Politically speaking, Woodstock shall be remembered as "Woodstock Nation" where 400,000 people participated in the greatest love-in (be-in) of all time. It was a time of experimentation in lifestyles, radical politics, drugs, and communal living. Margaret Mead who was a writer for Redbook and a participant at Woodstock said, "what started out as a disaster turned into a miracle and you could tell when you listened to those who has been there, you heard the wonder in their voices and saw it in their eyes and they said, "we were all there together. It was beautiful."

Even before the acres of trash had been bagged and hauled away and the last cars had been cleared from the parking lot that Route 17 had become, the Woodstock Festival of Music and Art and Aquarian Exposition of August 1969 had already achieved legendary status. People were talking about a Woodstock Nation. "Three days of peace and music," we heard that phrase over and over and over and...

 The original concept was for 100,000 or so to camp out on a sylvan glade in upstate New York for a weekend blast of great music and carnival rides. Long before the summer, the promoters had been denied permits for the original site in Wallkill. A hasty scramble led them to the now famous Yasgur's Farm in Bethel. The Festival never was in Woodstock, not even within walking distance.

 The woefully understaffed and poorly planned extravaganza may be remembered as the most successful fiasco in the history of entertainment. Unlike the pre-packaged Summer Jam at Watkins Glen in 1973, meant to accommodate the hundreds of thousands who showed up, the Woodstock Festival was never intended to be the monstrosity it became.

 When the promoters failed to erect a chain-link fence around the concert area in time for the weekend throng, WNEW-FM, and then several other so-called underground rock stations in New York City, began announcing that it was a free concert, and that's when zillions of long-hairs descended upon the sleepy community of White Lake, shutting down every roadway for a twenty mile radius and creating the third largest city in the entire state! History records that over a million and a half people arrived at that chaotic crossroads, but only (only?) 500,000 or so remained for their three days of peace and music, and less than a quarter of those were bona fide ticket holders.

 It has been noted by some cultural historians that the Woodstock Aquarian Exposition of August 1969 was actually the culmination of an era rather than the beginning. And a short-though glorious-era it was. More than the greatest concert in the twilight of rock's Golden Age, it was in fact the Mother of all Be-ins, and as such spawned a little known subculture that continues through to this day, the Rainbow Family. More about that later.

 The term "Be-in," and later "Love-in," was a play on words based on the teach-ins and sit-ins, techniques developed during the Civil Rights protests of the 1960's. The first "Human Be-in" took place as a 1966 New Year's Day celebration in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The Be-in, in turn, evolved from the so-called Trips Festivals and Electric Kool Aid Acid Tests being conducted in various dance halls in and around San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district.

 And there was Acid. Until 1968 LSD was perfectly legal, and through the combined efforts of author Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), his wild band of cohorts dubbed The Merry Pranksters, a basement chemist known to one and all as Owsley, creator of Purple Haze and Orange Sunshine, and a psychedelic rock band calling itself the Grateful Dead, a growing youth culture in the Bay City was increasingly experimenting with new models for group experience.

 The standard rock concert format had busted out, like just about everything else in the pop scene. It had become a more participatory event, with an obscured Fourth Wall, with strange new sounds throbbing to pulsating light shows meant to emulate the visual sensations of LSD. The music coming out of San Francisco at the time came to be called Acid Rock, and the Trips Festivals and Acid Tests were social laboratories mixing up new forms of entertainment.

 By the time of the New Year's Human Be-in, the freshly tuned-in, turned-on heads of San Francisco had given birth to a whole new social phenomenon: the Hippies. The definitive description was provided in a 1967 article in Ramparts, the glossy, colorful magazine devoted to the preoccupations of the Ultra Left. According to the Ramparts story, 60's Hippies were to the Beatniks of the 1950's like 60's Astronauts were to the flying aces of WW I. This was a whole new song fueled by acid and other powerful hallucinogens, and set to the tune of wailing guitar feedback.

