Woodstock Returns Again on the Festivals 50th Anniversary
Woodstock Returns Once more on the Festival's 50th Anniversary
Michael Lang, one of the event'southward original producers, volition present Woodstock 50 in Watkins Glen, North.Y., with a focus on activism.
WOODSTOCK, N.Y. — When the start Woodstock music festival was held in 1969, bringing around 400,000 people to a dirty field in Bethel, N.Y., information technology focused the earth's attention on popular music's power to shape the culture.
Half a century later, in a music market already jammed with big-ticket festivals, could another Woodstock muster the same impact?
Michael Lang, 1 of the producers of the original event, is betting that information technology can. From Aug. 16 to 18 — almost exactly 50 years after the start Woodstock — he volition nowadays an official anniversary festival, Woodstock 50, in Watkins Glen, N.Y., with ambitions to not just concenter a huge multigenerational audience but to rally those fans around a message of social activism.
Mr. Lang, who at 74 even so has some of the cherubic look seen in the 1970 documentary "Woodstock" — though his curls are threaded with gray — said in an interview at the festival role in Woodstock that he is still booking the acts for the new show; he is hoping for a mixture of legacy bands, current pop and rap stars and, possibly, some news-making combinations.
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But his vision for Woodstock'southward 50th, he said, is clear: a large-calibration camping weekend combining music with a program of films, speakers and partnerships with organizations like Head count, which registers immature voters.
"Coachella's got its matter, as does Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza," Mr. Lang said. "Only I think they're all missing an opportunity to make a difference in the globe. They're all perfect places for social engagement and for fostering ideas, and I remember that's lost."
"We want this to be more than simply coming to a concert," he added. "And hopefully a lot of the bands will become part of this effort to get people to stand up upwards and make themselves heard, to get and out vote. And if they don't have a candidate that represents their feelings, to find one — or to run themselves."
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Yet activism plays a meaning part in a number of festivals. Ecology sustainability is central to Bonnaroo, for example, and this twelvemonth Jay-Z'due south Made in America Festival, in Philadelphia, has "Cause Hamlet," with some 56 charitable and activist organizations represented.
Woodstock 50 will be held in the fields surrounding the Watkins Glen International racetrack, where the Summer Jam in 1973 drew an estimated 600,000 people for the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers and the Band; more recently, it has been the site of two festivals by Phish.
For Woodstock, three main stages volition be supplemented by three smaller "neighborhoods," as Mr. Lang described them, with their own nutrient and programming.
Tickets? Mr. Lang and his team are withal working on that. Just they envision selling a maximum of around 100,000 three-day passes, with nearly attendees camping on site.
Every bit with its other ceremony years, Woodstock's 50th volition be widely historic and exploited in the media, with books, albums and a PBS documentary amidst the projects planned. But dissimilar the terminal Woodstock ceremony concerts, in 1994 and 1999, which Mr. Lang presented along with partners, the event at present faces severe competition from large-scale festivals effectually the country.
Coachella, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, the three biggest, are now highly developed make names, with the drawing ability to sell out well in advance; tickets for Coachella's 2 weekends, for example, sold out in a matter of hours concluding calendar week.
There is even a competing Woodstock: the Bethel Woods Music and Culture Festival, over the same anniversary weekend — which volition also feature "TED-way talks" — will be held on the aforementioned grounds as the original, effectually 60 miles from the town of Woodstock. (The Watkins Glen site is further afield, near 30 miles west of Ithaca.)
For many concertgoers, another result is whether the Woodstock name itself was damaged by the 1999 festival, which was marred by fires, rioting and reports of sexual assail.
"It's non tainted," Mr. Lang said. "'99 was more like an MTV event than a Woodstock event, really. I accept some responsibleness for that. Information technology was also kind of an angry time in music."
And then there is the corporate consolidation of the concert business, which has grown especially intense over the final few years as two companies, Live Nation and AEG, compete to book major tours. Alive Nation is a partner in the Bethel Woods event.
"The manufacture has completely changed since 1999," said John Scher, the veteran concert promoter who was a partner with Mr. Lang on Woodstock '94 and '99. "The entrepreneurial spirit of 1969 doesn't exist anymore."
Mr. Lang declined to discuss the budget for Woodstock 50, simply festivals of its size typically spend tens of millions on talent alone.
"We paid $135,000 for all of our talent in 1969," Mr. Lang said. "Times accept inverse."
The festival is being financed past the Dentsu Custodianship Network, a unit of the Japanese advertising behemothic Dentsu; agencies within the Dentsu Aegis Network volition exist involved in marketing and selling sponsorships.
One reward for Woodstock fifty is that it is "official." Mr. Lang remains a partner in Woodstock Ventures, the company that controls the trademark rights, and licenses it for various products. The i Mr. Lang has been closest to is Woodstock Cannabis.
"Cannabis has ever been in our Dna," Mr. Lang said with a grinning; his first commercial venture, in 1966, was a head shop in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami.
Of the other immature men on the team that created Woodstock — Joel Rosenman, John Roberts and Artie Kornfeld — Rosenman is a partner in Woodstock Ventures, forth with the family unit of Roberts, who died in 2001. Kornfeld will render every bit a consultant and "spiritual adviser," Mr. Lang said.
Merchandise sales — particularly featuring the original Woodstock bird-and-guitar logo — provide i proxy for gauging the standing entreatment of the Woodstock brand. Dell Furano, the main executive of Epic Rights, who has handled official Woodstock trade for 15 years, said that he is expecting over $100 one thousand thousand in retail sales of Woodstock licensed products in 2019 — iv or v times that of non-ceremony years.
"In that location's every type of necktie-dye. Children's products. Dog products. Speakers, vino, cannabis," Mr. Furano said in an interview. "The appeal is multigenerational."
In 1969, the mud, the tie-dye and the idealism were all catalysts in creating what the original festival had promised: three days of peace and music. Mr. Lang said that the divisiveness of the current political climate chosen for that once over again.
"It just seems similar it'southward a perfect fourth dimension," he said, "for a Woodstock kind of reminder."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/arts/music/woodstock-50th-anniversary-festival.html
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