Michael Lang, concert impresario and the one who helped to create the iconic, world-defining 1969 music festival Woodstock died Saturday night at Sloan Kettering in New York. He was 77.
Michael Pagnotta, a rep for Lang and longtime family friend, confirmed the promoter’s death to Rolling Stone,adding that the cause was a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Lang, who was previously involved in the promotion of 1968 Miami Pop festival and music promoter Artie Cornfeld, also co-created Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Famously known as “Three Days of Peace and Music,” the upstate New York festival drew up to 400,000 people to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, NY and featured dozens of rock’s biggest names, including Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Who, Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
Lang was just 24 when he helped create the festival. This was partly due to the documentary about the event that was released in the next year. Over the years, Lang’s name became synonymous with the Woodstock brand, as the promoter helped helm subsequent iterations of the festival in 1994 and 1999. (When Pollstar asked Lang in 2019 what it’s like to be the “Woodstock poster child for eternity,”He responded, “Life is full of experiences, and not everything works out. But you keep trying or nothing works out … That’s always been my attitude.”) A 50th anniversary concert in 2019 was mired in controversy and legal issues and was canceled before it could go on.
Lang, a native New Yorker moved to Coconut Grove in the late 1960s, opening a head shop. “The climate is perfect, people are into a stimulating variety of artistic things and there was no place for them to get together,” Lang said in author Ellen Sanders’ 1973 book Trips: Rock Life in Sixties. The same ethos was applied to music festivals starting with the Miami Pop Fest in May 1968. This festival was attended by over 25,000 people and featured performances by Jimi Hendrix as well as John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, and the Mothers of Invention.
Lang returned to New York after meeting Kornfeld, who was then vice president at Capitol Records. They started Woodstock Ventures together with Roberts, Rosenman. After a series of planned locations fell through, the quartet was famously able to organize the festival at the 600-acre farm of Max Yasgur, a dairy farmer in Bethel, NY immortalized in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s 1970 hit “Woodstock.”In 2004, the event was awarded a spot on Rolling Stone‘s “50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll.”
“We thought we were all individual, scattered hippies,”David Crosby – Rolling Stone2004 “When we got there, we said, ‘Wait a minute, this is a lot bigger than we thought.’ We flew in there by helicopter and saw the New York State Thruway at a dead stop for 20 miles and a gigantic crowd of at least half a million people. You couldn’t really wrap your mind around how many people were there. It had never happened before, and it was sort of like having aliens land.”
“It was incredible,” added Carlos Santana. “I’ll never forget the way the music sounded bouncing up against a field of bodies.”
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