Woodstock Ventures billed the concert as a "weekend in the country" - temporary commune. The ads ran in the newspapers, both establishment and underground, and on radio stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Texas and Washington, D.C. A concert ticket also bought a campsite. But even a commune requires some kind of organization. In late June, Goldstein called in the Hog Farm.

The Hog Farm started out as a communal pig farm in California; its members eventually bought land next to a Hopi Indian reservation in New Mexico. Its leader was a skinny, toothless hippie whose real name was Hugh Romney. He was a one-time beatnik comic who had changed his name to Wavy Gravy and held the wiseguy title of "Minister of Talk". "We brought in the Hog Farm to be our crowd interface," Goldstein explained. "We needed a specific group to be the exemplars for all to follow. We believed that the idea of sleeping outdoors under the stars would be very attractive to many people, but we knew damn well that the kind of people who were coming had never slept under the stars in their lives. We had to create a circumstance where they were cared for."

The Wallkill Zoning Board of Appeals officially banned Woodstock on July 15, 1969. To the applause of residents, board members said that the organizer's plans were incomplete. They also said outdoor toilets, such as those to be used at the concert, were illegal in Wallkill. Two weeks earlier, the town board had passed a law requiring a permit for any gathering of more than 5,000 people. "The law they passed excluded one thing and one thing only - Woodstock," said Al Romm, then-editor of The Times Herald-Record, which editorialized against the Wallkill law. Wallkill Supervisor Jack Schlosser denied that this was the intent.

The Wallkill board may have done Woodstock Ventures a favor. Publicity about what had happened reaped a bonanza of interest. Besides, if Woodstock had been staged in Wallkill, Lang said, the vibes would either have squelched the show or turned it into a riot. "I didn't want cops in gas masks showing up, and that was the atmosphere there," Lang said. "With all the tensions around it, it wouldn't have worked." Another Woodstock Ventures member, Lee Blumer, remembered the threats made in town. "They said they were going to shoot the first hippie that walked into town," said Blumer.

Kodak wanted cash, but the movie crew got no money upfront for film. So Wadleigh pulled $50,000 out of savings, both from his personal account and an account for his independent film business. During July, Wadleigh was out in Wyoming filming a movie about mountain climbing. When promoters lost the Wallkill site, Wadleigh cringed. "I had this feeling of absolute terror that it wasn't going to come off," Wadleigh said. "That feeling that someone could pull the plug out on us didn't go away until the music started."

Elliot Tiber read about Woodstock getting tossed out of Wallkill. Tiber's White Lake resort, the El Monaco, had 80 rooms, nearly all of them empty, and keeping it going was draining his savings. But for all of Tiber's troubles, he had one thing that was very valuable to Woodstock Ventures. He had a Bethel town permit to run a music festival. "I think it cost $12 or $8 or something like that," Tiber said."It was very vague. It just said I had permission to run an arts and music festival. That's it." The permit was for the White Lake Music and Arts Festival, a very, very small event that Tiber had dreamed up to increase business at the hotel. "We had a chamber music quartet, and I think we charged something like two bucks a day," he said. "There were maybe 150 people up there."

Tiber called Ventures, not even knowing who to ask for. Lang got the message and went out to White Lake the next day, which probably was July 18, to look at the El Monaco. Tiber's festival site was 15 swampy acres behind the resort. "Michael looked at that and said, 'This isn't big enough,'" Tiber recalled. "I said, 'Why don't we go see my friend Max Yasgur? He's been selling me milk and cheese for years. He's got a big farm out there in Bethel.'" While Lang waited, Tiber telephoned Yasgur about renting the field for $50 a day for a festival that might bring 5,000 people. "Max said to me, 'What's this, Elliot? Another one of your festivals that doesn't work out?'" Tiber said.

Yasgur met Lang in the alfalfa field. This time, Lang liked the lay of the land. "It was magic," Lang said. "It was perfect. The sloping bowl, a little rise for the stage. A lake in the background. The deal was sealed right there in the field. Max and I were walking on the rise above the bowl. When we started to talk business, he was figuring on how much he was going to lose in this crop and how much it was going to cost him to reseed the field. He was a sharp guy, ol' Max, and he was figuring everything up with a pencil and paper. He was wetting the tip of his pencil with his tongue. I remember shaking his hand, and that's the first time I noticed that he had only three fingers on his right hand. But his grip was like iron. He's cleared that land himself."

