The original Woodstock festival was the high watermark of Sixties flower power, memorable for its music, its nudity and its mellow atmosphere.
The last attempt to revive it, for a 30th anniversary festival in 1999, ended in chaos with hundreds of police officers called to the site to stop rampaging fans from torching the stage and looting the overpriced vendors.
Now Michael Lang, the organiser of both events, is risking the Woodstock name once again by attempting to put together a free, green festival for the 40th anniversary.
All he needs is sponsorship of $10million (£7million) in the next three weeks, he told The Times yesterday. “The chances that something will happen are probable but I don't really have the answer yet as to what that will be,” he said.
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Central Park and various other outdoor spaces in New York City have been scouted and talks have been opened with a distinctly retro line-up of bands, including The Who, Santana, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Joe Cocker, the Dave Matthews Band and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The first four played the original festival. The Who headlined the second night, sealing their reputation as a live act in America - although Pete Townshend now recalls their performance as “f***ing awful”.
The first Woodstock festival was dreamt up by Mr Lang and three other people as a profit-making scheme, but such was the turnout that it ended up being free to many when the fences were cut.
From August 15, 1969, an estimated 400,000 people battled through epic traffic jams to reach Max Yasgur's dairy farm near Bethel, New York State, which had a population of about 3,000.
There they spent three era-defining days sitting around waiting for technical hitches to be sorted out, rolling around in the endless mud and taking myriad forms of recreational drugs before Jimi Hendrix closed the festival by inimitably mangling The Star Spangled Banner into an anti-war protest, some time after nine o'clock on the Monday morning.
For the 1994 and 1999 festivals, punters were charged up to $180 per ticket, but this time round Mr Lang wants to put on a “free and totally green event”. Unfortunately, this demands a pragmatic approach at odds with the hippy dream.
Speaking about Woodstock 2009 at the South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, at the weekend, Mr Lang announced: “It's got to be sponsor-driven.”
For visitors to the 1999 site this brought back memories of the Planet Hollywood restaurants, Woodstock Platinum cards, Budweiser beer gardens and $5 bottles of water that rendered laughable the comparisons with the shambolic but idealistic original.
Some observers blamed the blatant commercialism of the 1999 festival for the unhappy atmosphere that spilt over into rioting on the final day. Mr Lang hopes to avoid such problems this time by ensuring that his sponsors have “green leanings” and exerting a tighter grip on the musical line-up.
“I think what happened in 1999 was a function of the times and the music that we booked,” he said last night.
“There was a lot of anger around with bands like Limp Bizkit and Korn who were heavier than I would have liked. It turned into more of an MTV event than a Woodstock event and that was a lesson learnt. This time we will go for bands with more of a social conscience.”
This summer will be awash with Woodstock nostalgia even if Mr Lang fails to get Woodstock 4 off the ground. Ang Lee will have a new film out, called Taking Woodstock, about the hotelier who helped to rescue the festival by providing a new site for it after the citizens of Walkill, New York, blocked it at the 11th hour.
There's also a four-hour director's cut of the concert film Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music, which a young Martin Scorsese worked on, and a six-CD box set of Woodstock performances to listen to after reading Mr Lang's forthcoming book The Road to Woodstock and watching the imminent History Channel documentary.
Source Website: entertainment.timesonline.co.uk
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