 The Hippies relished group experience. Along with gaily colorful clothing, beads, feathers, and hair-any-way-you-please, they touted free love, communal living, Asian philosophy and the occult. Their anthem was summed up in Jesse Colin Young's lyrics "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try and love one another right now." And many of those long hairs really believed in all that peace and love stuff, or tried to. In any case, it was a long ways from James Dean's Rebel without a Cause and Marlon Brando's Wild One.

 New York picked up on the Hippie thing about a year or so after the San Francisco Be-in, with a significant influx of long haired youth into Greenwich Village, the East Village and the Lower East Side and by 1967, a thriving Flower Power thing was happening in Lower Manhattan. On Easter Sunday 1967 the first New York Be-in was held on the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, several thousand long hairs singing and playing and toking and drinking that Yago San'Gria wine. It was the first time the Hippies of New York had gathered in one place at one time and could see for themselves that there was plenty of 'em out there.

 Tompkins Square Park, in the heart of the East Village, became a central gathering place. In 1967, the City sponsored a series of free concerts in that park featuring the likes of Richie Havens and the Grateful Dead. It was following the Dead show, on Memorial Day of '67, that the police engaged in the first of many confrontations with the Hippies.

 By all accounts the long hairs were simply having a spontaneous drum jam, when New York's Finest showed up in great numbers and ordered the assembled youths to disperse. The ensuing melee caused dozens of injuries and lingering ill will between the Cops and the Kids.

 Confrontations between cops and kids occurred in cities across the nation, reaching a nadir with the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago when thousands of long haired youths-and anyone else who happened to be in the way-were clubbed by nightstick wielding officers in a feeding frenzy of oppression.

 Throughout that exquisite Summer of Love, 1967, and on into that pinnacle year of 1968, it seemed to many that the Hippie thing was a real movement, a force in the society, and that a new culture was emerging from the dead ashes of the Eisenhower world of the older generation. Looked like we had ourselves a revolution. Hippies could see that they were apparently growing in number. They could easily spot one another, with their distinct costume, their own lingo, even a hand gesture-the Peace Sign-to punctuate their mutual greetings.

 The Woodstock Festival proved without doubt, and for all time, that the long haired Hippie thing had indeed influenced an entire generation. Social historians suggest that very few of the horde that descended on Yasgur's Farm lived communally in the open free love lifestyle of the classic Hippie. In fact, Woodstock marks the acknowledgement that the general culture was taking on the affects of what started as a very few party-hearty acid heads from San Francisco. By 1969, speed and heroin had infiltrated and practically destroyed the Hippie neighborhoods of San Francisco and New York. Noting the blatant commercialization of Flower Power, a mock funeral was held in Frisco mourning the Death of the Hippie.

 So three days of peace? Well, if you don't count the numerous assaults and flared tempers, the concession stand that almost got torn down, the youth crushed by a backhoe in his sleeping bag, the handful of dysfunctional porta-potties, woefully inadequate for the amount of human waste generated that weekend, and the gargantuan mountain of garbage. The cops left the kids alone-far too many kids and only a handful of cops. Very public drug dealing, nudity and sex pervaded the scene.

 "It was chaos, wasn't it?" Pete Townshend of the Who is quoted as saying. "What was going on off the stage was just beyond comprehension-stretchers, and dead bodies, and people throwing up, and people having bad trips... I thought the whole of America had gone mad." He was not alone in his impressions. Remember that twice as many people left than stayed in that immense pit of mud and sheep manure.

 For all the great music-and it was truly one of the greatest musical events in all of rock 'n' roll-it was a thorough mess in the down to earth details, reflecting frightening implications for a hedonistic future of anarchistic chaos. Interestingly, away from the madhouse of humanity swarming over the hill surrounding the stage, through trails in the woods and along some of the roadways, the Hog Farm and other communal groups had set up camp kitchens, water stations and areas of relaxation and friendship.

 It was these quiet, unheralded moments that's the real legacy of Woodstock. Those camp kitchens and water stations evolved into the annual Gathering of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, which has been bringing tens of thousands to the National Forests every summer since 1971. These annual Gatherings embody the true spirit of the Hippie thing: peace and love and sharing-and the Gatherings are entirely free, no admission charged.