Yasgur was known across Sullivan County as a strong-willed man of his word. He'd gone to New York University and studied real estate law, but moved back to his family's dairy farm in the '40s. A few years later, Yasgur sold the family farm in Maplewood and moved to Bethel to expand. Throughout the '50s and '60s, Yasgur slowly built a dairy herd. By the time the pipe-smoking Yasgur was approached by Woodstock Ventures, he was the biggest milk producer in Sullivan County, and the Yasgur farm had delivery routes, a massive refrigeration complex and a pasteurization plant. The 600 acres that Ventures sought were only part of the Yasgur property, which extended along both sides of Route 17B in Bethel.

Within days after meeting Yasgur, Lang brought the rest of the Ventures crew up in eight limousines; by then, Yasgur was wise to Woodstock, and the price had gone up considerably. Woodstock Ventures kept all the negotiations secret, lest it repeat what had happened in Wallkill. At some point during the talks, Tiber and Lang went to dinner at the Lighthouse Restaurant, and Italian place just down Route 18B from El Monaco in White Lake. That's where the news leaked out. "While we were paying the check, the radio was on in the bar. The radio station out there, WVOS, announced that the festival was going to White Lake, " Tiber said. "The waiters or the waitresses must have called the radio station. We were just in shock. The bar was now empty. Michael just had a blank look. We all went into shock." On July 20, 1969, the world was talking about the first man to walk on the moon. But conversation in Bethel centered on this "Woodstock hippie festival." "I was used to fights, but I wasn't ready for this one, " Tiber said.

The Woodstock partners have since admitted that they were engaged in creative deception. They told Bethel officials that they were expecting 50,000 people, tops. All along they knew that Woodstock would draw far, far more. "I was pretty manipulative," Lang said. "The figure at Wallkill was 50,000, and we just stuck with it. I was planning on a quarter-million people, but we didn't want to scare anyone."

Ken Kesey's farm in Orefon was overrun with hippie acolytes. Kesey lived in Pleasant Hill, which became home base for his Merry Pranksters, the creators of the original Acid Tests in San Francisco. Kesey had bought the farm with the earnings from his two bestsellers, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1962) and "Sometimes a Great Notion" (1964). The fashion of the day was to share and share alike. But the horde was starting to bother even a founder of the counterculture.

As the Apollo 11 astronauts were strolling the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, the Pranksters were hearing from Wavy Gravy, whom they knew from the Acid Tests. The Hog Farmers said they were getting $1,700 to gather as many people together as possible and get them to Bethel. "Kesey was glad to get rid of everybody," said Ken Babbs, then 33 and the leader of the Pranksters' Woodstock squad. Babbs packed 40 hippies into five school buses. One was "The Bus" - the one later made famous by author Tom Wolfe in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." The Bus had a custom, psychedelic paint job and a Plexiglas bubble on top, and it was packed with sound gear. Its destination sign read: "Further." "While Neil Armstrong was taking a giant leap for mankind, we were starting to take a giant leap for Woodstock," Babbs said.

Max Yasgur had two concerns. "He thought a grave injustice had been done in Wallkill. And he wanted to make sure that he got the $75,000 before some other dairy farmer did," Rosenman said. "They were in no particular order. I'm not sure which was more important to him. Having said that, I'll say this about Max: He never hit us up for another dime after we paid him. I remember that every time we went over there, Max would hand you one of those little cartons of chocolate milk. Every time. We ended up with all these cartons of milk around the office."

Contracts for the use of land surrounding Yasgur's parcel ended up costing Ventures another $25,000. " We could have bought the land for what we rented it for," Lang said. Meanwhile, hand-lettered signs were being put up in the town of Bethel. They read: "Buy No Milk. Stop Max's Hippy Music Festival."

