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   As the Apollo 11 astronauts were strolling the Sea of Tranquility
on July 20, the Pranksters were hearing from Wavy Gravy, whom
they knew from the Acid Tests. The Hog Farmers said they were
getting $1,700 to gather as many people together as possible and
get them to Bethel. "Kesey was glad to get rid of everybody," said
Ken Babbs, then 33 and the leader of the Pranksters' Woodstock
squad. Babbs packed 40 hippies into five school buses. One was
"The Bus" - the one later made famous by author Tom Wolfe in
"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." The Bus had a custom,
psychedelic paint job and a Plexiglas bubble on top, and it was
packed with sound gear. Its destination sign read:  "Further."
"While Neil Armstrong was taking a giant leap for mankind, we
were starting to take a giant leap for Woodstock," Babbs said.

Max Yasgur had two concerns. "He thought a grave injustice had
been done in Wallkill. And he wanted to make sure that he got the
$75,000 before some other dairy farmer did," Rosenman said.
"They were in no particular order. I'm not sure which was more
important to him. Having said that, I'll say this about Max: He
never hit us up for another dime after we paid him. I remember
that every time we went over there, Max would hand you one of
those little cartons of chocolate milk. Every time. We ended up
with all these cartons of milk around the office."

Contracts for the use of land surrounding Yasgur's parcel ended
up costing Ventures another $25,000. " We could have bought the
land for what we rented it for," Lang said. Meanwhile,
hand-lettered signs were being put up in the town of Bethel. They
read: "Buy No Milk. Stop Max's Hippy Music Festival."

Lang had set a $15,000 ceiling for any act. But the hottest act in
the country - guitarist Jimi Hendrix - wanted more. Hendrix had
gotten a one-time fee of $150,000 for a concert earlier that summer
in California. His manager was demanding that much to play
Woodstock. But by July, Lang had some leverage too. He didn't
need Hendrix to make the biggest concert of the year. If Hendrix
wanted to come, he'd be welcome. "We paid Jimi Hendrix
$32,000. He was the headliner, and that's what he wanted,"
Rosenman said. Then Ventures lied about the terms. "We told
everyone that was because he was playing two sets at $16,000 each.
We had to do that, or the Airplane would want more than
$12,000." Lang set the bill so that folk acts like Joan Baez would
play on Friday, the opening day. Rock'n'roll was saved for
Saturday and Sunday. But Hendrix's one-and-only set was always
to be the finale. His contract said no act could follow him.

Motel owner Tiber's new job was to be the local liasion for
Woodstock Ventures in Bethel. He was paid $5,000 for a couple of
month's work. Tiber was earning his money too. "The town
meetings never drew more than flies before," Tiber said. "But then
they were standing-room-only, maybe 300 people. Maybe it was
that Michael was barefooted. He came off the helicopter with no
shoes. I'd never experienced anything like that before, but that was
the way he was. That was fine with me, but I think they didn't like
it."

Bethel residents had read about the worries in Wallkill: drugs,
traffic, sewage and water. Public fury mounted once more. A
prominent Bethel resident approached Lang. He said he could
grease the wheels of power and make sure Lang got the approvals
he needed. All the fixer wanted was $10,000. Woodstock Ventures
got the cash and put it in a paper bag. Lang won't name the man
who solicited the bribe.  But ultimately Woodstock Ventures
would not pay off. "We were very concerned with karma," Lang
said. "We thought that if we did pay someone off, that would be
wrong and we would change the way things came out." The
suggestion of a payoff galvanized Yasgur's support, Lang said.
"At that point, he really became an ally, not just a spectator."

But there may have been a payoff, anyway. Rosenman wrote in a
1974 book that he issued a $2,500 check to a man who was
demanding $10,000 to arrange local backing. Years later,
Rosenman said some of the events in the book were hyped for
dramatic tension. "And I honestly can't remember whether I wrote
the check or not, " Rosenman said.

At least one of Woodstock's opponents also was approached to fix
the deal. George Neuhaus was one of the old-style, old boy
politicians in Bethel, in and out of the town supervisor's post for
years. He thought Woodstock was being jammed down the throats
of local people who didn't want it. That July, Neuhaus was
approached by a man who wanted him to be a guide through the
local political maze. Neuhaus wanted none of it. Like Lang,
Neuhaus wouldn't identify the man, but both indicate it was the
same individual. "It wasn't, per se, money, but he wanted to know
if I could get the thing off the ground," Neuhaus recalled. "I was
sitting on my porch. I threw him the hell off my property. I
wouldn't have anything to do with it."

Bob Dylan was the only one of Lang's rock'n'roll heroes who
hadn't signed a contract. The promoters had borrowed some of
Dylan's mystique by naming their concert after his adopted home
town, which was only 70 miles from Bethel. Dylan's backup group,
The Band, was already signed. Lang figured that Dylan's
appearance was a natural. So he made the pilgrimage to Dylan's
Ulster County hideaway. "I went to see Bob Dylan about three
weeks before the festival," Lang said. "I went with Bob Dacey, a
friend of Dylan's, and we met in his house for a couple of hours. I
told him what we were doing and told him, 'We'd love to have you
there.' But he didn't come. I don't know why."

