Stardust, Golden and Marketable : As a town braces for a 25th-anniversary festival, the task of organizing--and selling--a Woodstock for the ‘90s begins

Located in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, this town of 18,000 is not far from where, once upon a time, Rip Van Winkle took a very long nap. Now Saugerties and the rest of the Hudson River Valley are braced for the reawakening of an equally colorful visitor--the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair--and on one recent night, locals filled the town’s Senior Citizens Center to debate whether Woodstock Ventures should be permitted to reprise the watershed festival at a nearby farm.

After the Pledge of Allegiance, people stepped up to a microphone to address the town board, concert promoter Michael Lang and a standing-room-only crowd of more than 300.

John Hall, leader of the rock group Orleans, was the first to speak. Hall, who has lived in Saugerties for more than 20 years, recently served as a county legislator, a political activity prompted by his opposition to a proposal to locate Ulster County’s megadump at Winston Farm, the proposed site of Woodstock ’94.

“I understand the trepidation of anyone who fears the arrival of so many people,” said Hall, referring to the 250,000 rock fans guaranteed to flock to the silver anniversary event on Aug. 13 and 14. “In my opinion, however, it is vastly preferable to having a megadump with 200,000 tons of garbage a year arriving on that site for the next 20 years.”

Thaddeus Dragula, a local Baptist preacher, begged to differ. “What’s worse,” he said, “a megadump that pollutes the water or a concert that pollutes our youth?”

Dragula was cheered by a contingent of retirees, conservative Christians and other foes of the festival who sat together at long tables toward the back of the room. While most speakers supported the fest, with many citing the financial boost it would give the beleaguered local economy, opponents called on the board to reject what they see as a Faustian bargain that would open their town to the social equivalent of a plague of locusts.

Keri Sorrin, a 17-year-old high school student whose hair was streaked pink and green, wasn’t particularly worried.

“As far as our morals are concerned, they’re already screwed up,” she said. “Maybe the festival can get us back on the right track.”

Romantics remember the 1969 Woodstock Festival--which took place in Bethel, N.Y., 60 miles southwest of Saugerties--as an impromptu city in which peace and love were the laws of the land. Realists remember Woodstock and consider it a miracle that the worst thing to result from half a million stoned hippies spending the weekend on a muddy field was a world-class traffic jam. But perhaps the seminal lesson of the Woodstock Festival was that the so-called counterculture was a whale of a consumer market. Now, 25 years later, the ramifications of that realization are evident in almost every aspect of Woodstock ’94.

Michael Lang, an architect of the original event, said little at the town meeting in Saugerties, already confident that the required permits would be secured within weeks. Woodstock Ventures had been negotiating with the town for 10 months, and Lang knew that their hand was strengthened not just by opposition to the dump, but by the fact that IBM, the area’s biggest blue-chip employer, had laid off 5,000 local employees in the last five years. (And indeed, after much last-minute financial wrangling, final approvals were granted on April 8.)

Initial bookings for Woodstock ’94 are rumored to include Peter Gabriel, Aerosmith, Metallica, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N’ Roses, Neil Young and, returning from the original festival, Santana and Crosby, Stills and Nash. (The final lineup is expected in about three weeks; one-third of the acts are reportedly already booked.) Lang neither confirms nor denies any of these. Pearl Jam, another band also high on the rumor list, has said it has no plans to play the festival.

That the Woodstock revival was helped by the downsizing of a corporate giant and fear of a dump are just two of many Aquarian ironies. Woodstock ’94 is also being bankrolled by PolyGram, which plans to market a film (Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple shot the meeting in Saugerties), a recording and a weekend-long pay-per-view broadcast of the event. Meanwhile, Pepsi is already exploiting Woodstock nostalgia with a commercial featuring a pot joke delivered by two veterans of Yasgur’s Farm: John Sebastian and Country Joe McDonald.

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Talk of Woodstock ’94 and another festival slated for the original site in Bethel has heated local conversations throughout a particularly hard winter. Some of the dialogues have even occurred in cyberspace, courtesy of Woodstock Online, which can be reached via modem at 914-679-3040.

