The motorcycle roared up to the El Monaco Hotel on Sunday afternoon. Behind the handlebars was a bearded hippie. On the back was a woman screaming that she was having a baby. Resort owner Elliott Tiber raced in. He said he was the only one on the lot who wasn't stoned, and he relied on his instincts to help deliver the baby. Then he watched as Army medics flew mother and child away in a helicopter. "She must have been stoned," Tiber said. " Either that, or Janis Joplin was quite a draw. The mother ‘had olive skin and big black eyes. Her English was kind of broken. A French accent, I think.'"

Ralph Corwin pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one and started trucking down Hurd Road. The 26-year-old biker from Winterton met up Sunday afternoon with a young couple. The girl wore an Army fatigue shirt and a pair of black jeans. The guy begged a smoke; Corwin flipped him three or four. The couple walked away. Corwin looked over his shoulder. The girl's black jeans were missing on the back side. "Only the strip down the center," Corwin said. "No undies, and her cheeks were hanging out."

A short, violent thunderstorm struck around 5pm, triggering an early exodus from the grounds. Leo O'Mara noticed a guy with a red beard, wearing a vast muddy poncho and a huge smile. O'Mara sat in the mud and wondered why this guy was so thrilled in such miserable weather. "Then I noticed that there were three other sets of legs under that poncho," O'Mara said.

Jerome O'Connel started walking back to the car at sundown. The rains had continued throughout much of the day, and O'Connel felt whipped by the weather. He wasn't the only one who really wanted to leave. "I remember that there was a whole line of cars on both sides of the road," O'Connell said. "There wasn't enough space in the middle for a car. But someone had driven down the middle anyway. There was a 3-inch scrape on both sides all the way down. Must have been 50 cars scratched."

All weekend, hippies had camped out on the Heller Dairy farm at the intersection of Route 17B and Happy Avenue. The kids didn't ask permission before pitching camp. And they left broken bottles and bent cans behind. But the last straw was Sunday night. "The last day, we had a car outside, with a hose next to it that we used for washing the car," said Blanche Heller. "We woke up and found that they had cut the hose and drained all the gas out of the tank. Now, if only they had asked...."

In Jeffersonville, the local congregation was upset about a kid who'd climbed into the basement of the church. He'd done no damage, left no mess, but the locals were still bothered by the intrusion. "They did find this young man in there, who had heated himself a can of beans, ate it, and left money on the table for the gas he used. " said Adelaide Schadt, wife of the Bethel town attorney.

While other stars flitted in and out of the show aboard helicopters, headliner Hendrix was roaming the crowd on foot. O'Mara remembered Hendrix stopping to talk with many of the girls. Others remember the star's turn in the Freak-Out Tent that day. "We didn't know who he was," Nurse Sanderson said. "Just a black man lying on the stretcher. Then everybody started saying, ‘Hey, isn't that Jimi Hendrix?' There was a big stir about it. " Hendrix lay on the stretcher for about 30 minutes before roadies hauled him out.

Investigator Cannock met Raymond Mizak's father Sunday night in a funeral home on East Broadway in Monticello. The senior Mizak was accompanied by the youth's uncle, a lieutenant in the New Jersey State Police. "It (the tractor) ran over his chest," Cannock said. "His head was twice the normal size. Really grotesque." The father told Cannock he had refused to give the boy permission to go to the concert. Cannock said the father blamed himself, said he should have locked his son up.

Two of the most vehement festival opponents showed up at the site independently sometime Saturday or Sunday. Wallkill Supervisor Jack Schlosser and former Bethel Supervisor George Neuhaus toured the grounds and came to identical conclusions. "It became obvious to me nobody knew what the hell they were doing. Nobody," Schlosser said.

Cannock got to the morgue at Horton Memorial Hospital in Middletown later Sunday night. A man in his mid-20s, who had been at the festival, had died of a heroin overdose. Cannock can't remember the man's name, and it was never disclosed. But for the second time that day, Cannock was assigned to get a body identified. Cannock tracked down a friend of the dead man's and met him at the morgue. "The kid had been autopsied already," Cannock said. Inexplicably, the body was not stitched up after the chest had been split open for the autopsy, according to Cannock. "The friend pulled down the sheet to far and saw it all," he said. "The kid passed right out."