Lang had set a $15,000 ceiling for any act. But the hottest act in the country - guitarist Jimi Hendrix - wanted more. Hendrix had gotten a one-time fee of $150,000 for a concert earlier that summer in California. His manager was demanding that much to play Woodstock. But by July, Lang had some leverage too. He didn't need Hendrix to make the biggest concert of the year. If Hendrix wanted to come, he'd be welcome. "We paid Jimi Hendrix $32,000. He was the headliner, and that's what he wanted," Rosenman said. Then Ventures lied about the terms. "We told everyone that was because he was playing two sets at $16,000 each. We had to do that, or the Airplane would want more than $12,000." Lang set the bill so that folk acts like Joan Baez would play on Friday, the opening day. Rock'n'roll was saved for Saturday and Sunday. But Hendrix's one-and-only set was always to be the finale. His contract said no act could follow him.

Motel owner Tiber's new job was to be the local liasion for Woodstock Ventures in Bethel. He was paid $5,000 for a couple of month's work. Tiber was earning his money too. "The town meetings never drew more than flies before," Tiber said. "But then they were standing-room-only, maybe 300 people. Maybe it was that Michael was barefooted. He came off the helicopter with no shoes. I'd never experienced anything like that before, but that was the way he was. That was fine with me, but I think they didn't like it."

Bethel residents had read about the worries in Wallkill: drugs, traffic, sewage and water. Public fury mounted once more. A prominent Bethel resident approached Lang. He said he could grease the wheels of power and make sure Lang got the approvals he needed. All the fixer wanted was $10,000. Woodstock Ventures got the cash and put it in a paper bag. Lang won't name the man who solicited the bribe. But ultimately Woodstock Ventures would not pay off. "We were very concerned with karma," Lang said. "We thought that if we did pay someone off, that would be wrong and we would change the way things came out." The suggestion of a payoff galvanized Yasgur's support, Lang said. "At that point, he really became an ally, not just a spectator."

But there may have been a payoff, anyway. Rosenman wrote in a 1974 book that he issued a $2,500 check to a man who was demanding $10,000 to arrange local backing. Years later, Rosenman said some of the events in the book were hyped for dramatic tension. "And I honestly can't remember whether I wrote the check or not, " Rosenman said.

At least one of Woodstock's opponents also was approached to fix the deal. George Neuhaus was one of the old-style, old boy politicians in Bethel, in and out of the town supervisor's post for years. He thought Woodstock was being jammed down the throats of local people who didn't want it. That July, Neuhaus was approached by a man who wanted him to be a guide through the local political maze. Neuhaus wanted none of it. Like Lang, Neuhaus wouldn't identify the man, but both indicate it was the same individual. "It wasn't, per se, money, but he wanted to know if I could get the thing off the ground," Neuhaus recalled. "I was sitting on my porch. I threw him the hell off my property. I wouldn't have anything to do with it."

Bob Dylan was the only one of Lang's rock'n'roll heroes who hadn't signed a contract. The promoters had borrowed some of Dylan's mystique by naming their concert after his adopted home town, which was only 70 miles from Bethel. Dylan's backup group, The Band, was already signed. Lang figured that Dylan's appearance was a natural. So he made the pilgrimage to Dylan's Ulster County hideaway. "I went to see Bob Dylan about three weeks before the festival," Lang said. "I went with Bob Dacey, a friend of Dylan's, and we met in his house for a couple of hours. I told him what we were doing and told him, 'We'd love to have you there.' But he didn't come. I don't know why."

In late July, Woodstock Ventures obtained permit approvals from Bethel Town Attorney Frederick W.V. Schadt and building inspector Donald Clark. But, under orders from the town board, Clark never issued them. The board ordered Clark to post stop-work orders; the promoters tore the signs down with Clark's tacit approval. He felt he was being made the fall guy for the town. Schadt said that Woodstock's momentum was accelerating like a runaway train. "At that time, it had progressed so far, any kind of order to stop it would have just resulted in chaos, " he said. "Here you have thousands of people descending on the community. How in the world do you stop them?"

Ken Van Loan, the president of the Bethel Business Association, wasn't worried. He'd decided this festival could be a great boost for the depressed economy of the Catskills. "We talked to the county about promoting this thing," said Van Loan, who owned Ken's Garage in Kauneonga lake. "We told 'em it would be the biggest thing that ever came to the county."

