Promoters, Townspeople Clash Over New Woodstock Festival

Nearly two decades after the Woodstock rock festival became a symbol of peace and love for the baby boom generation, the music has been replaced by bickering over whether there should be an anniversary concert.

Promoters are squabbling. Neighbor is pitted against neighbor, and bucolic Bethel is still trying to come to grips with its place in history.

“This town doesn’t want to forget it,” said Allan Scott, Bethel’s supervisor. “The town just doesn’t want to get into the same thing it got into 20 years ago.”

Max Yasgur’s old farm, where 300,000 people converged for three days in August, 1969, to hear musicians such as the Who, Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young isn’t a tourist trap, largely because many people still think it’s in Woodstock, 45 miles away.

The only clue along Route 17B is a small wooden sign advertising the “Woodstock Camp Ground” that points down narrow Hurd Road. About a mile down the road is a large, sloping field, empty except for a concrete and steel plaque that identifies its historic past.

“Every year more and more people have been assembling at the site. It’s virtually become a shrine,” said Stephen Davis, lawyer for the current owners of Yasgur’s Farm, Brooklyn auto glass shop owner Louis Nicky and his wife, June Gelish.

The Nickys offered the town $200,000 for the right to be host for another concert in the summer of 1989. Bethel would have to waive its ordinance forbidding gatherings of more than 10,000 people, passed in 1970.

No thanks, said the town board.

“I walked through it. Besides the drugs, there were sex orgies all over the place,” said George Neuhaus, town supervisor during the original festival. “I’m 100% against (another concert), and I will do everything I can to prevent it.”

Other townspeople aren’t so harsh.

“Of course there was a lot of noisy music and nude people, but there were a lot of good things too,” said Marion Vassmer, who runs a general store that sold supplies to famished concert-goers 19 years ago.

The small community, two hours from New York City and surrounded by farms and out-of-the-way vacation homes, simply can’t handle large crowds, Scott said.

The supervisor said he’s heard from five or six promoters about an anniversary concert. One even offered to pay for a new sewage and water system for Bethel, but Scott said that after he asked the promoter to post a letter of credit, he never heard from him again.

Gelish said the people blocking a concert are simply old-fashioned.

“My husband worked hard all his life. He never had a chance to be famous,” Gelish said of 61-year-old Louis Nicky. “This is his chance to be famous.”

Yasgur, who allowed promoters to hold the concert on his farm, died of a heart attack in 1973 at age 54.

Joel Rosenman, one of the four promoters of the original concert, says Nicky and Gelish, who bought the property seven years ago, just want to cash in on a piece of history they had nothing to do with.

Rosenman, not coincidentally, wants to promote his own series of commemorative concerts but somewhere other than the Catskills.