Looking back at Woodstock, from the inside

Michael Lang was one of the founders of Woodstock in 1969 -- he can be seen in the film on his motorcycle -- and he's been involved with the later, less seminal incarnations of the concert in 1994 and 1999. Now he's returning to the original festival in "The Road to Woodstock," a memoir co-written with Holly George-Warren.

While Woodstock was planned, much of it had to be improvised, including its location. Without enough time to set up fences or a proper perimeter, tickets became meaningless -- people just showed up. And who can blame them for driving for hours in rattling VW buses to see Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Neil Young, Canned Heat, Ravi Shankar, Richie Havens and the Grateful Dead? OK, I'd skip the Grateful Dead -- and that's exactly what Jerry Garcia, in retrospect, would have recommended.

"I had a wonderful time... but our performance onstage was musically a total disaster that is best left forgotten," he says in the book. George Ducker, in today's L.A. Times, writes:

Among the joys of "The Road to Woodstock" are the voices. Jerry Garcia confesses that the Grateful Dead were too stoned to play. ...

Cultural moments are impossible to duplicate, but it's to Lang's credit that the mythology of Woodstock still evokes a wide-eyed sense of possibility, despite its often unsettling echoes in commercials for Coke and blue jeans and life insurance.

"In the past forty years," he writes, "Woodstock has been the elephant in the room of my life. To keep it in perspective, I have chosen to make the room much bigger."

Read the complete review of "The Road to Woodstock" here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

-- Photo, left: Michael Lang in 1994. Credit: Tom Gorman / For The Times. Photo, right: Concertgoers in 1969. Credit: Associated Press

Comments

[SteveB]

It's to Mike Lang's credit that he makes mention in his book of Elliot Tiber (the man at the center of the forthcoming Ang Lee comedy about Woodstock called - just like Tiber's book - TAKING WOODSTOCK). Back in '69, Tiber was the one who contacted Lang and the rest of Woodstock Ventures and who offered both a concert permit (as Bethel Chamber of Commerce president, he had the power to do so) and who also offered the land around his crumbling motel the El Monaco. Though the concert ended up staged at Yasgur's Farm, the show wouldn't have been rescued out of Wallkill had Tiber not called Lang . . . and kudos to Lang for bringing this little piece of the Woodstock miracle into his spirited telling of that marvelous time in our cultural history . . . happy times for us all!

[Jess Hansen]

In all of the who ha of the Woodstock anniversary, it seems that another of the Festival's excellent performers are always left all of the lists. Which band do I speak of ? The Band.