As July became August, Vassmer's General Store in Kauneonga Lake was doing a great business in kegs of nails and cold cuts. The buyers were longhaired construction guys who were carving Yasgur's pasture into an amphitheater. " They told me, 'Mr. Vassmer, you ain't seen nothing yet,' and by golly, they were right," said Art Vassmer, the owner.

Abe Wagner knew that little Bethel, with a population of 3,900 souls, wasn't set to handle the coming flood of humanity. Two weeks before the festival, Wagner, 61, heard that Woodstock Ventures had already sold 180,000 tickets. Wagner, who owned a plumbing company and lived in Kauneonga Lake, was one of approximately 800 Bethel residents who signed a petition to stop the festival. "The people of Bethel were afraid of the influx of people on our small roads, afraid of the element of people who read the advertisements in the magazines that said, 'Come to Woodstock and do whatever you want to do because nobody will bother you,'" Wagner said.

By August, Elliot Tiber was getting anonymous phone calls. "They'd say that it'll never happen, that we will break your legs," Tiber said. "There was terrible name-calling. It was anti-Semitic and anti-hippies. It was dirty and filthy.

A week before the festival, Yasgur's farm didn't look much like a concert site. "It was like they were building a house, except there was a helicopter pad," Vassmer said. Vassmer had heard the nervous talk among his regular customers, especially when they heard the radio ads. "'I don't know about this,' they'd say," Vassmer recalled. "They'd say, 'Boy, when this thing comes, we're gonna be sorry.'" That same week, a group of outraged residents filed a lawsuit. It was settled within a few days; the promoters promised to add more portable toilets. "There was a lot of intrigue," Lang said. "I don't remember it all."

Those 800 petitioners weren't too happy with Bethel Supervisor Daniel J. Amatucci. "He didn't inform us about all the people until a week before the festival," Wagner remembered. "He turned around and threw it in the wastebasket without even looking at it." Wagner protester. Amatucci read it. Then he told Wagner it was too late.

Michael Lang gunned a shiny BSA motorcycle across a field of grass. He wore a leather vest on his shirtless back, and a fringed purse hung at his hip. A lit cigarette hung out of his mouth as he popped down the kickstand. It was early August 1969, and Lang commanded an army of workers throwing together the rock concert. A filmmaker came by to ask Lang some questions, freezing Lang, his motorcycle and his attitude forever in a movie moment that capures the careless bravado of youth. "Where are you gonna go from here?" the interviewer asked. "Are you gonna do another?" "If it works," Lang answered.

Ventures decided to try to win over the residents in Bethel. It sent out the Earthlight Theater to entertain local groups. It booked a rock band called Quill to do free performances. But Earthlight, an 18-member troupe, didn't do Shakespeare or Rodgers and Hammerstein. They did a musical comedy called "Sex. Y'all Come." They also stripped naked. Frequently.

On August 7, Ventures staged a pre-festival festival on a stage that was still under construction. Quill opened the show, and Bethel residents sat on the grass, expecting theater. Instead, the Earthlight Theater stripped and screamed obscenities at the shocked crowd. "They went from being suspicious to being convinced," Rosenman said.

Wavy Gravy rounded up 85 Hog Farmers and 15 Hopis. He donned a Smokey-the-Bear suit and armed himself with a bottle of seltzer and a rubber shovel. Then he and the barefooted, long haired Hog Farmers flew into John F. Kennedy International Airport. "We're the hippie police," Gravy announced as he and his entourage stepped off the plane on Monday, Aug. 11.

The opposition plotted a last-minute strategy to stop the show: a human barricade across Route 17B on the day before the concert. Tiber heard about the plan on Monday. "So, I go on national radio and said that they were trying to stop the show, " he said. "I didn't sleep well. About two o'clock in the morning, I wake up and I hear horns and guitars. This is on Tuesday morning. I look out, and there are five lanes of headlights all the way back. They'd started coming already."