Outside Yasgur's farm, Monticello Hospital nurses and doctors had set up a clinic in a school that was closed for the summer. Monticello Hospital's head of nursing, Gladys Berens, helped deliver three babies there, only miles from the festival grounds. She was there when a Marine on leave was brought in sometime Sunday, unconscious from an overdose. The Marine - an 18 year-old from Long Island - died in the hospital, one of three concert fatalities. "This young Marine had been through the war without a scratch, and he ends up dying in Horton Memorial Hospital in Middletown, NY. How sad," Berens, now 71, recalled.

Artie Kornfeld figured the capsule he was taking was speed, Dexedrine, something to keep him alert for the rest of the festival. His wife, Linda, took one too. Then he began hallucinating that the National Guard (which was not there) was shooting into the crowd. The colors were all melting together. "I was dosed. It was my first psychedelic, and it happened at Woodstock," Kornfeld said. "I never would have chosen that place deliberately, never to do it at Woodstock." Kornfeld learned later that the capsule was powdered psilocybin mushroom, a powerful hallucinogen. "I decided that we needed help. It was 12 hours before Hendrix," Kornfeld said. "I was Thorazined out of it. That's why I missed Hendrix."

The Holiday Inn in Monticello was one of the headquarters for Woodstock performers. It was also the quarters for the state police. Cannock wasn't impressed at being in the company of the rich and famous. He doesn't even remember their names. "We were rubbing elbows. I wasn't thrilled to have them there," the investigator said. " The two dead bodies were fixed in my brain."

John Pinnacaia didn't even feel it at first, just a twinge of pain on the instep of his foot late Sunday night. Then this girl started screaming, and there was all this blood. "It must have been some kind of bottle," he said. "I couldn't even see it. My foot was in the mud." Pinnacaia had been listening to guitarist Johnny Winter while fetching peanut butter sandwiches for himself, his girlfriend and his sister. But the 18-year-old from Brooklyn took one step and became a Woodstock casualty. "This guy picked me up, threw me over his shoulder and ran me to the hospital (tent). Must have saved my life," he said. A helicopter flew him to Monticello Hospital. "They'd given me a shot of anesthetic, but it hadn't started working. They had to start stitching. Then this big fat nurse sat on me so I couldn't move, and they started stitching. That's all I remember of that. One other thing: They called home to ask permission to operate," Pinnacaia said. "Mom freaked out."

Woodstock 1969 ... Monday

It was about 9am, time for Hendrix, the headliner. He had launched into the national anthem, a moment that would go down in the annals of rock'n'roll. "I remember trying to fall asleep during the ‘Star-Spangled Banner'," said Ciganer, Jerry Garcia's buddy. "I just wished he would stop." The party was over.

The partners had to face a different kind of music. Woodstock Ventures had obtained letters of credit, backed by Roberts' trust fund, from a bank on Wall Street. Now, Ventures was at least $1.3 million in debt.

Kornfeld was still muddy when he walked into the banker's office. "He had a tank with a piranha in it, and he was feeding him meat," Kornfeld recalled. "The attitude already was a battleground." Ventures was in trouble because Woodstock had been a damn-the-expense money pit for six weeks. Kornfeld's promotional expenses were more than $150,000, 70 percent over budget. Lang's production expenses had soared to $2 million, more than 300 percent over budget.

Ventures had paid crews overtime to do six months of work in six weeks' time. Three days of running a private air fleet of helicopters had also helped to bust the budget. "It was like living a dream," Lang recalled. "My idea was just to get it done, whatever it took. We had a vision, and it all came true." When it was all over, the Wall Street bankers demanded an accounting. The promoters had sold about $1.1million in tickets, but Ventures had written maybe $600,000 in bad checks and had other debts. As of August 19, 1969, the high-water mark of the counterculture had cost at least 2.4 million hard, capitalist dollars. Thousands of dollars more in fines, fees, claims and lawsuits hadn't even come in yet. To top it off, there was a criminal investigation. The attorney general's office and the Sullivan County district attorney were starting to dig.

About those two kids who brought their woes to Charlie Prince: The banker helped them solve their problem. They found the week-old ‘69 Olds. It was parked eight miles away. In front of Neuhaus' home. Two state troopers were sitting on it.

Leo O'Mara walked the 20 miles back to his car. Andrew never found the friends who brought him, but made some new ones and rode home with them. Gary Krewson had left Sunday afternoon in the Volkswagen bus he'd come in.

