Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (64 page)

FREAK-OUT:
After an hour or so, the man went to the apartment and found two teenage boys fixing up the place. He threatened them at gunpoint: “Stop this racket or you’ll be sorry.” It worked...kind of. He didn’t hear any more noise because the police came and took him to jail.

THE ANNOYED:
Ashley Carpenter, a bicyclist from Dorset, England

SITUATION:
Carpenter always tried to share the road with cars, but often felt that motorists ignored him.

FREAK-OUT:
When a car splashed him with water in December 2003, the 37-year-old Carpenter snapped and started a vigilante campaign to rid the road of rude drivers. His method: slashing tires. In all, Carpenter slashed more than 2,000 tires on 548 cars, causing more than £250,000 ($447,000) worth of damage. He was nabbed by police after being caught in the act by surveillance cameras.

THE ANNOYED:
A 30-year-old Norwegian man

SITUATION:
His girlfriend liked to drink alcohol. He didn’t. So he spent night after night after night as her designated driver.

FREAK-OUT:
Apparently not knowing how to say no, he decided his only way out was to lose his driver’s license. So on the way home one night, he passed a police car at 85 mph in a 50 mph zone. It worked: He was banned from driving for a year. (He also got a two-week vacation from his girlfriend—in jail.)

OTHER FREAK-OUTS

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After a neighbor’s dog pooped on his lawn, Walter Travis, 68, shot the neighbor several times (but not the dog).

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Danny Ginn stole a garbage truck at gunpoint because the truck’s driver kept using his driveway to turn around.

•
Kevin French, 45, shot his neighbor in the head with an air rifle because he “mowed his lawn too often.” (The neighbor recovered.)

In 1900 over 2 million wild mustangs roamed the U.S. Today there’s only about 20,000.

The Woodstock Music and Arts Festival was an event like no other in the 20th century. Nearly half a million young people gathered in upstate New York on a hot, rainy weekend in 1969 to watch one of the most impressive musical lineups in history. But what they got was much more than a concert—Woodstock was both a cultural milestone and the end of an era
.

T
ENSE TIMES

In the late 1960s, the United States was a divided nation. The war in Vietnam had essentially put people on one of two sides: pro-war or anti-war. And both sides were vehement in their beliefs—the violent confrontation between police and protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago had proved that. By 1969, as the anti-war movement felt more and more marginalized by the media, the only way left to spread the message of peace was through music.

San Francisco was the West Coast headquarters of the hippie movement; on the East Coast, it was New York City. But after a while, the hustle and bustle of the cities became too much for musicians to deal with—especially for recording music—so a lot of them started moving to the country.

About 100 miles north of Manhattan, the rural town of Woodstock, New York, had been a pastoral retreat for artists and musicians for nearly a century. Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Van Morrison, to name a few, decided to build homes and record there. Young people liked Woodstock for its back-to-nature appeal, but the local farmers weren’t too thrilled to see long-haired hippies rolling into town. Because there were only a few at first, the locals just shrugged it off. They had no idea what was about to hit them.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR

There was one thing Woodstock lacked: a state-of-the-art recording studio. In the spring of 1969, four entrepreneurs—all young men in their 20s—decided to build one.

Your eyesight is sharpest in the middle of the day.

•
Michael Lang, the oldest of the four at 26, was a stereotypical longhair, described by his friends as a “cosmic pixie.” A year earlier, he had produced Florida’s largest-ever rock concert—the two-day Miami Pop Festival, which drew 40,000 people.

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Artie Kornfeld was a vice president of Capitol Records and an accomplished songwriter with 30 hit singles to his credit, including Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve.”

•
John Roberts was the one with money. He was heir to a toothpaste fortune and had served in the Army. The only concert he’d ever been to was a Beach Boys show.

•
Joel Rosenman was a Yale Law School graduate, but he cared more about playing guitar in a lounge band than practicing law.

LET’S PUT ON A SHOW

Kornfeld and Lang were friends who shared a New York City apartment and a love for progressive music. One of their dreams was to put on a huge music festival. When they heard of the exodus up to Woodstock, they wanted to be a part of it, and building a studio would be their in. They thought a rock concert might be a good way to raise money and generate publicity for the studio—but first they needed money to put on the concert.

Meanwhile, in another New York City apartment, Roberts and Rosenman were busy thinking up new and inventive business ideas. They had some money between them, but true to the times, they wanted to use it for some unconventional, cutting-edge business venture. But what? They decided to write and produce a television sitcom about two oddball businessmen who got into a different wacky business venture every week. For plot ideas, they put an ad in the
New York Times
in March 1968:

Young Men with Unlimited Capital
looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions.

MEETING OF THE MINDS

The show never made it off the drawing board. The ad, however, caught the eye of Lang and Kornfeld’s lawyer, who knew his clients were looking for business partners to put on their concert. A meeting was arranged in February 1969. Although they came from different backgrounds—Roberts and Rosenman were button-down college graduates; Kornfeld and Lang were tie-dyed flower children—they all agreed that the summer of 1969 in Woodstock, New York, would be the time and place for an unprecedented festival, what they called “three days of peace and music.” They expected between 40,000 and 50,000 people to show up.

Big surprise: Human sweat contains a chemical similar to what skunks spray.