Kornfeld made Warner Brothers an offer it couldn't refuse. It was Wednesday, two days before showtime. Ventures had to make a movie deal... now. All Kornfeld wanted was $100,000 to pay for film. The concert would take care of the acting, the lighting, the dialogue and the plot. "Michael Wadleigh was up there (at the site) waiting with (Martin) Scorsese," Kornfeld said. "All they needed was money for film. The contract was handwritten and signed by myself and Ted Ashley (of Warner Brothers). I told them, 'Hey, guys, there are going to be hundreds of thousands of people out there. It's a crap shoot: spend $100,000 and you might make millions. If it turns out to be a riot, then you'll have one of the best documentaries ever made."

Wadleigh rounded up a crew of about 100 from the New York Film scene, including Scorsese. Wadleigh couldn't pay them until much later, but he could get them inside the event of the summer. The crew signed on on a double-or-nothing basis. If the film made it, they'd get twice regular pay. If the film bombed, they'd lose. The crew got to Woodstock a few days before, driving up in Volkswagen Beetles and beat-up cars. Wadleigh's plot ran like this: Woodstock would be a modern-day Canterbury Tale, a pilgrimage back to the land. He wanted the film to be as much about the hippies who trekked to Woodstock as about the music on stage. He wanted the stories of the young people, their feelings about the Viet Nam War, about the times. The stories of the townspeople. These would make the film, not just the music.

Eight miles away, Times Herald-Record harness racing reporter John Szefc was working on a feature story at the Monticello Raceway. Then he caught a glimpse of the traffic out on Route 17B. It was 11am, more than 24 hours before the concert, and traffic was already backed up all the way down Route 17B to Route 17 - a distance of 10 miles. "That's when I knew this was going to be big. Really significant, " he said. Szefc's story that night was about the effect of the concert on the racetrack. Some bettors fought the traffic on Route 17B and managed to get to the windows. But the handle was down $60,000 from a typical weekend night in August.

By the afternoon of Thursday, August 14, Woodstock was an idyllic commune of 25,000 people. The Hog Farmers had built kitchens and shelters with two-by-fours and tarps. Their kids were swinging on a set of monkey bars built of lumber and tree limbs, jumping into a pile of hay at the bottom. Wavy Gravy recruited "responsible-looking" people and made them security guards. He handed out armbands and the secret password, which was "I forget." Down the slope, stands were ready to sell counterculture souvenirs: hand-woven belts, drug paraphernalia and headbands. Christmas tree lights were strung in the trees. Sawdust was strewn along the paths. Over the hill, carpenters were still banging nails into the main stage. The Pranksters and the Hog Farmers had built heir own alternative stage.

Prankster leader abbs acted as emcee, opening the stage to anyone who wanted to jam. The sound system was a space amplifier borrowed from the Grateful Dead. "Over the hill and into the woods we went," Babbs said. "We had the free school for the kids, the Free Kitchen and so, the Free Stage.

Woodstock 1969 ... Friday

The sticky-sweet smell of burning marijuana wafted into the open windows of the house in Bethel late Thursday night. The chirp and buzz of the insects suddenly gave way to the shuffle of sandaled feet. "It sounded like a parade," said the man who lived there. The young Bethel couple lived a quarter-mile from Yasgur's field. The wife, 22, was pregnant with the couple's second child, and the husband, 27, a salesman, had an important business meeting in Albany on Friday morning. But the couple wasn't budging from Bethel. When they awoke on the first of three days of peace and music, they looked out front. "Nothin' but cars and people. Saw a trooper. Ten kids were on the hood of his car," the husband said. They looked out back. "People were camping all over the yard," he added.

Producer Lang woke up Friday morning to find that something was missing....the ticket booths. Others had known for days, but Lang said that Friday morning was his first inkling that Woodstock would never collect a single dollar at the gate. " Tickets were being handled over in (Roberts') office," Lang said. "I just assumed that they were handling the booths, but they were never put in place." Van Loan, the cigar-smoking owner of Ken's Garage, had been hired two days before the festival to tow about two dozen ticket booths into position. "All we ever got to move was two or three," Van Loan recalled. "Each one we moved took longer and longer. There were too many people and cars and abandoned (vacant) tents blocking the way."

