How Towns Around Woodstock Pushed to Cancel the Hippie Takeover
August 14, 2019 in History
Joseph G. Owen wasn’t exactly the target market for the Woodstock festival. But when he saw a sign advertising “3 Days of Peace & Music” while on vacation in Florida, he packed his bags and headed to New York.
Owen didn’t want to attend the festival—he wanted to stop it. The Wallkill town justice hurried home to New York and drafted a law that slapped strict regulations on events that drew over 5,000 people. After a raucous town board meeting, the ordinance passed, effectively banning the Woodstock festival, which had already sold over 50,000 tickets, from Wallkill.
But the Woodstock Music and Art Fair‘s expulsion from the tiny New York town was just the tip of the iceberg. During the months leading up to the iconic music festival, its organizers faced an all-out war from locals intent on pulling the plug on the event—and in response, Woodstock organizers pulled some shady tricks of their own, sidestepping local laws and making plenty of enemies as they finagled the logistics of the three-day event, which eventually attracted more than 400,000 attendees.
READ MORE: Woodstock 1969: How a Music Festival That Should’ve Been a Disaster Became Iconic Instead
The idea for the festival began as a flight of fancy. In 1967, John Roberts, heir to a denture glue fortune, was working on an idea for a TV show with his college friend Joel Rosenman about two young entrepreneurs who got involved in a variety of absurd business ventures. Roberts and Rosenman wanted to generate ideas for episodes, so they placed a seemingly simple ad in the classifieds sections of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal: “Young Men with Unlimited Capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions.”
The ad attracted plenty of crazy business ideas, but one in particular caught Roberts’ and Rosenman’s eye. Michael Lang, a music promoter who had orchestrated the recent Miami Pop Festival, and Artie Kornfeld, a producer at Columbia Records, proposed starting a music studio in Woodstock, New York, which had become a haven for counterculture icons like Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and The Band.
Roberts and Rosenman weren’t interested in the studio, but were intrigued by the idea of tapping into the late-1960s counterculture. After a meeting, the foursome agreed to try organizing a massive music festival instead. Roberts agreed to put up …read more
Source: HISTORY
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