Little Michael Kennedy from Smallwood was three years old. On Tuesday, his dad took him down to Yasgur's farm. "All I can remember is all the garbage," Kennedy said. "It was the first time I ever saw a longhair. I asked my dad, ‘What are they?' He said. ‘That's someone who doesn't cut their hair and cleans up garbage.'" Ventures spent $100,000 to clean the decimated festival site. Goldstein dug a huge hole and bulldozed tons of shoes, bottles, papers, clothes, tents and plastic sheets into the ground. He set the pile afire. The vast, smoky smolder that burned for days brought Ventures a charge of illegal burning from Bethel officials.

On Tuesday, Prince's phone rang at Sullivan County National Bank. It was bank president Joe Fersh, who told Prince that Woodstock Ventures' account was $250,000 short. Robert's check had bounced, and the bank checks Prince had written Saturday night to the performers weren't covered. Fersch wanted to know: "What are you going to do about it?" So Prince called Roberts. "(Roberts) said, ‘I know the pickle you're in, Charlie. I'll be there Thursday morning.'" Prince recalled.

By Wednesday, the lab had analyzed the green, leafy substance submitted as evidence in Judge Liese's court. The irate pot smokers were right. They were buying bogus reefer. "It turned out to be a mixture of timothy grass and birdseed," said the judge. "He must have paid $6 for the six pounds of it." Liese ordered the ersatz marijuana salesman set free. "A guy selling birdseed for $6 an ounce. What are you gonna do?" said Liese with a chuckle. Also on Wednesday, a Woodstock mother came back to thank acting-midwife Tiber. Tiber jotted her name down, stuck the matchbook into his pants and, from there, it went into history. "I have no idea what pants I was wearing," he said.

Thursday morning, Roberts arrived alone at the White Lake branch of the Sullivan County National Bank. He pledged $1 million in stock to the bank to cover the $250,000 note. "I was off the hook," Prince said. Roberts, Lang, Kornfeld and Rosenman had made personal guarantees to pay the bills. But only Roberts' family - and his own trust fund - had enough assets to pay off Woodstock's debt. While Lang stayed with the cleanup crews, the other three partners squirmed under the fiscal glare. Roberts' father and brother told the Wall Street bankers that they never had run out on debts and they weren't going to start now. The Roberts family paid off the debt.

Bob Dylan had been scheduled to leave for Europe on August 15 aboard the Queen Elizabeth. But Dylan's son was hospitalized that day, and the rock legend stayed home. Dylan left the country in late August to play at the Isle of Wight Festival off the coast of Britain. Michael Lang was in the crowd.

Gary Krewson had another Woodstock moment back home in Tunkhannock, Pa., about 90 miles away. Krewson was sitting on the steps of the town's only hotel when he saw three psychedelic school buses tooling over the hill to the town's only traffic light. The lead bus, driven by Wavy Gravy, blew an engine. Krewson fetched Tunkhannock's only mechanic, who let the Pranksters and Hog Farmers use his garage. The bus crew pulled the blown engine and popped in a spare within 45 minutes. Gravy and company were on their way to another festival in Texas.

The Times Herald-Record submitted its stories for the 1969 Pulitzer Prize competition. Editor Al Romm recalls: "A friend, years later, who was on the judging panel, said, ‘You'll never know how close you came to winning.' Our coverage took a different tack from most of the publications. Nobody had as many people at the scene as we did, about six. We had passing coverage of the music. Really could have done better with that. We were just enveloped with the human indignities. The sickness. The miscarriages.

Six weeks after the festival, Rosenman and Roberts bought out Lang and Kornfeld for $31,240 each. Lang, Kornfeld, Rosenman and Roberts - the four young men who had produced and promoted Woodstock - were separated for more than 20 years by Woodstock's fallout. Rosenman and Roberts stayed best friends. But they charged for years that Lang and Kornfeld, but especially Lang, grabbed all the attention immediately after the event. For instance, Rosenman and Roberts weren't in the movie at all. Kornfeld was seen a couple of times, but Lang was featured prominently, riding his motorcycle and being interviewed. "We were so busy that I think the credit was directed toward Michael (Lang), " Rosenman said in 1989. "Years later, people would ask, ‘Were you involved in that thing Mike Lang did?' You have to be in this business a long time to know how valuable it is to be famous. I think Michael and Artie knew that. We didn't have any idea.

Lang said in 1989 that he, more than anyone is probably responsible for the ill will. "John and Joel were from a different world. They were outsiders, and they didn't understand," Lang said. "I didn't have time to acclimate them. I'm not the most communicative person in the world. I was kind of a wise guy." Kornfeld, upon reflection, figures it's not really important who did what. "With all the attention grabbing that's gone on over the years, my reality is that there are a lot of more important things," Kornfeld said. "Look, no one person produced Woodstock; the generation produced Woodstock. And look at it emanate now."