 So, while a quarter of a million revellers head to Saugerties, forking over their $150 ticket price-the original costs was $18-for "Woodstock II, the Re-union," the real reunion already took place at the Rainbow Gathering in a forest in Wyoming... but that's a myth for another time.

 The Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969 drew more than 450,000 people to a pasture in Sullivan County. For four days, the site became a countercultural mini-nation in which minds were open, drugs were all but legal and love was "free". The music began Friday afternoon at 5:07pm August 15 and continued until mid-morning Monday August 18. The festival closed the New York State Thruway and created one of the nation's worst traffic jams. It also inspired a slew of local and state laws to ensure that nothing like it would ever happen again.

 Woodstock, like only a handful of historical events, has become part of the cultural lexicon. As Watergate is the codeword for a national crisis of confidence and Waterloo stands for ignominious defeat, Woodstock has become an instant adjective denoting youthful hedonism and 60's excess. "What we had here was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence," said Bethel town historian Bert Feldman. "Dickens said it first: 'It was the best of times. It was the worst of times'. It's an amalgam that will never be reproduced again."

 Gathered that weekend in 1969 were liars and lovers, prophets and profiteers. They made love, they made money and they made a little history. Arnold Skolnick, the artist who designed Woodstock's dove-and-guitar symbol, described it this way: "Something was tapped, a nerve, in this country. And everybody just came."

 The counterculture's biggest bash - it ultimately cost more than $2.4 million - was sponsored by four very different, and very young, men: John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang. The oldest of the four was 26. John Roberts supplied the money. He was heir to a drugstore and toothpaste manufacturing fortune. He had a multimillion-dollar trust fund, a University of Pennsylvania degree and a lieutenant's commission in the Army. He had seen exactly one rock concert, by the Beach Boys.

 Robert's slightly hipper friend, Joel Rosenman, the son of a prominent Long Island orthodontist, had just graduated from Yale Law School. In 1967, the mustachioed Rosenman, 24, was playing guitar for a lounge band in motels from Long Island to Las Vegas.

 Roberts and Rosenman met on a golf course in the fall of 1966. By winter 1967, they shared an apartment and were trying to figure out what they ought to do with the rest of their lives. They had one idea: to create a screwball situation comedy for television, kind of like a male version of "I Love Lucy".

 "It was an office comedy about two pals with more money than brains and a thirst for adventure." Rosenman said. "Every week they would get into a different business venture in some nutty scheme. And every week they would be rescued in the nick of time from their fate."

 To get plot ideas for their sitcom, Roberts and Rosenman put a classified ad in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times in March 1968: "Young Men With Unlimited Capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions." They got thousands of replies, including one for biodegradable golf balls. Another seemed strange enough to work as a real business venture; Ski-bobs, bicycles on skis that were a fad in Europe. Roberts and Rosenman researched the idea before abandoning it. In the process, the two went from would-be television writers to wanna-be venture capitalists. "Somehow, we became the characters in our own show," Rosenman said.

 Artie Kornfield, 25, wore a suit, but the lapels were a little wide and his hair brushed the top of his ears. He was a vice president at Capitol Records. He smoked hash in the office and was the company's connection with the rockers who were starting to sell millions of records. Kornfeld had written maybe 30 hit singles, among them "Dead Man's Curve," recorded by Jan and Dean. He also wrote songs and produced the music for the Cowsills.

 Michael Lang didn't wear shoes very often. Friends described him as a cosmic pixie, with a head full of curly black hair that bounced to his shoulders. At 23, he owned what may have been the first head shop in the state of Florida. In 1968, Lang had produced one of the biggest rock shows ever, the two-day Miami Pop Festival, which drew 40,000 people. At 24, Lang was the manager of a rock group called Train, which he wanted to sign to a record deal. He bought his proposal to Kornfeld at Capitol Records in late December 1968.

 Lang knew Kornfeld had grown up in Bensonhurst, Queens, like he had. Lang got an appointment by telling the record company's receptionist that he was "from the neighborhood." The two hit it off immediately. Not long after they met, Lang moved in with Kornfeld and his wife, Linda. The three had rambling, all-night conversations, fueled by a few joints, in their New York City apartment.

