Last month, all the talk about Woodstock’s 50th anniversary this summer concentrated on the surreal and the idea of déjà vu. Producer Michael Lang was winning and losing lawsuits, the festival lost its financial backing and then its on-site producers and its home. But it also gained new financial consultants in the form of an old-school Wall Street firm, seemed to hold on to its stable of diverse top-shelf musical acts, and just this week land at a new concert venue in Central New York.
Now all the talk around Woodstock 50 is increasingly incredulous that Lang’s persistence may be paying off the way it did in 1969…or 25 and 30 years later.
According to the managing member of American Racing and Entertainment, which owns Vernon Downs racetrack and casino in Oneida County (between Utica and Syracuse), Lang and Woodstock 50 were set to sign a letter of intent for use of the venue August 15-18 and start seeking necessary permits.
Town of Vernon Supervisor Randy Watson went one further by stating last week that Woodstock 50 has already begun that permit process…for a festival set to top out at 65,000 attendees instead of the original 150,000 they’d aimed for at their first choice for a venue, Watkins Glen International raceway, let alone the 500,000, 400,000 and 350,000 figures previous connotations of Woodstock have drawn.
Meanwhile, the trade magazine Billboard has reported that Jason Felts, CEO of Virgin Produced — the entertainment arm of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, which produces the popular KAABOO festival in Southern California and has expanded to Texas and the Cayman Islands in recent years — is in talks with Lang and his partner co-owners about helping resurrect and stage the troubled anniversary festival at a yet-to-be-named site in upstate New York.
Acts booked and purportedly paid for who will be playing at the festival include Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, Imagine Dragons, Dead & Co., and a host of older “legacy” bands from the original festival. Questions whether the new venue, which includes a racino and racetrack but has no camping, will include several stages and other festival areas have not yet been answered.
Repeated calls and emails to Lang et al have yet to be answered…this week.
♫ Turn out the lights, the party’s over…….. ♫
If the Stones would re-do Altamont, I’d come.
No, it is a concert now, put on by promotion, too make money, or to get another shot at fifteen minutes of fame, for folks like Michael Lang; (who likes to be famous for losing money on events like this, it would seem). Peace, Love, and Understanding, is something that does not exist, in reality, at these concerts, anymore. The generation now, is very different, then us, back in the Sixties. Back, then communication was slow, and wound it’s way up and down that long curly pigs tail that connected hand set to receiver. The young women and men of today have technology, not unlike we do here, debating humanity. Technology, that ‘we’ only saw on TV, way back then, on shows like Star Trek, or Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon in the Funny Paper’s. And Today? Why someone could almost run a country by tweeting, around five AM, every morning, on their twitter account. So, the expression of these new Bohemian’s, is done instantaneously, to the world, at their fingertips, and at the moment of thought, moreover, large groups of fornicating, fun loving, drug induced, peace loving, mind bended, free spirited hippies and beatniks, rolling around in the mud, listening to some of the greatest, bands, musicians, poets, and voices, shouting sanity from the mountaintops, about peace, love, and understanding, is not needed. It will be a new voice in a new way, that will change the world again, like Woodstock did in ’69. Today, why Woodstock festival revival concerts are not about changing the world, it’s just some old dudes chasing their first buzz and, of coarse, greed. So let’s add tolerance and compassion too the mix, also, when we talk about what we need today, too “Peace, Love, And Understanding”. I am not saying to forget, nor, to not honor the memory of Woodstock, it is just, that you can not relive it. I can still hear Richie Haven singin’; ” …Freedom, freedom, Freedom, freedom, sometimes I feel, like a motherless child. Sometimes…”
“… The New York State Thruway is closed, man…”