Woodstock had 5,162 medical cases, according to a state Health Department report released October 4, 1969. The report listed 797 documented instances of drug abuse. No births were recorded in the festival medical tent, but Dr. Abruzzi told the Health Department there were eight miscarriages. The report lists two deaths by drug overdose and the death of Raymond Mizak in the tractor accident. In late fall, a Sullivan County grand jury declared that there wasn't enough evidence to indict anyone for anything. The driver of the tractor was never identified and was not charged. Another investigation by the state attorney general's office ended in early 1970 with Woodstock Ventures having to make refunds on 12,000 to 18,000 tickets. The tickets were sold to people who were not able to attend because the roads were closed.

John Pinnavaia was considered 1-A by his draft board when he walked onto Yasgur's farm. After he stepped on the bottle and it slashed the tendon in his right foot, he was classified 1-Y for a temporary disability. After four months on crutches, Pinnavaia got married, putting him even lower on the draft list. Pinnavaia stayed out of the Army but still bears a road map of scars on his foot. He calls it his "Woodstock wound." " I can't walk over broken glass even with shoes on. I just cringe at the sound," says Pinnavaia.

The owner of the only stereo store in Middletown became a hippie of sorts. "I went from one of me to one of them," Allan Markoff said. Markoff always regretted he didn't stay at Woodstock, but he explains it this way: "There was no place to hang out. I'm not a close-to-the-earth individual. I'm a Ritz Carlton type of individual, and there were no luxury places to stay. I can't live in the rain and the mud. Markoff, now 54, would also go full tilt into the rock'n'roll business, supplying equipment for a Rolling Stones tour in the early ‘70s. He rigged a massive sound system in former Beatle George Harrison's hotel room at the Plaza in New York City. Harrison was promptly evicted from the hotel.

Two years after Woodstock, fence installer Daniel Sanabria discovered that he was sort of a star. " Woodstock: The Movie" was out. He was in it. "Being hams, we'd jump in front of the camera at any opportunity, " Sanabria said. "It was the greatest time of our life. We bonded as children; we bonded as men."

Woodstock 1969 ... The Final Word

After Woodstock, Wavy Gravy wanted to keep the energy going. He returned to the Hog Farm commune, where he discovered "every hippie in the world had moved to our house." Gravy got a few thousand dollars from Warner Brothers to finance a proposed movie, " Medicine Ball Caravan." The idea was to round up some Merry Pranksters and Hog Farmers, travel across the country in a bus and film the trip. The movie was never released. Somehow, the group ended up in England. Throughout the early and mid ‘70s, they traveled to 13 countries, including Turkey, India and Nepal, distributing free food and medical supplies along the way.

Krassner and his fellow Yippies tried to build on Woodstock. They helped put on a "Pow Wow Symposium" at Hog Farm headquarters in New Mexico. But in December came Woodstock's bad twin, Altamont, where the Hell's Angels worked security - and some stomped members of the audience. In 1970, the trial of the Chicago Seven began, and the Yippies focused their energy and money on freeing the defendants. Krassner and Ken Kesey decided to collaborate on "The Whole Earth Catalogue Supplement," the successor to the post-hippie bible, "The Whole Earth Catalogue." In the early 70's, the entire radical community began to dissolve as its members went their separate ways. Krassner returned to New York, where he continued to perform and publish a newsletter. In 1974, Krassner moved to Venice, California, to a house by the ocean a block from actor Dennis Hopper's house.

Max Yasgur toured Israel about two years after the concert and had the opportunity to meet Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion went down the receiving line, speaking to each guest. "Max said to Ben-Gurion, ‘I'm Max Yasgur of Bethel,' and Ben-Gurion shakes his hand and says, ‘Oh yeah, that's where Woodstock was, wasn't it?" said Liberty's Lou Newman, a friend of Yasgur's until the dairy farmer's death of a heart attach in 1973.

Yasgur's farm was subdivided and sold by his widow, Miriam. Most of that land is still pasture, fodder for the cattle herd of Bud Russel, who owns the old Yasgur farmhouse in Bethel.

