Woodstock 50 collapses: What went wrong?

Late last year, Michael Lang, one of the producers of the original Woodstock festival in 1969, began to approach music’s most powerful managers and booking agents with a pitch.

Lang wanted to commemorate Woodstock’s 50th anniversary with a three-day, multigenerational event that would draw 150,000 people to a Formula One racetrack in upstate New York. With the Woodstock brand as a magnet, he told them, the festival would celebrate the spirit of the original yet be relevant to the youth of today, according to five agents and other talent representatives, who spoke anonymously because the conversations were confidential. The agents were skeptical.

With less than a year before Lang’s chosen weekend, Aug. 16-18, time was short. They doubted whether the Woodstock name meant much to Generation Z. And how would Woodstock 50 stand out from the glut of festivals already flooding the market?

Still, the agencies agreed to supply top-tier talent to the festival — if Lang and his partners accepted all the risk. As one senior agent recalled their message to him: “We’ll help. But you’re going to overpay us, and pay us up front.”

With their help — and with financing from a division of Dentsu, a Japanese advertising conglomerate — Lang and his team booked more than 80 acts, including Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, the Killers, Santana, Imagine Dragons, Chance the Rapper, Halsey, and Dead and Company, who were set to perform in Watkins Glen, N.Y. According to court papers, the festival paid $32 million in talent fees.

But this week, in the most disastrous collapse of a music event since the Fyre Festival two years ago, Lang’s dream came to an end in a humiliating defeat for one of the most storied names in rock history.

The death of Woodstock 50 is also the story of a former player returning to a changed game. Since the last Woodstock, in 1999 — another disaster, which ended with riots and reports of sexual assault — festivals have become an intensive competitive and expensive market, with little room for error or miscalculation.

Here’s how Woodstock 50 unraveled:

An announcement, but no tickets

The festival was announced in January, but it was far from ready. Organizers had made requests for dozens of artists — their original wish list included Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Drake and Kendrick Lamar — but not confirmed bookings with any of them.

Soon red flags began to pop up. Organizers quietly reduced their attendance target to 100,000. The lineup was not announced until March 19, and, strangely, tickets were not set to go on sale for another month, on April 22.

Then the date for ticket sales came and went, and news emerged that the festival had not secured proper permits — raising serious doubts about its viability.

Within days, Dentsu pulled out and declared Woodstock 50 dead. Lang disputed that Dentsu had the right to cancel under their contract — and a judge ultimately agreed that it did not — but the damage was done. By early June, Woodstock 50 lost its venue in Watkins Glen when it failed to make a $150,000 payment. “Losing Watkins Glen set us back six weeks,” Lang said in an interview this week. “We never really recovered from that.”

A small town says no

After the loss of Watkins Glen, Lang and his partners tried to move to another racetrack — this one for horses — in Vernon, a town

35 miles east of Syracuse with a population of about 5,000.

With less than two months left on the festival clock, organizers faced stiff opposition from local government officials, who were concerned that proper plans could not be implemented in time. The sheriff of Oneida County said he could not guarantee public safety at the event (other happenings, including the Madison-Bouckville antique show, would require his staff ).

The town Code Enforcement Office also would not budge. It rejected four permit applications by Woodstock 50; the first two, officials said, were just one page apiece. In rejecting the fourth — which was 237 pages — Vernon’s code enforcement officer, Reay Walker, wrote a withering eight-page letter that pointed to insufficient traffic, parking and security plans, and declared a public safety plan “worthless.”

A last-ditch effort fails

When the town of Vernon issued its last denial, July 22, Woodstock 50 seemed unsalvageable.

But Lang had one Hail Mary left. He contacted Seth Hurwitz, an independent promoter in Washington, expressing interest in Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. Hurwitz instead pointed him to the Merriweather Post Pavilion, the amphitheater that Hurwitz and his company, IMA, manage in the woods of Columbia, Md., which could hold about 30,000 people.

Hurwitz offered Merriweather on the condition that Lang could confirm a lineup, and gave him a tight deadline to do it.

“It won’t be another Fyre Fest,” Hurwitz said in an email interview when Merriweather was announced as the new venue, “because I won’t let them sell any tickets unless I see confirmations in writing from the acts.”

But Lang was unable to save Woodstock 50. He was asking artists to play a vastly smaller event hundreds of miles away from the original venue, under the banner of a damaged brand. According to their original contracts, artists could refuse to appear anywhere other than Watkins Glen.

He tried to rebrand the event as a free benefit for HeadCount, a voter-registration nonprofit, but that was not enough. One by one, artists abandoned Woodstock 50: Jay-Z, John Fogerty, Santana and finally Cyrus.

“The world is a very different place than it was in 1969,” said Frank Riley, who represents Robert Plant and his band the Sensational Space Shifters, who had been booked for Woodstock 50.