Abbie Hoffman was the head of the Yippies - the Youth International Party, the irreverent left-wing organization founded by Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner and Woodstock's Ed Sanders. Hoffman convinced the festival's producers to donate $10,000 to the Yippies - mainly by threatening to disrupt the proceedings. The political pranksters wanted the money to fund various community projects, including New York City storefronts they rented to shelter runaways and defense funds they established for the "politically oppressed."

Along with the Hog Farmers and other left-leaning groups, the Yippies set up "Movement City," their festival- within-a-festival, about a quarter-mile from the stage. Days before the festival, Hoffman and his lieutenant, Krassner, mimeographed thousands of flyers urging festival-goers not to pay. Of course, that issue became moot as soon as the fence went down. Krassner would later say that all attempts to politicize the three days of peace and love had evaporated. Krassner also recalled bringing a brand new white-fringed leather jacket to Woodstock. It was stolen from the Movement City tent.

Three school buses rolled up to Yasgur's farm late Friday morning and parked near Ventures headquarters, by the playground and the Freak-Out Tent on West Shore Road. Inside were more than 100 New York City police officers hand-picked by concert management for their street smarts and relaxed attitudes. In the days before the concert, the city police department had told its members that it would not sanction Woodstock work. The cops had been promised $50 a day. But when the officers arrived in Bethel, a more stringent warning awaited them. "The message was something to the effect of, 'If you participate in this, you may be subject to departmental censure,'" Feldman said. "So they stretched their legs, got back in the bus and went back to New York City."

Many stayed to work under assumed names. But they demanded that Woodstock Ventures increase their pay to $90 a day. Ventures paid it. "We had eight to nine guys on the payroll as Mickey Mouse and names like this," said Arthur Schubert, a waiter at the Concord Hotel and one of the directors of the security force.

Melanie Safka was supposed to sing, so she and her mother got in her mom's 1968 burgundy Pontiac Bonneville and headed upstate. When they turned onto Route 17, they noticed lots of traffic. When Melanie called the festival's producers, they said, yes, the traffic was headed for Bethel, which was getting crowded, so she'd better get to a hotel where they would take her by helicopter to the festival site. At that hotel, the name and location of which Melanie doesn't remember, she saw a slew of TV cameras focusing on Janis Joplin and her bottle of Southern Comfort. "And me?" says Melanie. "I was just a fleckling."

State police investigator Fred W. Cannock, 34, was supposed to direct traffic at the intersection of Route 55 and Route 17B in White Lake. But parked cars didn't need much direction. "I just stood there and watched the fiasco," Cannock said. " Route 17B was jammed for roughly 9 miles, all the way back to Monticello and beyond."

Woodstock organizers blamed state police for the monstrous traffic jam. The troopers had refused to enact the festival's traffic plan. "I know the way cops think, and I think they figured that if they had done that, they would acquire responsibility for whatever might happen," Goldstein said. "Of course, they were not necessarily in favor of these kinds of events, and they wanted it to turn to (chaos). They wanted it to be a disaster."

Woodstock organizers had meant for cars to pull off the highway and be directed by the NYPD cops to parking in fields off Route 17B. On Tuesday, Goldstein had pleaded for the state police to help, at least by starting the procedure. The state police brass added additional troopers to direct traffic. Local civil defense officials refused to plan for a disaster; their office was closed Friday afternoon as the traffic rolled in. So the traffic backed up for miles while the police looked on. "Suddenly, we were in a logistic nightmare," Goldstein said. That didn't mean that individual officers didn't have sympathy for the floundering festival-goers.

"I thought they were hippie scum - but you couldn't help but really feel sorry for the kids," Cannock said. "They got sucked into this carte blanche. Nobody said anything about reservations, tickets. They just came. You couldn't believe it. Advance sales paid, nobody else paid a nickel. They paid with pain, hunger and exposure, or whatever."

Wadleigh bought out rooms in a local motel, the Silver Spur, for the film crew and equipment. The crew naturally nicknamed the place "the Silver Sperm." Then the crowds came. They left cars in the middle of the road. The crew and their cameras were stuck. They ended up sleeping in the field, under the stage, wherever.

