Michael Lang

It's a life experience that happens only once.

So Michael Lang, promoter, kept coming in and saying, you know, here comes 8 o'clock.

Hey, man, you guys, give us another hour, man.

So we're behind.

So I got my first taste of the legal business in the music area and getting a cease and desist letter from the guys who put Woodstock on.

Now, it's interesting that years later, I became friends with them and indeed became very good friends with Michael Lang.

And we put on a 25th anniversary and a 30th anniversary of Woodstock in 94 and 99.

So we stopped calling it Woodstock Revisited, but I kept selling the tickets.

Well, I was there for two weeks before it started.

Michael Lang hired me to fly out there and just photograph all the building and, you know, getting the campsites ready.

The hog farm from New Mexico was there readying the camping grounds and You know, carpenters, hippie carpenters who are building the big platform stage at the bottom of that hill at Yazgar's Farm.

And I just walked around all day taking photos of whatever was happening, just documenting, you know.

We're going to have to do a nine-hour follow-up, I think.

Was there a word about it? Because you already knew Michael Lang personally for some time before it stuck.

So you knew that he was trying to put this festival together and were following the

news.

Everything was just barely with my dad and me.

It always happened one way or the other, but we made it work.

At one point you were talking about Michael Lang running a record label called Just Sunshine.

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and I was reading it at around the same time I was reading a book called The Road to Woodstock by Michael Lang, who was one of the, uh-

Yeah

... who was the organizer of the original Woodstock.

Like, I know you kind of...

That's that the idea kind of came to you from reading these multiple different books.

And also I love that you mentioned Michael Lang, because he does make a little cameo- [laughs]

Yes, he does.

Like every couple of years, I'll go back and read it just because it's been long enough and I can enjoy it again from, you know, without having, you know, it be completely fresh in my mind.

And I was rereading Bram Stoker's Dracula sort of around the same time I was reading Michael Lang's The Road to Woodstock.

So Michael Lang was the organizer of the original festival.

And it was a lot about how they put the festival on, you know, convincing townspeople, finding a location, you know, the bands and all this other stuff.

And somehow the synapses crossed and Woodstock became, you know, haha, wood stake.

Let me not jump the gun here.

Right.

But one thing that stood out, you talked about reading Michael Lang's biography, you talked about working on your own documentary about Vietnamese And one of the things that stood out when reading it was it wasn't just this conflict between like the supernatural and, you know, hippies and whatnot, but also the like cultural conservatism as well.

Yeah.

So it was organized by four guys: Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, Joel Rosenman, and John Roberts.

And one of them had been, like a, like a concert promoter in the past.

So they ha- they had a l- a little bit of experience with, like, music festivals.

in the Un- in, in the United States and beyond.

Yeah, it was quite interesting, 'cause I know, I think Michael Lang, who was the man who sort of, he's becomes the, um, the kind of figurehead-

Mm

... um, was a complete disaster zone really.

Then came Woodstock.

And its organizer, Michael Lang, needed Bill Graham's help to secure West Coast bands like Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

Well, Bill Graham agreed, but said on one condition, that a new band that he discovered, Santana, would also be allowed to play.

So on August 16th, Carlos and his band made their way to Woodstock, New York for a destiny-changing performance.