" and downplayed the highly conceptual theme of
Aquarius. The promoters figured "peace" would link the anti-war
sentiment to the rock concert. They also wanted to avoid any
violence and figured that a slogan with "peace" in it would help
keep order.

The Woodstock dove is really a catbird; originally, it perched on a
flute. "I was staying on Shelter Island off Long Island, and I was
drawing catbirds all the time," said artist Arnold Skolnick. "As
soon as Ira Arnold (a copywriter on the project) called with the
copy-approved 'Three Days of Peace and Music,' I just took the
razor blade and cut that catbird out of the sketchpad I was using.
"First, it sat on a flute. I was listening to jazz at the time, and I
guess that's why. But anyway, it sat on a flute for a day, and I
finally ended up putting it on a guitar."

Melanie Safka had a song on the radio called "Beautiful People.
"An extremely hip DJ named Roscoe on WNEW-FM played it.
One day, Melanie ran into a curly-haired music-business guy
named Michael Lang, who was talking about a festival he was
producing. When Melanie asked if she could play there, Lang's
answer was a very laid-back, "Sure." "I thought it would be very
low key," recalled Melanie.

Woodstock Ventures was trying to book the biggest rock'n'roll
bands in America, but the rockers were reluctant to sign with an
untested outfit that might be unable to deliver. "To get the
contracts, we had to have the credibility, and to get the credibility,
we had to have the contracts, "Rosenman said. Ventures solved
the problem by promising paychecks unheard of in 1969. The big
breakthrough came with the signing of the top psychedelic band of
the day, The Jefferson Airplane, for the incredible sum of $12,000.
The Airplane usually took gigs for $5,000 to $6,000. Creedence
Clearwater Revival signed for $11,500. The Who then came in for
$12,500. The rest of the acts started to fall in line. In all, Ventures
spent $180,000 on talent. "I made a decision that we needed three
major acts, and I told them I didn't care what it cost," Lang said.
"If they had been asking $5,000, I'd say, 'Pay 'em $10,000.' So we
paid the deposits, signed the contracts, and that was it: instant 
credibility."

In the spring of 1969, John Sebastian's career was on hold. From
1965 to 1967, Sebastian's band, the Lovin' Spoonful, had cranked
out hit after hit - "Do You Believe in Magic," "You Didn't Have
To Be So Nice," "Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind,"
"(What a Day For a) Daydream" and "Summer In The City." But
in 1967, after the Lovin' Spoonful appeared on "The Ed Sullivan
Show", things began to go wrong. Two band members were busted
for pot possession and left the group. Their replacements never
quite fit in. In 1968, the group broke up, and Sebastian tried going
solo. But his performing career wasn't taking off. So, in the spring
of 1969, Sebastian headed west to do a little soul searching. He
ended up at a California commune where the hippies made money
by making brightly colored shirts and jackets by a process they
called tie-dye.

The residents of Wallkill had heard of hippies, drugs and rock
concerts, and after the Woodstock advertising hit The New York
Times, The Times Herald-Record and the radio stations, local
residents knew that a three-day rock show, maybe the biggest ever,
was coming. Besides, Woodstock Venture's employees sure looked
like hippies. In the minds of many people, long hair and shabby
clothes were associated with left-wing politics and drug use. The
new ideas about re-ordering society were threatening to many
people. In Wallkill, those feelings were unleashed upon Mills and
his family. Residents would stop Mills at church to complain.
Ventures tried to head off some of the complaints by hiring Wes
Pomeroy, a former top assistant at the Justice Department, to
head the security detail. A minister, the Rev. Donald Ganoung,
was put on the payroll to head up local relations.

Allan Markoff watched the two freaks walk into his store in late
April or early May. They were Lang and his buddy, Stan
Goldstein. Goldstein, 35, had been one of the organizers of the
1968 Miami Pop Festival. For Woodstock, he was coordinator of
campgrounds. "They wanted me to design a sound system for
50,000 or so people," said Markoff, who owned the only stereo
store in Middletown, the Audio Center on North Street. "They
said there could even be 100,000, might even go to 150,000."

He thought Lang and Goldstein were nuts. "There had never been
a concert with 50,000; that was unbelievable," Markoff said.
 "Now, 100,000, that was impossible. It's tantamount to doing a
sound system for 30 million people today." Markoff, then 24, was
the only local resident listed in the Audio Engineering Society
Magazine. Lang and Goldstein had picked his name out of the
magazine; suddenly, Markoff was responsible for gathering sound
gear for the greatest show on earth. He remembers one 
characteristic of the sound system. At the amplifier's lowest
setting, the Woodstock speakers would cause pain for anyone
standing within 10 feet.

Markoff had doubts about the sanity of the venture until he saw
the promoters' office in a barn on the Mills' land. "That's when I
saw all these people on these phones, with a switchboard,"
Markoff said. "When I saw that, I said, 'Hey, this could really
happen.'"

Rosenman and Roberts couldn't entice any of the big movie
studios into filming their weekend upstate. So they got Michael
Wadleigh. Before Woodstock, rock documentation meant
obscurity and few profits. A year before Woodstock, Monterey
Pop had fizzled at the box office, making movie execs skittish over
the idea of funding another rock film. During the summer of
Woodstock, Wadleigh, 27, was gaining a reputation as a solid
cameraman and director of independent films. Two years earlier,
he had dropped out of Columbia University of Physicians and
Surgeons, where he was studying to be a neurologist. Since then,
he'd spent his time filming on the urban streets, the main
battlefield for the cultural skirmishes of the 1960s. He'd filmed
Martin Luther King Jr. He'd filmed Bobby Kennedy and George
McGovern talking to middle Americans on the campaign trail in
'68. 

Wadleigh was experimenting with using rock'n'roll in his films as
an adjunct to the day's social and political themes. He was also
working with multiple images to make documentaries more
entertaining than those featuring a bunch of talking heads. And
then the Woodstock boys came to his door. Their idea was
irresistable. The money was not. Wadleigh went for it anyway.

Goldstein went alone to his first town board meeting in Wallkill.
"This was before we knew we had problems," he said. "It was
probably in June. We had a full house. No more than 150 people.
There were some accusations. Someone made some references to
the Chicago convention. That it was young people, and this is the
way the youth reacted, and that's what we could expect in our
community. (Wallkill Supervisor Jack) Schlosser said that Mayor
Daley knew how to handle that. Then I lost my temper. I said
there was no need for the violence and that (the police) reaction
caused the violence. I said that Daley ran one of the most corrupt
political machines in history."

Schlosser, who attended the Chicago convention, didn't recall such
a specific exchange about Daley. He did remember the convention,
however "I saw these people throw golf clubs with nails in them,"
he said of the Chicago protesters. "I saw them throw excretion.
The police, while I was there at least, showed remarkable
restraint."

As the town meetings and the weeks wore on, the confrontation
between Ventures and the residents of Wallkill got worse.
 Woodstock's landlord, Howard Mills, was getting anonymous
phone calls. The police were called, but the culprits never were
identified, much less caught. "They threatened to blow up his
house," Goldstein said. "There were red faces and tempers flaring.
People driven by fear to very strange things. They raise their
voices and say stupid things they would never ordinarily say. "To
this day, Howard Mills will not discuss how his neighbors turned
against him in 1969. "I know that it is a part of history, but I
don't want to bother about it," Mills said.