The common wisdom in Saugerties is that while the festival won’t revitalize the economy, it will generate a couple million dollars and publicity that could help attract both business investments and tourist dollars.

As for the megadump, it could still end up at Winston Farm, and fest foes are quick to quip that the debris from the concert might as well be left on the site. Lang has held out the carrot that if the festival is successful, the farm would be developed as an outdoor venue for summertime concerts.

Everybody expects Woodstock ’94 to cause a weekend of commotion. Though Winston Farm is right next to an exit on the New York State Thruway, nearly all of the surrounding roads are two-lane affairs. But promoters have emphasized that the event would not re-create the logistic nightmare of the original. One reason is that they’ve had to submit extensive environmental, security, medical and traffic plans to obtain a variance to the mass-gathering laws enacted after the 1969 festival.

A few days after the Saugerties town meeting, Lang was at his home in the town of Woodstock, poring over proposed designs for the three stages he plans to erect on the 740-acre farm. “In some cases,” said Lang, who still has the suede vest he wore at the original festival, “I was hearing people say the same things that their parents said in ’69. But these days, the opposition is more of a minority, and what it boils down to is here is a conservative country town embracing Woodstock. How bizarre can you get?”

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In the summer of ‘69, Duke Devlin hitchhiked to the Woodstock Festival from a commune near Amarillo, Tex. He stayed in Bethel, and commemorated his move with a large tattoo that includes the Woodstock logo of a dove sitting on the neck of a guitar. (The logo for this year’s festival depicts a Fender-style guitar neck and two birds.) Hippie pilgrims have long journeyed to Yasgur’s Farm, and during the week of the 20th anniversary, a quarter-million people are said to have driven by the counterculture’s field of dreams. Impromptu festivals have marked the anniversary for years, although last summer the party had to be moved when a promoter who’d leased the original site in anticipation of the 25th anniversary covered the field with fresh green chicken droppings.

“Every time I go past the original site,” says Devlin, who owns a local farm stand, “I’m amazed to see kids who weren’t even born when the festival happened. They seem to have a longing for the peace and love that was there, and are looking for something to kick it off.”

Promoters have long tried to satisfy that need, but over the years, Bethel has had a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the festival that put it on the map. However, town officials have entertained various 25th-anniversary plans and are currently talking with Sid Bernstein, a music business veteran whose dusty old claim to fame is that he promoted concerts by the Beatles at Carnegie Hall and Shea Stadium. (See accompanying story, Page 80.)

Observes Devlin: “Bethel has a 300-watt light bulb, but they’ve covered it with a bushel basket.”

By contrast, Saugerties has all but put on a light show welcoming Woodstock ’94. The festival is once more being produced by Lang and two men from wealthy families who’ve been business partners since before the first festival, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman. New on the bus to Woodstock is John Scher, a major East Coast concert promoter who also runs the diversified entertainment division of PolyGram.

The budget for the original Woodstock was $500,000, although the festival ended up costing closer to $3.3 million. Woodstock ’94 is a co-production between Woodstock Ventures and PolyGram, which is supplying the $19.5-million budget.

At the first festival, a “favored nations” booking policy ensured that none of the top acts would receive more than $15,000. Tickets were priced from $7 for one day to $18 for all three days.

Tickets for the two-day Saugerties festival, which will be sold beginning around June 1 through a lottery, are expected to cost about $120. Shortly after Woodstock, Bob Dylan earned $150,000 to play the Isle of Wight Festival, and rock concerts became a much more lucrative, arena-oriented business. Industry rumors have top acts at Woodstock ’94 getting $350,000 plus points in the offshoot products.

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After Jimi Hendrix closed the first festival by playing the “Star-Spangled Banner” on his Stratocaster, the promoters discovered that they were about $1.7 million in debt. Roberts and Rosenman bought out Lang, and then sold a bigger share of the film and recording rights to Warner Bros., which had already put up $100,000 to film the festival and another $500,000 to edit the footage that became “Woodstock.” Roberts says that the debt was essentially paid off by 1980, except that over the years more money was spent to protect a trademark that had come to define a generation--”Woodstock.”