In late July, Woodstock Ventures obtained permit approvals from
Bethel Town Attorney Frederick W.V. Schadt and building
inspector Donald Clark. But, under orders from the town board,
Clark never issued them. The board ordered Clark to post
stop-work orders; the promoters tore the signs down with Clark's
tacit approval. He felt he was being made the fall guy for the town.
Schadt said that Woodstock's momentum was accelerating like a
runaway train. "At that time, it had progressed so far, any kind of
order to stop it would have just resulted in chaos, " he said.
 "Here you have thousands of people descending on the
community. How in the world do you stop them?"

Ken Van Loan, the president of the Bethel Business Association,
wasn't worried. He'd decided this festival could be a great boost
for the depressed economy of the Catskills. "We talked to the
county about promoting this thing," said Van Loan, who owned
Ken's Garage in Kauneonga lake. "We told 'em it would be the
biggest thing that ever came to the county."

As July became August, Vassmer's General Store in Kauneonga
Lake was doing a great business in kegs of nails and cold cuts. The
buyers were longhaired construction guys who were carving
Yasgur's pasture into an amphitheater. " They told me, 'Mr.
Vassmer, you ain't seen nothing yet,' and by golly, they were
right," said Art Vassmer, the owner.

Abe Wagner knew that little Bethel, with a population of 3,900
souls, wasn't set to handle the coming flood of humanity. Two
weeks before the festival, Wagner, 61, heard that Woodstock
Ventures had already sold 180,000 tickets. Wagner, who owned a
plumbing company and lived in Kauneonga Lake, was one of
approximately 800 Bethel residents who signed a petition to stop
the festival. "The people of Bethel were afraid of the influx of
people on our small roads, afraid of the element of people who
read the advertisements in the magazines that said, 'Come to
Woodstock and do whatever you want to do because nobody will
bother you,'" Wagner said.

By August, Elliot Tiber was getting anonymous phone calls.
"They'd say that it'll never happen, that we will break your legs,"
Tiber said. "There was terrible name-calling. It was anti-Semitic
and anti-hippies. It was dirty and filthy.

A week before the festival, Yasgur's farm didn't look much like a
concert site. "It was like they were building a house, except there
was a helicopter pad," Vassmer said. Vassmer had heard the
nervous talk among his regular customers, especially when they
heard the radio ads. "'I don't know about this,' they'd
say," Vassmer recalled. "They'd say, 'Boy, when this thing comes,
we're gonna be sorry.'" That same week, a group of outraged
residents filed a lawsuit. It was settled within a few days; the
promoters promised to add more portable toilets. "There was a lot
of intrigue," Lang said. "I don't remember it all."

Those 800 petitioners weren't too happy with Bethel Supervisor
Daniel J. Amatucci. "He didn't inform us about all the people
until a week before the festival," Wagner remembered. "He turned
around and threw it in the wastebasket without even looking at
it." Wagner protester. Amatucci read it. Then he told Wagner it
was too late.

Michael Lang gunned a shiny BSA motorcycle across a field of
grass. He wore a leather vest on his shirtless back, and a fringed
purse hung at his hip. A lit cigarette hung out of his mouth as he
popped down the kickstand. It was early August 1969, and Lang
commanded an army of workers throwing together the rock
concert. A filmmaker came by to ask Lang some questions,
freezing Lang, his motorcycle and his attitude forever in a movie
moment that capures the careless bravado of youth. "Where are
you gonna go from here?" the interviewer asked. "Are you gonna
do another?"  "If it works," Lang answered.

Ventures decided to try to win over the residents in Bethel. It sent
out the Earthlight Theater to entertain local groups. It booked a
rock band called Quill to do free performances. But Earthlight, an
18-member troupe, didn't do Shakespeare or Rodgers and
Hammerstein. They did a musical comedy called "Sex. Y'all
Come." They also stripped naked. Frequently.

On August 7, Ventures staged a pre-festival festival on a stage that
was still under construction. Quill opened the show, and Bethel
residents sat on the grass, expecting theater. Instead, the
Earthlight Theater stripped and screamed obscenities at the
shocked crowd. "They went from being suspicious to being
convinced," Rosenman said.

Wavy Gravy rounded up 85 Hog Farmers and 15 Hopis. He
donned a Smokey-the-Bear suit and armed himself with a bottle of
seltzer and a rubber shovel. Then he and the barefooted, long
haired Hog Farmers flew into John F. Kennedy International
Airport. "We're the hippie police," Gravy announced as he and
his entourage stepped off the plane on Monday, Aug. 11.

The opposition plotted a last-minute strategy to stop the show: a
human barricade across Route 17B on the day before the concert.
Tiber heard about the plan on Monday. "So, I go on national
radio and said that they were trying to stop the show, " he said. "I
didn't sleep well. About two o'clock in the morning, I wake up and
I hear horns and guitars. This is on Tuesday morning. I look out,
and there are five lanes of headlights all the way back. They'd
started coming already."