 One of their ideas was for a cultural exposition/rock concert/extravaganza. Another was for a recording studio, to be tucked off in the woods more than 100 miles from Manhattan in a town called Woodstock. The location would reflect the back-to-the-land spirit of the counterculture. Besides, the Ulster County town had been an artists' mecca for a century. By the late 1960s, musicians like Bob Dylan, The Band, Tim Hardin, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were moving to the area and wanted a state-of-the-art studio.

 Lang and Kornfeld were searching for seed money for the festival and money to build the recording studio. They never saw the "young men with unlimited capital" ad, but their lawyer recommended they talk to Roberts and Rosenman. The four met in February 1969. "We met with them in their apartment on 83rd Street in a high-rise," Lang recalls. "They were kind of preppy. Today, I guess they'd be yuppies. They were wearing suits. Artie did most of the talking, because I think they seemed puzzled by me. They were curious about the counterculture, and they were somewhat interested in the project. They wanted a written proposal, which we had but we didn't bring with us. We told them that we would meet again with a budget for the festival.

 To this day, the founders of Woodstock disagree on who came up with the original idea for the concert. And, dulled by time, competition and countess retelling, no one recollection is consistent. Lang and Kornfeld say Woodstock was always planned as the largest music festival ever held. At the second meeting, Lang recalls discussing a budget of $500,000 and attendance of 100,000. Lang said he had started looking at festival sites in the fall of 1968, which would have been well before he'd hooked up with Kornfeld or Roberts and Rosenman. But Rosenman and Roberts maintain that they were the driving force behind the festival. As Rosenman and Roberts recall it, Kornfeld and Lang primarily wanted a studio, hyped by a party for rock'n'roll critics and record company executives. "We would have cocktails and canapes in a tent or something," Rosenman said. "We'd send limos down to New York to pick everyone up. Tim Hardin or someone could sing. Maybe, if we were lucky, Joan Baez would get up and do a couple of songs."

 At some point, Rosenman and Roberts focused on the party idea and decided that it really ought to be a rock concert. "We made a deal," Rosenman said. "We'd have the party, and the profits from the party would be used to pay for the recording studio. Ultimately, we had the money, so what we said went."

 By the end of their third meeting, the little party up in Woodstock had snowballed into a bucolic concert for 50,000 people, the world's biggest rock'n'roll show. The four partners formed a corporation in March. Each held 25 percent. The company was called Woodstock Ventures, Inc., after the hip little Ulster County town where Dylan lived.

 The Woodstock Ventures team scurried to find a site. Real estate agents across the mid-Hudson were scouring the countryside for land to rent for just a few months. Feelers went out in Rockland County, then in Orange. For $10,000, Woodstock Ventures had leased a tract of land in the Town of Wallkill owned by Howard Mills, Jr. "It was a Sunday in late March," Rosenman said. "We drove up to Wallkill and saw the industrial park. We talked to Howard Mills and we made a deal." "The vibes weren't right there. It was an industrial park," Roberts interjected. "I just said, 'We gotta have a site now.'"

 The 300-acre Mills Industrial Park offered perfect access. It was less than a mile from Route 17, which hooked into the New York State Thruway, and it was right off Route 211, a major local thoroughfare. It has the essentials, electricity and water lines.

 The land was zoned for industry; among the permitted uses were cultural exhibitions and concerts. The promoters approached the town planning board and were given a verbal go-ahead because of the zoning. Nonetheless, Lang was unhappy with the site. It was missing the back-to-the-land ambience Woodstock Ventures was selling. "I hated Wallkill," Lang said. Ventures set to work on the Mills property, all the while searching for an alternative.

 Rosenman told Wallkill officials in late March or early April that the concert would feature Jazz bands and folk singers. He also said that 50,000 people would attend if they were lucky. Town Supervisor Jack Schlosser thought something was fishy. "More than anything else, I really feel they were deliberately misleading the town," Schlosser said. "The point is, they were less than truthful about the numbers. I became more and more aware, as discussions with them progressed, they did not really know what they were doing. I was in the Army when divisions were 40,000 or 50,000 men," he said. "Christ almighty, the logistics involved in moving men around... I said at one point, 'I don't care if was a convention of 50,000 ministers," I would have felt the same way."

