Free The Road to Woodstock by Michael Lang Page B

hundred acres in the township of Wallkill, in Orange County, about a ninety-minute drive from New York City. The asking price for a four-month lease was $10,000, pending approval from the local zoning board. Joel and John paid $1,500 as a deposit for a two-way, thirty-day option on the land. They appeared before the Wallkill Zoning Board on April 18 and told them we’d be having an arts fair at the Mills Industrial Park with a possible forty to fifty thousand people attending over a couple of days. They downplayed the rock and roll component, perhaps a bit too much, and promised to take out liability insurance for the event. The Wallkill Zoning Board members seemed a bit dubious but told them they had no objections to our plans.
    When I checked out the Mills Industrial Park, my first reaction was horror. The flat, bulldozed property looked as if it had been raped. Buzzards were flying around. It was as far as you could get from the feeling I was looking for. I had pictured walking into an open, pastoral scene of beauty and calm that could make you feel comfortable and at peace. This was ugly, cold, hard, and dirty and felt as if someone had taken what they wanted from the land and left the debris.
    John, not unreasonably, was getting anxious, and after talking to Mills and showing the site to Mel, I was persuaded that we could transform it into an acceptable landscape. It would never be idyllic, but it did have electricity, water, and access from major roads. Our festival’s name would remain Woodstock, no matter where it was held. I was not going to give that up. The name Woodstock had come to represent the heart of what I hoped to accomplish.
    We rapidly started filling staff positions. Most of the technical people came through Bill Graham’s Fillmore organization. The top lighting director in rock and roll, Chip Monck, had worked at Montereyand at Mel’s Miami Pop Festival. He’d started his career at the Village Gate, had run the lights at the Newport festivals since their inception in 1959, and had designed the lighting for the Fillmore East. He rang me up about the festival after he heard about it from Hector Morales.
    CHIP MONCK: I went to see Hector Morales and Hector said, “Hey, this curly-headed kid has been in here and he’s booking every bit of talent in the world.” I wasn’t working at the moment and thought, It sounds like it’s going to be something pretty big! So I called up Michael and said, “Gee, let’s have a cup of coffee and put our heads together.” I contacted Annie Weldon, who was John Morris’s wife at that time, and said, “Can I bring this kid over and introduce him to you and John? Will you please just politely host the evening so we can get this thing moving?” So we met at their place on Thirteenth Street and Sixth Avenue.
    “Hector explained to me what you’re booking,” I said to Michael, “and I really want to know more about it and if we can be of help.” Michael laid out his vision—without revealing too much but giving just enough. It was up to us to lock in and agree. That’s what you do with a promoter or a skilled entrepreneur. You take orders. Michael was understated, and when he got into a hole or into a corner, he did his famous mumble.
    He was looking at having maybe two hundred and fifty thousand people. My feeling was we were looking at between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. It was going to be huge and it was going to be everybody, and it had to be done correctly. Any time anybody saw Michael and realized what he was doing and what the accomplishment could be, they immediately signed themselves on.
    Chip came on board for a $7,000 salary. A charming and unflappable guy, he had a good grasp of what we were trying to put together.Chip’s friend John Morris sort of talked his way into a job. He had been concert promoter Bill Graham’s right-hand man at the Fillmore, and he knew numerous artists and their managers. I hired him to do artist