“You know,” warned Roberts’ father, appalled by his son’s business venture, “this thing will be haunting you 25 years from now.” He was right; Woodstock proved as tough to shake as the scent of patchouli.

“Philosophically,” adds Rosenman, “it’s always bothered me that Woodstock worked in all respects but as a business venture.” Promoting the world’s most famous rock concert also carries a lot more cachet than the mergers and acquisitions that occupied the partners throughout the 1980s.

“We don’t say we’re the Richardson Mint guys,” admits Rosenman, citing one of their other business ventures.

The Woodstock guys came to a rude realization, however, when they considered staging a 20th anniversary festival in Berlin that was to bridge both sides of the then-divided city.

“When we looked at our contracts seven or eight years ago,” says Roberts, “we found that we were pretty much married to Warner Bros. They basically had all the ancillary rights short of live-event profits and merchandising.”

The company that’s now called Time Warner does not have a live concert division and wasn’t particularly interested in staging another Woodstock. The result was a protracted negotiation between Woodstock Ventures and Warners. The deal that emerged, says Roberts, “was that Warners would retain rights to the original movie and recording, and we bought back the rest. The price was substantial, but our deal with PolyGram was that we had to provide all these rights free and untrammeled.” Warners remains a profit participant in Woodstock ’94.

If you think such corporate maneuvers belie the Woodstock vibe, hold onto your roach clip. “In 1969,” says Lang, “we were not basing the viability of the show on the ancillaries. Who knew from ancillaries? We didn’t even have T-shirts.”

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Woodstock ’94 will be well stocked with ancillaries. Considering that 250,000 tickets at $120 each would roughly cover producing the festival, the potential profit centers are clearly the pay-per-view television broadcast, the feature film, the soundtrack album and souvenir merchandise. Roberts also hopes that a revitalized “Woodstock” trademark will facilitate such future plans as a chain of hard-rocking Woodstock cafes.

“Woodstock ’94 reflects the typical pop music mix of idealism and giant doses of greed,” reflects writer and musician Ed Sanders, a 20-year Woodstock resident best known for his work with the Fugs. “It’s an event fueled by the credit-card power of 14-year-old kids.”

But this Woodstock Nation won’t have to worry about running out of cash: there will be automatic teller machines on the grounds of Winston Farm.

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Woodstock’s reputation as a “colony of the arts” was born early in the century, when two artists’ communities--Byrdcliffe and Maverick--sought to develop lifestyles that integrated arts and crafts with advanced social ideals. Before long, Woodstock became known as the Greenwich Village of the Catskills. Beat-era artists came in the 1950s. In the ‘60s, the late Albert Grossman, one of the most powerful music managers of the decade, moved to town and brought along such clients as Bob Dylan and the Band. By the time Dylan had his motorcycle accident on Zena Road, Woodstock was known to a whole generation of hippies.

Throughout the years, however, there has been consistent friction between the town’s bohemian elements and its more typically rural citizens. Back in the late ‘60s, Michael Lang was laughed out of town when he proposed staging the Woodstock Festival in, of all places, Woodstock. It was bad enough, some complained, that longhairs arrived on the Village Green looking for Dylan or Big Pink. (The Band’s famous house, immortalized by the group’s classic album “Music From Big Pink,” actually is in West Saugerties.)

Yet Woodstock has long benefited from the festival that borrowed its name. Twenty-five years worth of tourists have passed through town looking for Yasgur’s Farm. The pizza shop bears a variation on the Woodstock logo, while local radio station WDST relishes the resonance of calling itself Radio Woodstock. One guy even carved up an acre of land into square-inch plots to sell as souvenirs. Still, with Woodstock ’94 now literally down the road, everybody’s expecting a crazy summer, including Family of Woodstock, a social service organization originally formed to handle transient hippies who hung around after the ’69 festival. They’ve been contracted to help with its sequel.

A striking element of the debate over Woodstock ’94 is how opponents fear that crime and violence will replace peace and love. It’s not like 1969, this logic goes, when sex was safe, drugs were recreational, and rock ‘n’ roll was, well, rock ‘n’ roll. “These days,” said an unidentified police officer in the local paper, “it’s not just ‘take a little LSD and go to sleep;’ now it’s guns and drugs, stealing and killing.”

