Woodstock Festival

What a difference 25 years makes with the media. The press got caught short by the original Woodstock festival in 1969. Who knew it was going to be a cultural landmark? "None of the other writers wanted to go," recalls Atlantic Records President Danny Goldberg, who was assigned to the rock festival as a 19-year-old cub reporter for Billboard magazine. "I was excited to go, but the regular reviewers were into going to the Copacabana (nightclub) and getting free drinks."

Richie Havens, the veteran folk singer whose frenetic guitar strumming and impassioned vocals made him one of the defining voices and faces of Woodstock and 1960s pop music, died Monday of a heart attack at his home in Jersey City, N.J. He was 72. His death was confirmed by his booking agent, Tim Drake. The Brooklyn native with the powerful ripsaw voice galvanized rock fans as the opening act at Woodstock, the festival billed as "Three Days of Peace and Music" in upstate New York in August 1969.

It is hardly a mellow, tie-dyed happening. A quarter of a century after Woodstock, promoters are scrambling to leave little to chance this time on the fringes of this picturesque Hudson Valley village. Construction crews have built two huge tanks on the Winston Farm, each holding 1 million gallons of water. Workers have stretched 25,000 feet of pipes leading to drinking stations. Security personnel have erected more than 10 miles of chain-link fence surrounding the property.

Clearly, Woodstock was more than just a festival. For the more than 500,000 concertgoers who made the trip to that dairy farm in upstate New York 40 years ago, it was a three-day invocation that summoned up music as a shackle-busting experience, an uncorking of generational exuberance, aided along by a massive amount of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Director Ang Lee's experience with the event, however, was much more subdued but transformative nonetheless. It came via an old black-and-white TV. He was a 14-year-old middle schooler in Taiwan, studying docilely and relentlessly for his high-school entrance exam.

"It used to be us versus them. Then, we became them and the kids became us. Except, we're also still us . . . aren't we?" --Hector Lizzardi, site manager for Woodstock '94. * On a steamy summer morning, Woodstock II is busy being born. With a roar, Hector Lizzardi's Jeep bounces to the top of a grassy ridge and shudders to a halt. Behind the wheel, the ponytailed man with a '60s heart and a '90s bankroll points proudly to the green meadow below.

Richie Havens, the veteran folk singer whose frenetic guitar strumming and impassioned vocals made him one of the defining voices and faces of Woodstock and 1960s pop music, died Monday of a heart attack at his home in Jersey City, N.J. He was 72. His death was confirmed by his booking agent, Tim Drake. The Brooklyn native with the powerful ripsaw voice galvanized rock fans as the opening act at Woodstock, the festival billed as "Three Days of Peace and Music" in upstate New York in August 1969.

Folk singer Richie Havens, whose up-tempo rendition of George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun" was a musical centerpiece of the Woodstock festival 20 years ago, reportedly hopes to do a live reunion festival in Moscow that would feature such acts as John Sebastian (formerly of the Lovin' Spoonful), Joe Cocker and the newly risen Jefferson Airplane. Havens' production company would produce the concert special for MTV Networks, which operates the MTV and VH-1 all-music cable services.

Ten years from now, if someone puts on a "30 Years After Woodstock Festival" and The Times covers it, please don't send a pop critic again--send a human being. I perceived the "20 Years After" festival at Cal State Dominguez Hills on Aug. 19 as a birthday party held to celebrate Woodstock, not a concert intended to duplicate it. In his Aug. 21 article, " '20 Years After': Weak Woodstock Vibes," reviewer Chris Willman shouldn't have tried to measure the festival by counting births, rainfall, brown acid tabs or bodies (copulating or not)

Drug policy director William J. Bennett complained Tuesday about the "memory distortion" in the nostalgia that has welled up around the 20th anniversary of the Woodstock festival. The 45-year-old Bennett, a one-time guitar player and fan of early rock 'n' roll, recited what he called a "casualty list from Woodstock" of rock performers, including singer Janis Joplin, who died in later years from drug overdoses.

Woodstock, N.Y., is a short 17 miles from Bard College, home of the college's far-reaching Wagner festival. As I drove down from Albany International Airport to Bard, the town seemed an appropriate stop for lunch, not the least because Garden Cafe, in the village green, is reputed to be the best vegan restaurant in the region, and Wagner was a vegetarian. Not surprisingly, Woodstock is festooned with colorful reminders of the 40th anniversary of the famous "3 Days of Peace and Music" held about 70 miles away but known anyway as the Woodstock festival.