FINDING A FIELD, PART I

The four men formed Woodstock Ventures. In the spring of 1969, they scouted around upstate New York for a concert site in or near Woodstock. In Wallkill they found an abandoned industrial park. It was the right size (300 acres), was in a good location (right off the highway), and had all the utilities in place. Roberts shelled out $10,000 to rent the park, and the town of Wallkill welcomed them with open arms...at first.

Although the industrial park had all the amenities the four were looking for, the “vibe” didn’t feel right. Lang, for one, hated it: the industrial feeling of the park was a far cry from the back-to-nature theme he’d envisioned for the concert. The people of Wallkill were wary of the prospect of 50,000 hippies converging on them, but Rosenman assured town supervisor Jack Schlosser that it would be a low-key folk festival—they’d get 50,000 people if they were lucky. Schlosser reluctantly agreed, and so did Lang. Roberts tried to ease the tensions between hippies and townsfolk by hiring a minister to take care of local relations and a former assistant at the justice department named Wes Pomeroy to head security. Even though the site wasn’t perfect, it was the only one they had.

FINDING THE ACTS

As spring turned to summer, the four promoters went to work trying to book the biggest folk and rock acts of the day. But performers were understandably hesitant—Woodstock Ventures had never put on a concert before, and now they were trying to put on the largest one of the year. “To get the contracts,” remembered Rosenman, “we had to have the credibility, and to get the credibility, we had to have the contracts.” They got the contracts the only way they could think of: they promised incredible sums of money to performers. One of the most popular groups of the time, Jefferson Airplane, agreed to play for $12,000, twice their usual fee. Then Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Who signed for similar fees.

Ancient Egyptians slept on stone pillows.

Those groups gave the show the credibility it needed. Other acts soon began to follow: the Grateful Dead and the headliner, Jimi Hendrix. (The musician they wanted most, Bob Dylan, couldn’t make the show—he had already signed on to play the Isle of Wight Festival in England on the same weekend.)

With all the wheels in motion, an army of longhaired hippies descended upon Wallkill to begin setting up the site and start construction on the largest sound system ever created. The influx proved to be too much for the already suspicious locals. “I don’t care if it’s a convention of 50,000 ministers,” Schlosser told Woodstock Ventures. “I don’t want that many people in my town.” So on July 15, 1969—a month before the concert was scheduled to begin—the Wallkill council ran Woodstock Ventures out of town.

FINDING A FIELD, PART II

Losing the site was a huge blow. The people at Woodstock Ventures were disconsolate; some were even packing up their stuff to go home. But then something unexpected happened: the press found out about what happened in Wallkill and ran with it. While the promotion for Woodstock was limited mostly to radio stations and independent newspapers, the story of the town that reneged on its concert deal made headlines everywhere. Suddenly, Woodstock was a part of the national conversation. And that may have been the best thing to happen to the festival. Many think that if the concert had gone on in Wallkill, it would have turned out badly—tensions there were already high, and some Wallkill citizens had threatened to “shoot the first hippie that walks into town.”

But the fact remained that Woodstock still had no venue. Then, sometime during the week of July 20, when most of the people of the world were focused on the first moon landing, Lang heard about Max Yasgur, an eccentric old pipe-smoking dairy farmer from the town of White Lake. He owned a 600-acre farm and might be willing to rent it. Lang went to the field and fell in love with it. “It was magic,” he said. “The sloping bowl, a little rise for the stage. A lake in the background. The deal was sealed right there in the field.”

THE BUSINESS OF PEACE

Woodstock Ventures may have started out with the best of intentions for the festival, but it was evident early on that they would have to utilize some tough business tactics to make it happen.

The human body creates and kills 15 million red blood cells every second.

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Rosenman had maintained that maybe 50,000 people at most would show up. That’s what he told Wallkill and that’s what he told the people of White Lake, even though he knew it wasn’t true. He expected five times that amount. At that point they would have told anyone anything to make the show happen. But Max Yasgur was wise to the ways of Woodstock Ventures. He tallied up his expenses for lost crops and destruction of his land and charged $75,000 for his field—in advance—and got it.

•
The bands were misled, too. There was supposed to be a $15,000 cap on artists’ fees, but word leaked out that Jimi Hendrix had been promised $32,000. Rosenman explained that it was because Hendrix was the headliner and was slated to do two sets. But in the end it didn’t matter, because many of the acts were never paid in full, anyway.

HERE IT COMES

A week before the start of the festival, the citizens of White Lake and Bethel realized the full magnitude of what was about to happen. There were at least 1,000 people on the site building the stage, the sound towers, the clinics, tent cities, and two huge ticket booths. That was on the inside. On the outside, tens of thousands of people were driving up Route 17B, inundating the small town of Bethel.

In an attempt to pacify the locals, Woodstock Ventures invited them to attend a pre-festival event in order to prove that the Woodstock performers were harmless and wholesome. They hired an avant-garde acting troupe called Earthlight Theater to perform a play. Bad idea: The play was called
Sex. Y’all Come
, and the script involved having the actors strip naked, pantomime an orgy, and shout obscenities at the crowd. The townsfolk were not amused. White Lake pulled the permits with just a few days left before the event. But by this point, it was too late. The “Stop Work” signs were ripped down almost as soon as they were put up. Like it or not, Woodstock was going to happen.