San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Rock promoter helped create Woodstock
Michael Lang, one of the creators of the Woodstock festival, which drew more than 400,000 people to an upstate New York farm in 1969 for a weekend of “peace and music” — plus plenty of drugs, skinnydipping, mud-soaked revelry and highway traffic jams — resulting in one of the great tableaus of 20th century pop culture, died Jan. 8 in a Manhattan hospital. He was 77.
Michael Pagnotta, a spokesperson for Lang’s family, said the cause was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
In August 1969, Lang was a baby-faced 24-year-old with limited experience as a concert promoter when he and three partners, Artie Kornfeld, John P. Roberts and Joel Rosenman, put on the Woodstock Music and Art Fair on land leased from a dairy farmer, Max Yasgur, in bucolic Bethel, N.Y.,
about 100 miles northwest of New York City.
Since Monterey Pop in California two years before, rock festivals had been sprouting around the country, and the Woodstock partners, all in their 20s, were ambitious enough to hope for 50,000 attendees. Lang
and Kornfeld, a record executive, booked a solid lineup, with, among others, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and a new group called Crosby, Stills & Nash (they would be joined at the festival by Neil Young). The show was set for Aug. 15-17.
The event became a defining moment for the Baby Boomer generation, as a celebration of rock as a communal force and a manifestation of hippie ideals. Despite the presence of nearly half a million people, and the breakdown of most health and crowd-control measures, no violence was reported.
Lang was seen in the documentary “Woodstock” (1970) roaming the grounds in cherubic curls and a vest. Despite the festival’s concept as a moneymaker, Lang always insisted that its aims were to bring out the best in humanity.
Michael Scott Lang was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 11, 1944, and grew up in middle-class surroundings. He attended New York University and the University of Tampa, and in 1966 he opened a head shop in Miami. He soon became involved in the music scene there, and in May 1968 he was one of the promoters of the Miami Pop Festival, with Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Blue Cheer and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention.
Later that year Lang moved to Woodstock, N.Y., an outpost with bohemian cachet thanks to the residency of Bob Dylan.
The Woodstock festival was initially portrayed in the news media as a catastrophe. The Daily News’ front page declared, “Traffic Uptight at Hippie Fest,” and a New York Times editorial bore the headline “Nightmare in the Catskills.”
But images of endless fields of long-haired fans idling peacefully, and of stars like Hendrix, the Who and Santana commanding thousands of fans, ricocheted around the world and established a new template for the rock festival.
Lang remained in the music. promotion business. He is survived by his wife, Tamara Pajic Lang; daughters Molly Lang, LariAnn Lang and Shala Lang Moll; sons Harry and Laszlo; a grandson; and his sister, Iris Brest.