So many thoughts and feelings about Michael Lang since he passed away but the story that came immediately to mind was one that he told me about his first psychedelic experience. He was only a teenager growing up in Bensonhurst at the time, a bold and precocious kid already gravitating to what was going on in the Village, so when he managed to get his hands on this new stuff called LSD, he decided he was going to just take it and hop on the subway and head into the city to see what would happen.
The LSD was pure Sandoz—a tiny dark dot on a white sugar cube—and like so many others who encountered it at the time, Michael had no idea what he was in for, and he wasn’t quite ready when the guy sitting across from him in the subway car began transmogrifying into a giant rabbit. He knew about Alice In Wonderland, and there was the imaginary rabbit friend of Jimmy Stewart in the movie Harvey--but oh, this was something else entirely…
By the time he got off at 14th Street and Seventh Avenue, it was coming on full throttle. As he headed north, he only got higher and higher with each step until it all became too much and he began to feel like he was losing his mind (of course, he was), but the fear that he would never return began to overwhelm him, so when he spied a church across the street he ducked into its garden, seeking refuge from everything that was coming down on him.
“I got completely lost in that little garden,” he related. “I had no idea of where I was or even who I was anymore.”
It was a beautiful spring evening and the garden that he’d wandered into was in full bloom; within moments he was utterly enchanted.
“I was walking this tightrope between the magic of what I was experiencing and the fear that I was lost and would never find my way out, and then I began realizing that the more I just let go and went with the experience, the calmer I seemed to get, and the less it mattered that I was lost in a garden. At some point I just looked up and saw the Empire State building and then I knew exactly where I was. All I ever would have had to do was just look up into the sky and I would have known! But somehow that’s not what I was there to do…To this day I have no idea what church it was or how long I was actually in it—a minute, or an eternity—but It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life…”
Somehow the story of Michael’s virgin acid trip always seemed a template to me for how he would handle Woodstock--for those decisive moments when everything seemed like it might all unravel into pure disaster. There were many and they were very dramatic. The moment he decided to make it a free festival, despite the devastating financial ramifications. The moment when Nelson Rockefeller was breathing down their necks and threatening to send in the National Guard. The terrifying prospect of thousands of people being electrocuted in the mud in front of the stage after the climactic storm. Michael instinctively understood that his whole generation had materialized on Max Yasgur’s farm seeking something far beyond the music—seeking the refuge of a garden from the madness that was America during the 1960s—and that there were hundreds of thousands of souls out there on LSD freaking and flashing, in states ranging from the most infernal psychic and physical discomfort to the most primordial ecstasy and transcendent release. He was always able to project calm and courage in those fateful moments because he was always confident that if they got lost, all he had to do was let go, and look up into the sky exactly as he’d done in that little church garden, and they would get their bearings and find their way. And he was right.
Truth be told, I never made it to Woodstock in’69, so I’m not reporting these things firsthand. That summer between junior and senior year of high school, I had a job as a houseboy at a country club. I knew that if I went to the festival, I’d lose the job and I wanted to keep it, so I stayed put. Of course, after the movie came out, I bitterly regretted missing it, which meant that I went to every rock festival on the East Coast for the next four years hoping it would happen again (it never did because it never could). But I did get to immerse myself in the Woodstock story on four different occasions, once for my book Can’t Find My Way Home, twice for two of Barbara Koppel’s Woodstock documentaries that I had the pleasure of working on, and once with Michael himself when he asked me to help him develop what he envisioned was going to be a Woodstock exhibit that would travel the world (alas, it didn’t happen). In the process I got to know him quite well, and each time I delved into the story of Woodstock it became clearer and clearer that Woodstock simply would never have happened without him. All you have to do is look at his Woodstock partners to understand why. John Roberts and Joel Rosenmann were basically a couple of preppie kids with money who didn’t know the difference between Gracie Slick and Gracie Allen, and had it not been for Woodstock it’s unlikely you would have ever heard their names. And even Artie Kornfeld who was a hip music business guy didn’t grasp the zeitgeist of the moment like Michael. Like many of the early hippies he was a true cultural adventurer, and he understood the relationship between the music and the lifestyle, the art, the politics, the mind-altering substances, and the spiritual consciousness more than any of his associates. Michael was a true visionary—a hippie with a dream--but underneath the dream was boundless ambition, the charismatic smoothness of a snake charmer, and the guile of a riverboat gambler.
Of course, it was the movie that made Michael famous, and what emerged was the image of the coolest hippie on the planet rambling around the site on his BSA motorcycle, bare-chested in his leather vest, his long mane of ringlets bouncing behind him. He was beautiful and above all else authentic, with an infectious grin and a twinkle in his eye that made anything and everything seem possible—he was Woodstock, embodying its essence of freedom and change. At the age of twenty-five he was commonly viewed as the wunderkind who made it all happen, who had conjured and presided over an event that defined an era and a generation, but rock festivals were a minefield and even someone as nimble as Michael could be victimized by their explosive unpredictability, as happened shortly thereafter at Altamont. And so, Michael settled into a successful career as a manager in the music industry. He made no money on Woodstock but was fortunate enough to end up with a piece of Billy Joel, which floated his boat. The great Joe Cocker had become known for drunkenly stumbling around stages and vomiting when Michael pulled him out and helped resurrect him.
Throughout everything he did, Michael retained the aura of the Woodstock wunderkind and never abandoned the dream of doing it again. And again. And again. As a custodian of its cultural consciousness he never forgot that he was purveying a myth of Woodstock—an ideal, and he always had to walk a fine line between marketing it to the corporate interests who had the resources to make it happen again and his sincere belief that the myth could be real and magic, because he had lived it. It was in some respects a dance with the devil, like riding a tiger, and the ride itself could be addictive. The results were mixed. The ’94 festival was no mirage—Michael actually succeeded in bringing Woodstock to a new generation—a triumph that only made the flaming Gotterdammerung of the ’99 festival that much more awful. There were other long-held dreams that Michael was never able to actualize like the movie he wanted to make of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margherita and his elusive quest to bring Woodstock to Broadway, but perhaps none were more obsessional than his attempt to put together a festival to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary, which fell apart so sadly and spectacularly before he became ill with the Hodgkins lymphoma that took his life after a long brutal struggle. In the cynical and darkening world of recent years in which he tried so hard to regenerate another Woodstock, he seemed a Don Quixote-like figure jousting with windmills of legend and mega-finance and so many other forces, and I couldn’t help but wonder what was driving him to ride the tiger again in his seventies. Michael was a complex man, but I suspect that the primary motivation was still the simple one most organically evident in the first Woodstock movie, when he and Artie Kornfeld are standing blissfully on stage in the aftermath of the storm being interviewed by Gabe Pressman, and Michael says that this is only the beginning of something and articulates the very ethos of the Woodstock experience as he sees it—that of a new culture and generation functioning “on their own, without cops, without guns, without clubs, without hassles” and how it works, and how “everybody pulls together and helps each other.” He fully recognizes that the Three Days of Peace, Love and Music that they pulled off was a financial disaster, and when Pressman wonders why they were smiling, his comment says it all: “Just look what you got, man. You couldn’t buy that for anything. These people are communicating with each other, and that rarely happens anywhere anymore.”
Michael always knew that far beyond the music and the event, the real meaning of Woodstock was something that happened in the heart, and that when it happened people would wear it inside of them for the rest of their lives, as he had. This was his destiny, his true raison d’être.. I have no doubt that as he left us, he let go and looked up into the sky as the boy had done in that church garden, got his bearings, and found his way home.
