Woodstock5

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Kornfeld made Warner Brothers an offer it couldn't refuse. It was
Wednesday, two days before showtime. Ventures had to make a
movie deal... now. All Kornfeld wanted was $100,000 to pay for
film. The concert would take care of the acting, the lighting, the
dialogue and the plot. "Michael Wadleigh was up there (at the
site) waiting with (Martin) Scorsese," Kornfeld said. "All they
needed was money for film. The contract was handwritten and
signed by myself and Ted Ashley (of Warner Brothers). I told
them, 'Hey, guys, there are going to be hundreds of thousands of
people out there. It's a crap shoot: spend $100,000 and you might
make millions. If it turns out to be a riot, then you'll have one of
the best documentaries ever made.'"

Wadleigh rounded up a crew of about 100 from the New York
Film scene, including Scorsese. Wadleigh couldn't pay them until
much later, but he could get them inside the event of the summer.
The crew signed on on a double-or-nothing basis. If the film made
it, they'd get twice regular pay. If the film bombed, they'd lose.
The crew got to Woodstock a few days before, driving up in
Volkswagen Beetles and beat-up cars. Wadleigh's plot ran like
this: Woodstock would be a modern-day Canterbury Tale, a
pilgrimage back to the land. He wanted the film to be as much
about the hippies who trekked to Woodstock as about the music
on stage. He wanted the stories of the young people, their feelings
about the Viet Nam War, about the times. The stories of the
townspeople. These would make the film, not just the music.

Eight miles away, Timer Herald-Record harness racing John Szefc
was working on a feature story at the Monticello Raceway. Then
he caught a glimpse of the traffic out on Route 17B. It was 11am,
more than 24 hours before the concert, and traffic was already
backed up all the way down Route 17B to Route 17 - a distance of
10 miles. "That's when I knew this was going to be big. Really
significant, " he said. Szefc's story that night was about the effect
of the concert on the racetrack. Some bettors fought the traffic on
Route 17B and managed to get to the windows. But the handle was
down $60,000 from a typical weekend night in August.

By the afternoon of Thursday, August 14, Woodstock was an
idyllic commune of 25,000 people. The Hog Farmers had built
kitchens and shelters with two-by-fours and tarps. Their kids were
swinging on a set of monkey bars built of lumber and tree limbs,
jumping into a pile of hay at the bottom. Wavy Gravy recruited
"responsible-looking" people and made them security guards. He
handed out armbands and the secret password, which was "I
forget." Down the slope, stands were ready to sell counterculture
souvenirs: hand-woven belts, drug paraphernalia and headbands.
Christmas tree lights were strung in the trees. Sawdust was strewn
along the paths. Over the hill, carpenters were still banging nails
into the main stage. The Pranksters and the Hog Farmers had built
heir own alternative stage.

Prankster leader Babbs acted as emcee, opening the stage to
anyone who wanted to jam. The sound system was a space
amplifier borrowed from the Grateful Dead. "Over the hill and
into the woods we went," Babbs said. "We had the free school for
the kids, the Free Kitchen and so, the Free Stage.

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."

The sticky-sweet smell of burning marijuana wafted into the open
windows of the house in Bethel late Thursday night. The chirp and
buzz of the insects suddenly gave way to the shuffle of sandaled
feet. "It sounded like a parade," said the man who lived there. The
young Bethel couple lived a quarter-mile from Yasgur's field. The
wife, 22, was pregnant with the couple's second child, and the
husband, 27, a salesman, had an important business meeting in
Albany on Friday morning. But the couple wasn't budging from
Bethel. When they awoke on the first of three days of peace and
music, they looked out front. "Nothin' but cars and people. Saw a
trooper. Ten kids were on the hood of his car," the husband said.
They looked out back. "People were camping all over the yard,"
he added.