Nobody was searched for weapons on the way to Woodstock; that won’t be the case at Woodstock ’94. At Woodstock, the promoters were so busy putting up the stage that there was no time to construct a proper entrance where people could buy tickets. At Woodstock ‘94, no tickets will be available at the gate, and Winston Farm will be surrounded by an eight-foot fence patrolled by security guards.

A controversy over the presumed appearance of Guns N’ Roses also suggests that the promoters of Woodstock ’94 will be held to a different standard than if they were staging just another rock show. Because the very name Woodstock suggests all sorts of hippie ideals, citizens of the Woodstock Nation will be watching to see if the music at the festival is politically correct.

Opposition to Guns N’ Roses has brought together some strange bedfellows. Dragula, the preacher, sees the band as embodying all that is evil about rock ‘n’ roll. Sanders, who wrote a book about the Charles Manson murders, “The Family,” objects to the band recording one of Manson’s songs, and Axl Rose wearing his image on a T-shirt.

“There is a liberal/conservative schism in terms of who supports the festival,” explains Sanders, “but there are also plenty of liberals who aren’t too happy about a quarter-million 18- to 24-year-old people watching Guns N’ Roses.”

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Levon Helm of the Band, who has lived in Woodstock for most of the past 25 years, hopes that Woodstock ’94 will prove to be a peaceful tonic. “When the first festival came around,” he says, “things were a lot softer, and people were more tolerant of each other. I’d like to see this festival work out a little of our meanness.”

Helm would also like to see a “survivors slot” at Woodstock ’94 for the Band. He’s not the only one looking for a payday. The town of Saugerties has bargained the richest deal, with a cut of $4 per ticket fairly guaranteeing a $1-million windfall, an additional $150,000 to finance the permit process and $350,000 set aside for additional expenses. Ulster County will get $1.40 per ticket. The promoters will also take out a $50-million insurance policy to cover unexpected expenses incurred by both the town and Ulster County. Surrounding towns, including Woodstock, are also negotiating with the promoters to assume their costs.

“August is on Michael Lang,” jokes Sanders, “and I’m encouraging everybody in Woodstock to send him their therapy bills.” Sanders has his own piece of the action: Fantasy Records will release a live album called “The Fugs Celebrate the Woodstock Festival.”

The Howard Johnson Lodge directly across from Winston Farm has already sold out its rooms for the August weekend at a rate of $350 a night, up from a normal high of $80. Other motels are charging up to $1,200 for three nights. One company has reserved more than 600 area hotel rooms with an eye toward charging sky-high prices at festival time.

Day Yusko, a middle-aged hippie who cuts hair and sells a variety of crafts out of a storefront in Woodstock, would like to kick the money-changers out of the festival. Yusko, a longtime activist in the loose-knit clan known as the Rainbow Family, says that after the group’s annual Fourth of July gathering, many will head for Woodstock.

“People are going to come and unfold their tents wherever they can,” says Yusko, who predicts that many thousands will come to the area without tickets to the Saugerties festival. “People respond to the fact that a new religion was born at Woodstock based on the spirit of sharing and caring. And they also won’t want to miss the party of the century.”

The first to come, says Yusko, will be the “road dogs.” These nomadic hitchhikers, he explains, are the scouts who will seek out campsites in the area and comb the mountains abutting Winston Farm to look for free passage into the festival.

Lang is no road dog, but he still hopes that Woodstock ’94 will reflect the soul of the original. “There’s a tremendous amount of interest in the ‘60s again,” he says, “but instead of mere nostalgia, we want Woodstock ’94 to be a forum to pass along that spirit to a new generation.”

Woody and Louise Sperl have spent 47 quiet years in a small home that borders Winston Farm. Their children grew up playing on the farm’s vast fields, and now also live in houses that border the property that will host Woodstock ’94. “It’s certainly not going to be your average weekend,” says Louise who, like her husband, is 71, “but then, we’ve just been through a winter with 17 snowstorms.”

“If the music sounds halfway good,” continues Louise, “I’ll sit in the back yard. If not, I’ll turn on the air-conditioning and listen to Garth Brooks.”