As Woodstock began to fade into legend in the early ‘70s, the Town of Wallkill was tagged as the hometown of the uptight, much to the consternation of Wallkill Supervisor Schlosser. Wallkill was only trying to protect itself from a horde it was not prepared to handle, he said. Besides, added Schlosser, who retired from politics in 1984, the promoters lied to the town, and that's never mentioned in Woodstock lore. "That is what bugs me about this whole thing, " Schlosser said in 1989. "They have been allowed to perpetuate that myth for 20 years.. "

Woodstock's medical director, Dr. William "Rock Doc" Abruzzi, went on to specialize in the medicine of drug abuse. Drugs brought Abruzzi prominence, but they also provided the means for his downfall. He was charged in 1974 with anesthetizing female patients and molesting them while they were unconscious. Two years later, minutes before he was to go to trial, he pleaded guilty to sexual abuse. Abruzzi's saga didn't end there. The state's highest court ruled that a police officer violated Abruzzi's rights when he watched the doctor abuse his patients through an examination window. Abruzzi never served his prison sentence, but he did lose his license to practice medicine in New York. He has since dropped out of sight and can not be located. To this day, Abruzzi has his supporters, including Nurse Sanderson. "He was framed," said the nurse, who retired in 1980 and left Middletown.

For the next decade, Woodstock was virtually a cliche for all that was goofy about the ‘60s. By 1980, the world had moved on. Rosenman and Roberts were still in venture capital, but instead of funding concerts, they were dismantling conglomerates and handling mergers. "The transactions that we were involved in would have been vetoed if they'd known about Woodstock, " Rosenman said. "It wasn't exactly broadcast in our resumes.

Kornfeld was the one who was able to use his Woodstock credentials. He remained in the music business, promoting rock acts and albums. He worked with Bruce Springsteen and Tracy Chapman. Lang too, stayed in music. His title as Woodstock's producer gave him a certain cachet with superstars of the business. Lang signed a Long Island singer named Billy Joel to his first record contract. He was Joe Cocker's manager. But even Lang downplayed Woodstock. "I didn't talk about it for years," he said.

Country Joe figures his fate was sealed right after he shouted: "Gimme an F. After the movie came out, that's all I was known for," McDonald said. "Its pretty hard to top the ‘Fish Cheer.' I don't know if I can do that.' The Fish Cheer was McDonald's improvised call-and-response that began with ‘Gimme and F' and concluded with " What's that spell? (Expletive!)" McDonald's musical career went from Woodstock into a slide. By the ‘80s, Country Joe said he'd had it with the music business. "I won't make another record again unless it seems commercially viable," he said in 1989. "I just don't have the burning desire to make a record that nobody wants to hear. You spend a year to do it, and it doesn't sell more than 1,000 copies. That's not cost-effective. Music is something that needs to be heard." McDonald said the problem was he was still writing "sociopolitical and anti-war" songs. "Today, politics and war isn't good box office," he added. When McDonald tours, it's for a handful of fans at tiny folk clubs. He might even turn up at the occasional ‘60s revival show, but only if the price is right. "I don't like doing these nostalgia things," he said, "but when people offer me the right amount of money, I'll do it. I wouldn't even write a story about myself. I wouldn't waste my time." By 1991, the year he recorded an acoustic album, " Superstitious Blues," Country Joe had changed his tune. In 1994, he appeared in a Pepsi commercial featuring a Woodstock reunion for yuppies.

A guy named Louis Nicky from Brooklyn bought about 40 acres from the widow Yasgur at the intersection of Hurd Road and West Shore Drive in Bethel. A couple of tons of concrete - the footings for the main stage at Woodstock - were tumbled off in the brush in the northeast corner. Nicky didn't really worry too much about the history he'd bought. He just wanted to run a few horses, but a bout with cancer caused him to abandon the plan. Twice, the town put up a sign identifying Nicky's land as the site of the concert. Twice, the sign was stolen.

For years, no one celebrated Woodstock's anniversary, and Augusts came and went without notice. People who wanted to stop by Yasgur's farm and reminisce weren't always sure they were at the right place.

In the late ‘70s, a ragtag bunch started celebrating every August with a three-day party. Around 1978, a welder named Wayne Saward came out for the party. "And it was, like, super-quiet," he recalled. "There'd be 30 people there, at most. And that was in the middle of the night. Then in 1984, Saward started, pretty much alone, to build the world's only monument to the event. It's a 5 1/2 ton marker made of cast iron and concrete; landowner Louis Nicky paid $650 for concrete and casting the iron. Once the marker went up, the site became a kind of counterculture shrine. Visitors started showing up randomly, staying for a few minutes, then leaving.

The magic that is Woodstock continues...it's in the air!