Woodstock, N.Y., is a short 17 miles from Bard College, home of the college's far-reaching Wagner festival. As I drove down from Albany International Airport to Bard, the town seemed an appropriate stop for lunch, not the least because Garden Cafe, in the village green, is reputed to be the best vegan restaurant in the region, and Wagner was a vegetarian. Not surprisingly, Woodstock is festooned with colorful reminders of the 40th anniversary of the famous "3 Days of Peace and Music" held about 70 miles away but known anyway as the Woodstock festival.

The statute of limitations should protect us from prosecution, so let the truth be told -- we used anti-poverty funds to buy the Frankly Dankly bus in the landmark summer of '69. One of our group still insists we "passed the hat" to pay for the thing. But he's a respectable lawyer now, so we'll allow him that fog of memory. Everyone else is willing to 'fess up that we dipped into money intended to help the poor to procure the oil-leaking school bus we saw sitting in a lot with a "For Sale" sign.

There is much truth to the argument that the landmark Woodstock festival functioned more as a turning point for the business of rock 'n' roll than for music itself. The photos of hundreds of thousands of young people gathered in a field in upstate New York that were sent around the world delivered a message that youth culture could be exceedingly lucrative.

When your last name is Yasgur, you get used to people asking: "Yasgur? As in that Yasgur?" And if you're Abigail Yasgur -- second cousin of the late Max Yasgur, who thrust the family name into the spotlight by lending his upstate New York dairy farm for the Woodstock festival -- the frequent queries make you proud enough to want to share the tale.

Jimi Hendrix's dive-bombing guitar runs on "The Star-Spangled Banner." Rain chants. Joe Cocker's chicken strut. The love, mud and three days of music. The Woodstock experience is a museum piece now. The Museum at Bethel Woods opens Monday on the site of the old dairy farm northwest of New York City that was trampled under by some 400,000 people on the wet weekend of Aug. 15-17, 1969. Part of a $100-million music and arts center, it tells the story of Woodstock. Mocked recently by conservatives as a "hippie museum," the exhibits actually give a thorough look at the generation-defining concert and the noisy decade that led up to it. Displays include a run of the chain link fence placed around the concert site in a futile bid to keep out freeloaders and a plaque telling the story of Leni Binder, a local woman who made peanut butter sandwiches for the concert kids.

A museum dedicated to Woodstock will rock on even though the federal government pulled $1 million in funding for the memorial to the hippie fest. Officially, the Woodstock museum is known as the Museum at Bethel Woods, and is to open next year. Bethel is the upstate town where organizers put on the three-day Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969.

*** VARIOUS ARTISTS "Woodstock 99" Epic We all know about the raging bonfire that the summer's Woodstock festival turned out to be, but the three-CD soundtrack (in stores Tuesday) aims to answer the musical question: Just how incendiary were the acts themselves? Fortunately for those who kept a safe distance from the mayhem, Woodstock 99 aimed to please, regardless of whether attendees leaned toward metal mosh music or soft-focus folk-pop.

Fans rushed the stage during a Pearl Jam concert at one of Europe's largest rock festivals Friday, crushing to death at least eight people and injuring three others, Danish police said. The injuries occurred while the rock band was performing on the main Orange Stage at the annual open-air Roskilde Festival near Copenhagen, the capital. "Several people were crushed or trampled to death," police said in a statement. The rush occurred at 11:40 p.m., police said. Members of Pearl Jam implored the crowd to move back because people were being pressed against the stage, and the message was repeated over the loudspeakers, Danish radio said.

Hippies used to say, if you remember Woodstock, you weren't really there. Republicans say presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton can forget about getting $1 million in taxpayer funds for a Woodstock museum. Sens. Clinton and Charles E. Schumer, Democrats from New York, want to earmark the federal money for a museum that would commemorate the 1969 music festival in their state.

Wanted: tie-dyed shirts, signs, guitars, snapshots, bits of trampled fence and other groovy artifacts from the 1969 Woodstock concert. The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts wants the artifacts for a museum honoring Woodstock and the '60s, which could open next year. A 4,800-seat concert pavilion at the former farm 80 miles northwest of New York City opened this summer.