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   Woodstock Ventures billed the concert as a "weekend in the
country" - temporary commune. The ads ran in the newspapers,
both establishment and underground, and on radio stations in Los
Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Texas and
Washington, D.C. A concert ticket also bought a campsite. But
even a commune requires some kind of organization. In late June,
Goldstein called in the Hog Farm.

The Hog Farm started out as a communal pig farm in California;
its members eventually bought land next to a Hopi Indian
reservation in New Mexico. Its leader was a skinny, toothless
hippie whose real name was Hugh Romney. He was a one-time
beatnick comic who had changed his name to Wavy Gravy and
held the wiseguy title of "Minister of Talk". "We brought in the
Hog Farm to be our crowd interface," Goldstein explained. "We
needed a specific group to be the exemplars for all to follow. We
believed that the idea of sleeping outdoors under the stars would
be very attractive to many people, but we knew damn well that the
kind of people who were coming had never slept under the stars in
their lives. We had to create a circumstance where they were cared
for."

The Wallkill Zoning Board of Appeals officially banned
Woodstock on July 15, 1969. To the applause of residents, board
members said that the organizer's plans were incomplete. They
also said outdoor toilets, such as those to be used at the concert,
were illegal in Wallkill. Two weeks earlier, the town board had
passed a law requiring a permit for any gathering of more than
5,000 people. "The law they passed excluded one thing and one
thing only - Woodstock," said Al Romm, then-editor of The Times
Herald-Record, which editorialized against the Wallkill law.
Wallkill Supervisor Jack Schlosser denied that this was the intent.

The Wallkill board may have done Woodstock Ventures a favor.
Publicity about what had happened reaped a bonanza of interest.
Besides, if Woodstock had been staged in Wallkill, Lang said, the
vibes would either have squelched the show or turned it into a riot.
"I didn't want cops in gas masks showing up, and that was the
atmosphere there," Lang said. "With all the tensions around it, it
wouldn't have worked." Another Woodstock Ventures member,
Lee Blumer, remembered the threats made in town. "They said
they were going to shoot the first hippie that walked into town,"
said Blumer.

Kodak wanted cash, but the movie crew got no money upfront for
film. So Wadleigh pulled $50,000 out of savings, both from his
personal account and an account for his independent film
business. During July, Wadleigh was out in Wyoming filming a
movie about mountain climbing. When promoters lost the Wallkill
site, Wadleigh cringed. "I had this feeling of absolute terror that it
wasn't going to come off," Wadleigh said. "That feeling that
someone could pull the plug out on us didn't go away until the
music started."

Elliot Tiber read about Woodstock getting tossed out of Wallkill.
Tiber's White Lake resort, the El Monaco, had 80 rooms, nearly
all of them empty, and keeping it going was draining his savings.
But for all of Tiber's troubles, he had one thing that was very
valuable to Woodstock Ventures. He had a Bethel town permit to
run a music festival. "I think it cost $12 or $8 or something like
that," Tiber said."It was very vague. It just said I had permission
to run an arts and music festival. That's it." The permit was for
the White Lake Music and Arts Festival, a very, very small event
that Tiber had dreamed up to increase business at the hotel. "We
had a chamber music quartet, and I think we charged something
like two bucks a day," he said. "There were maybe 150 people up
there."

Tiber called Ventures, not even knowing who to ask for. Lang got
the message and went out to White Lake the next day, which
probably was July 18, to look at the El Monaco. Tiber's festival
site was 15 swampy acres behind the resort. "Michael looked at
that and said, 'This isn't big enough,'" Tiber recalled. "I said,
'Why don't we go see my friend Max Yasgur? He's been selling me
milk and cheese for years. He's got a big farm out there in
Bethel.'" While Lang waited, Tiber telephoned Yasgur about
renting the field for $50 a day for a festival that might bring 5,000
people. "Max said to me, 'What's this, Elliot? Another one of your
festivals that doesn't work out?'" Tiber said.

Yasgur met Lang in the alfalfa field. This time, Lang liked the lay
of the land. "It was magic," Lang said. "It was perfect. The
sloping bowl, a little rise for the stage. A lake in the background.
The deal was sealed right there in the field. Max and I were
walking on the rise above the bowl. When we started to talk
business, he was figuring on how much he was going to lose in this
crop and how much it was going to cost him to reseed the field. He
was a sharp guy, ol' Max, and he was figuring everything up with a
pencil and paper. He was wetting the tip of his pencil with his
tongue. I remember shaking his hand, and that's the first time I
noticed that he had only three fingers on his right hand. But his
grip was like iron. He's cleared that land himself."

Yasgur was known across Sullivan County as a strong-willed man
of his word. He'd gone to New York University and studied real
estate law, but moved back to his family's dairy farm in the '40s. A
few years later, Yasgur sold the family farm in Maplewood and
moved to Bethel to expand. Throughout the '50s and '60s, Yasgur
slowly built a dairy herd. By the time the pipe-smoking Yasgur was
approached by Woodstock Ventures, he was the biggest milk
producer in Sullivan County, and the Yasgur farm had delivery
routes, a massive refrigeration complex and a pasteurization plant.
The 600 acres that Ventures sought were only part of the Yasgur
property, which extended along both sides of Route 17B in Bethel.

Within days after meeting Yasgur, Lang brought the rest of the
Ventures crew up in eight limousines; by then, Yasgur was wise to
Woodstock, and the price had gone up considerably. Woodstock
Ventures kept all the negotiations secret, lest it repeat what had
happened in Wallkill. At some point during the talks, Tiber and
Lang went to dinner at the Lighthouse Restaurant, and Italian
place just down Route 18B from El Monaco in White Lake. That's
where the news leaked out. "While we were paying the check, the
radio was on in the bar. The radio station out there, WVOS,
announced that the festival was going to White Lake, " Tiber said.
"The waiters or the waitresses must have called the radio station.
We were just in shock. The bar was now empty. Michael just had a
blank look. We all went into shock." On July 20, 1969, the world
was talking about the first man to walk on the moon. But
conversation in Bethel centered on this "Woodstock hippie
festival." "I was used to fights, but I wasn't ready for this one,
" Tiber said.

The Woodstock partners have since admitted that they were
engaged in creative deception. They told Bethel officials that they
were expecting 50,000 people, tops. All along they knew that
Woodstock would draw far, far more. "I was pretty
manipulative," Lang said. "The figure at Wallkill was 50,000, and
we just stuck with it. I was planning on a quarter-million people,
but we didn't want to scare anyone."

Ken Kesey's farm in Orefon was overrun with hippie acolytes.
Kesey lived in Pleasant Hill, which became home base for his
Merry Pranksters, the creators of the original Acid Tests in San
Francisco. Kesey had bought the farm with the earnings from his
two bestsellers, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"  (1962) and
"Sometimes a Great Notion" (1964). The fashion of the day was to
share and share alike. But the horde was starting to bother even a
founder of the counterculture.