Woodstock's security force was briefed late that morning by none other than Babbs, the Prankster leader. Babbs was one of the more experienced acid trippers. "I guess they had me do it because I was in the Marines," Babbs said. "I told them that if someone was hassling someone else, then they should help the person who was in trouble. Keep an eye out for people who need help. Other than that, it was nobody else's business what they did. "They asked about drugs, and I told them not to worry about it. I said, 'There are going to be so many drugs around, you're not going to be able to keep track of any of it.'"

At about noon, Babbs and Wavy Gravy watched as a dozen guys in orange jackets started walking up the rise. They carried change boxes and were nearing the fence border. "They said, 'We're the ticket-takers, and now we want everyone to walk out and come back in,'" Babbs said. "I said, 'Man, you gotta be kidding me. There are 200,000 people in there. So the head security guy says to me, 'There's no way we're going to be able to get these tickets. What do you want to do?' They had, like, a double-wide section of fence that was open for the gate. So Wavy and I said the only thing to do is take down the fence. So, we - Wavy and I - unrolled the fence about 100 feet, and the people all came pouring in."

Schubert said his security forces had no choice. "How can you to tell 200,000 to 400,000 people, 'Go home, it's over?" he said. "It would have been the riot of the century." But the crowd closer to the stage couldn't see the impromptu ceremony of taking down the gate. From there, it looked like the mob was taking over. "My most vivid memory was that there was this chain-link, Cyclone fence that went all the way around," said Bert Feldman, who was working security on the hill near the Hog Farm base. " I had the uncanny feeling that there were 500 million people there. Suddenly, the fence was no more. Trampled into the mud. It disappeared like magic." Lang said he never exactly decided Woodstock would become a free show. But he did decide to make the announcement. " It was kind of like stating the obvious," he said.

Complaints were coming in to Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in Albany. Rosenman and Roberts hinted that a declaration of a disaster area in Bethel might be welcomed, to ease the crowd's suffering and because it would limit the company's liability in lawsuits. But the other partners feared a disaster declaration could bring in the National Guard and the possibility of an armed confrontation. Extra cops, including 20 Rockland County deputies mounted on horseback, had already been brought in. But the governor did not consider Woodstock an act of God. He made no declaration. "We'll play it by ear," the governor's spokesman told United Press International.

Sullivan County residents heard that the kids up there in Bethel didn't have enough food. By Friday afternoon, members of the Monticello Jewish Community Center were making sandwiches with 200 loaves of bread, 40 pounds of cold cuts and two gallons of pickles. Woodstock Ventures estimated that it needed donations of 750,000 sandwiches. Food was being airlifted in from as far away as Newburgh's Stewart Air Force Base.

Day One of Woodstock was supposed to be the day for the folkies. Joan Baez was the headliner, preceded by a bill that included Tim Hardin, Arlo Gutherie, Sweetwater, the Incredible String Band, Ravi Shankar, Bert Sommer and Melanie. One rock act, Sly and the Family Stone was added for a little taste of the rock'n'roll of the weekend. The scheduled starting time was 4pm. The performers were spread around in Holiday Inns or Howard Johnsons miles from the site. Because of the traffic jam, the promoters were frantically contracting for helicopters to shuttle in the performers and supplies. But the helicopters were late. A four-seater finally arrived after 4pm; it could handle only single acts. Lang had two choices: Hardin, who was drifting around backstage stoned, or Richie Havens, who looked ready. "It was, 'Who could get setup the quickest?'" Lang said. "And I went with Richie Havens." Three days of music started at 5:07pm Eastern Daylight Time on August 15, 1969.

Every time Richie Havens tried to quit playing, he had to keep on. The other acts hadn't arrived. Finally, after Havens had played for nearly three hours - improvising his last song "Freedom" - a large U.S. Army helicopter landed with musical reinforcements. An Army helicopter? "Yes," said Havens. "It was the only helicopter available. If it wasn't for the U.S. Army, Woodstock might not have happened." The U.S. Army saved the day for a crowd that was, for the most part, anti-war? "We were never anti-soldier," said Havens. "We were just against the war."