About Woodstock
First,
in case you didn’t know, the legendary 1969
Woodstock Music and Art Fair (Woodstock Festival)
was not held in Woodstock. It was held in Bethel,
a small town in a neighboring county about an hour’s
drive away. Woodstock’s town fathers refused
to allow a giant music festival expected to attract
legions of hippies, to be held in the arts colony.
Woodstock, New York has been an arts colony since
1902, when a group of English idealists led by Ralph
Whitehead, founded Byrdcliffe, an arts and crafts
community based on the philosophies of John Ruskin
and William Morris. It was this group of craftsmen,
philosophers, thinkers and individualists who, you
might say, actually planted the seed that blossomed
into the spellbinding gathering that rocked the
world nearly seven decades later.
From the beginning, the Byrdcliffe arts
colony attracted to its bountiful landscape many of
the world’s premier artists and intellectuals,
thinkers, seekers and bohemians. Starting in 1915,
artist Hervey White, an original member of the arts
colony, began the Maverick Festivals, held in Woodstock
every August. Modeled after the Artists Balls of Paris,
the festivals attracted thousands of people from all
over the world for a weekend of costumed revelry and
generally bacchanal-type activities. The festivals
ended with the Depression in the early ‘30’s,
but lesser forms of it lingered on through the early
‘60’s, when the town was the site of “Sound
Outs”, large outdoor, communal musical happenings
which attracted a few hundred people and kept the
spirit alive.
Enter Michael Lang, a young enterprising
impresario in touch with the pulse of a generation.
He dreamed of raising money for a state-of-the-art
recording studio via a giant Woodstock music and arts
festival. He put the wheels in motion and steered
the ship. Although Woodstock refused to grant the
necessary permits, the festival persevered, kept its
name and after several rejections, finally found a
home on the dairy farm of the kindly Max Yasgur, 60
miles away from the arts colony.
300,000 people and a once in a lifetime experience
later, the Woodstock Festival found its way into the
cultural history books.
Today, Byrdcliffe continues as an arts
and crafts community, one of the oldest and most successful
in the country. The Woodstock area is rich in creative
thought and activity, bolstered by NYC just two hours
to the south. The streets of Woodstock are sometimes
crowded with tourists and bewildered visitors searching
for the hallowed festival site. There are complaints
about too many BMW’s and Audi’s, skyrocketing
home prices, and the cost of health food, but the
town still has an alternative feel. It has remained
a distinctive cultural center with plentiful art galleries,
poetry readings, superb musicians, mystics, healers,
even a Woodstock Film Festival, a Tibetan Buddhist
Monastery and a giant drum circle in the center of
town on Sunday afternoons. And now Argentine Tango.
As for Michael Lang? The Woodstock 69
founder continues to live in Woodstock with his family.
And, we’re pleased to say…. he has started
dancing tango! Now there’s a happy ending….