 In the cultural-political atmosphere of 1969, promoters Kornfeld and Lang knew it was important to pitch Woodstock in a way that would appeal to their peer's sense of independence. Lang wanted to call the festival an "Aquarian Exposition," capitalizing on the zodiacal reference from the musical "Hair". He had an ornate poster designed, featuring the water-bearer.

 By early April, the promoters were carefully cultivating the Woodstock image in the underground press, in publications like the Village Voice and Rolling Stone magazine. Ads began to run in The New York Times and The Times Herald-Record in May. For Kornfeld, Woodstock wasn't a matter of building stages, signing acts or even selling tickets. For him, the festival was always a state of mind, a happening that would exemplify the generation. The event's publicity shrewdly appropriated the counterculture's symbols and catch phrases. "The cool PR image was intentional," he said.

 The group settled on the concrete slogan of "Three Days of Peace and Music" and downplayed the highly conceptual theme of Aquarius. The promoters figured "peace" would link the anti-war sentiment to the rock concert. They also wanted to avoid any violence and figured that a slogan with "peace" in it would help keep order.

 The Woodstock dove is really a catbird; originally, it perched on a flute. "I was staying on Shelter Island off Long Island, and I was drawing catbirds all the time," said artist Arnold Skolnick. "As soon as Ira Arnold (a copywriter on the project) called with the copy-approved 'Three Days of Peace and Music,' I just took the razor blade and cut that catbird out of the sketchpad I was using. "First, it sat on a flute. I was listening to jazz at the time, and I guess that's why. But anyway, it sat on a flute for a day, and I finally ended up putting it on a guitar."

 Melanie Safka had a song on the radio called "Beautiful People." An extremely hip DJ named Roscoe on WNEW-FM played it. One day, Melanie ran into a curly-haired music-business guy named Michael Lang, who was talking about a festival he was producing. When Melanie asked if she could play there, Lang's answer was a very laid-back, "Sure." "I thought it would be very low key," recalled Melanie.

 Woodstock Ventures was trying to book the biggest rock'n'roll bands in America, but the rockers were reluctant to sign with an untested outfit that might be unable to deliver. "To get the contracts, we had to have the credibility, and to get the credibility, we had to have the contracts," Rosenman said. Ventures solved the problem by promising paychecks unheard of in 1969. The big breakthrough came with the signing of the top psychedelic band of the day, The Jefferson Airplane, for the incredible sum of $12,000. The Airplane usually took gigs for $5,000 to $6,000. Creedence Clearwater Revival signed for $11,500. The Who then came in for $12,500. The rest of the acts started to fall in line. In all, Ventures spent $180,000 on talent. "I made a decision that we needed three major acts, and I told them I didn't care what it cost," Lang said. "If they had been asking $5,000, I'd say, 'Pay 'em $10,000.' So we paid the deposits, signed the contracts, and that was it: instant credibility."

 In the spring of 1969, John Sebastian's career was on hold. From 1965 to 1967, Sebastian's band, the Lovin' Spoonful, had cranked out hit after hit - "Do You Believe in Magic," "You Didn't Have To Be So Nice," "Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind," "(What a Day For a) Daydream" and "Summer In The City." But in 1967, after the Lovin' Spoonful appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show", things began to go wrong. Two band members were busted for pot possession and left the group. Their replacements never quite fit in. In 1968, the group broke up, and Sebastian tried going solo. But his performing career wasn't taking off. So, in the spring of 1969, Sebastian headed west to do a little soul searching. He ended up at a California commune where the hippies made money by making brightly colored shirts and jackets by a process they called tie-dye.

