Free The Road to Woodstock by Michael Lang Page A

started researching the logistics for accommodating two hundred thousand people spending three days at the site. As there was no precedent for what we were planning—outside the military—we began to develop strategies to determine what we’d need on-site and how much it would cost. For example, to estimate how many Porta-Potties we would need, we’d time people going in and out of bathrooms at public facilities.
    STAN GOLDSTEIN: I would get to Yankee Stadium early and go into a bathroom and count the stalls. I had a watch and a clipboard and would count how many people went through the doors in what period of time. Then I would divide that by the number of available seats to figure out how many people would use how many toilets over a period of time.
    We thought that the U.S. Army would have information on setting up temporary “cities,” for troop deployments overseas or in rural locations. Stan made arrangements to go to the Pentagon, but his appointments were canceled. The army was unwilling to divulge information about field sanitation.
    When John and Joel met with Schaller’s attorney in late March, the meeting did not go well. They were informed that Schaller had decided not to rent the property to us after all. We started to get concerned. We had booked talent, we were hiring staff, and we had no place for the festival. We began searching areas farther afield from Woodstock, surveying properties via helicopter, and driving to check out possible sites. There was still snow on the ground, so an accurate assessment of potential sites meant a lot of walking. It was on one of these site walks that I became acquainted with Tom Rounds, Tom Driscoll, and Mel Lawrence, from Arena Associates, based in L.A. Taking advantage of my groundwork, they had produced the second Miami Pop Festival at Gulfstream Race Track in December ’68, after I’d moved to Woodstock. I’d heard good things about the festival from Stan, who’d recorded some of the acts. I invited them east to meet anddiscuss our Aquarian Exposition. Rounds’s background was radio, Driscoll controlled a strawberry empire in California, and Mel was the operations guy. Lacking experience running a huge operation, I was considering hiring a line producer, someone skilled in production as well as in conducting a business with hundreds of employees. Arena Associates wanted $50,000 for each partner, plus a percentage of the gate, for the physical production. That was too much money. “Thanks for coming out,” I told them, “but I think I’ll do it myself.”
    But during our meetings and site surveys, Mel and I had quickly clicked. He was a very practical, “get it done” guy, and he understood what I was trying to do. I needed someone to be site manager, and he seemed to have the right skill set and my kind of vision. When the three were leaving, I asked Mel to stay on. He agreed to join my staff for a flat fee of $8,000.
    MEL LAWRENCE: I was hooked on being a general and said, “I want to do this.” I liked Michael. He had an air of confidence—and he made you feel confident. This quality gave you faith in him.
    Mel had entered the concert business through radio and had been involved with some big concerts in Hawaii. He worked on the country’s first pop festival, the Magic Mountain Festival in Northern California, and handled staging, fencing, and traffic operations at Monterey Pop the following week. As our site manager, he could help in all these areas and more.
    MEL LAWRENCE: Our first planning meeting for Woodstock took place in a luncheonette on Sixth Avenue. Michael, Stan, and I started one of my patented outlines, which can run fifteen or twenty pages. We sort of laid out the festival on napkins.
    On the last Sunday in March, John and Joel went for a drive upstate to look around, increasingly desperate to find a site. Heading back to the city in John’s Porsche, they saw a sign on Route 17 that read: MILLS INDUSTRIAL PARK FOR RENT . It was two