 The residents of Wallkill had heard of hippies, drugs and rock concerts, and after the Woodstock advertising hit The New York Times, The Times Herald-Record and the radio stations, local residents knew that a three-day rock show, maybe the biggest ever, was coming. Besides, Woodstock Venture's employees sure looked like hippies. In the minds of many people, long hair and shabby clothes were associated with left-wing politics and drug use. The new ideas about re-ordering society were threatening to many people. In Wallkill, those feelings were unleashed upon Mills and his family. Residents would stop Mills at church to complain. Ventures tried to head off some of the complaints by hiring Wes Pomeroy, a former top assistant at the Justice Department, to head the security detail. A minister, the Rev. Donald Ganoung, was put on the payroll to head up local relations.

 Allan Markoff watched the two freaks walk into his store in late April or early May. They were Lang and his buddy, Stan Goldstein. Goldstein, 35, had been one of the organizers of the 1968 Miami Pop Festival. For Woodstock, he was coordinator of campgrounds. "They wanted me to design a sound system for 50,000 or so people," said Markoff, who owned the only stereo store in Middletown, the Audio Center on North Street. "They said there could even be 100,000, might even go to 150,000."

 He thought Lang and Goldstein were nuts. "There had never been a concert with 50,000; that was unbelievable," Markoff said. "Now, 100,000, that was impossible. It's tantamount to doing a sound system for 30 million people today." Markoff, then 24, was the only local resident listed in the Audio Engineering Society Magazine. Lang and Goldstein had picked his name out of the magazine; suddenly, Markoff was responsible for gathering sound gear for the greatest show on earth. He remembers one characteristic of the sound system. At the amplifier's lowest setting, the Woodstock speakers would cause pain for anyone standing within 10 feet.

 Markoff had doubts about the sanity of the venture until he saw the promoters' office in a barn on the Mills' land. "That's when I saw all these people on these phones, with a switchboard," Markoff said. "When I saw that, I said, 'Hey, this could really happen.'"

 Rosenman and Roberts couldn't entice any of the big movie studios into filming their weekend upstate. So they got Michael Wadleigh. Before Woodstock, rock documentation meant obscurity and few profits. A year before Woodstock, Monterey Pop had fizzled at the box office, making movie execs skittish over the idea of funding another rock film. During the summer of Woodstock, Wadleigh, 27, was gaining a reputation as a solid cameraman and director of independent films. Two years earlier, he had dropped out of Columbia University of Physicians and Surgeons, where he was studying to be a neurologist. Since then, he'd spent his time filming on the urban streets, the main battlefield for the cultural skirmishes of the 1960s. He'd filmed Martin Luther King Jr. He'd filmed Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern talking to middle Americans on the campaign trail in '68.

 Wadleigh was experimenting with using rock'n'roll in his films as an adjunct to the day's social and political themes. He was also working with multiple images to make documentaries more entertaining than those featuring a bunch of talking heads. And then the Woodstock boys came to his door. Their idea was irresistible. The money was not. Wadleigh went for it anyway.

 Goldstein went alone to his first town board meeting in Wallkill. "This was before we knew we had problems," he said. "It was probably in June. We had a full house. No more than 150 people. There were some accusations. Someone made some references to the Chicago convention. That it was young people, and this is the way the youth reacted, and that's what we could expect in our community. (Wallkill Supervisor Jack) Schlosser said that Mayor Daley knew how to handle that. Then I lost my temper. I said there was no need for the violence and that (the police) reaction caused the violence. I said that Daley ran one of the most corrupt political machines in history."

 Schlosser, who attended the Chicago convention, didn't recall such a specific exchange about Daley. He did remember the convention, however. "I saw these people throw golf clubs with nails in them," he said of the Chicago protesters. "I saw them throw excretion. The police, while I was there at least, showed remarkable restraint." As the town meetings and the weeks wore on, the confrontation between Ventures and the residents of Wallkill got worse. Woodstock's landlord, Howard Mills, was getting anonymous phone calls. The police were called, but the culprits never were identified, much less caught. "They threatened to blow up his house," Goldstein said. "There were red faces and tempers flaring. People driven by fear to very strange things. They raise their voices and say stupid things they would never ordinarily say." To this day, Howard Mills will not discuss how his neighbors turned against him in 1969. "I know that it is a part of history, but I don't want to bother about it," Mills said.