Michael Lang, who helped organize Woodstock, dead at 77

NEW YORK — Michael Lang, who helped create and organize the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1968, died Saturday. He was 77.

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Lang died in New York City, family spokesperson Michael Pagnotta told Variety. The cause of death was a rare form of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Pagnotta said.

Woodstock, a three-day event at Max Yasgur’s farm near Bethel, New York, became the seminal music and cultural event of the 1960s. More than 400,000 people gathered in the rain-soaked, muddy farm field, the Mid Hudson News reported.

The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is located at the site of the music festival, according to the newspaper.

Lang made his last public appearance around the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, Variety reported. A 50th-anniversary concert in 2019 was canceled due to legal issues and other controversies, Rolling Stone reported.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Lang dropped out of New York University before heading to the Miami area to organize music events, according to The Hollywood Reporter. That included the 1968 Miami Pop Festival, which featured Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa and John Lee Hooker.

Lang, then 24, moved to Woodstock, where he worked with Artie Kornfeld and partners Joel Rosenman and John Roberts to plan the music festival, which took place from Aug. 15-18, 1969, the website reported.

The festival starred Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, the Who, Carlos Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Joe Cocker and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Woodstock snarled traffic in upstate New York, shutting down the New York State Thruway as scores of fans left their cars stranded and found other means to reach the festival grounds, Variety reported.

“We thought we were all individual, scattered hippies,” David Crosby told Rolling Stone in 2004. “When we got there, we said, ‘Wait a minute, this is a lot bigger than we thought.’ We flew in there by helicopter and saw the New York State Thruway at a dead stop for 20 miles and a gigantic crowd of at least half a million people. You couldn’t really wrap your mind around how many people were there. It had never happened before, and it was sort of like having aliens land.”

A 1970 soundtrack album and documentary film, in which Lang was prominently featured, detailed the scheduling snafus, weather issues and general lack of preparedness for the event, Variety reported.

“Woodstock offered an environment for people to express their better selves, if you will,” Lang told Pollstar in 2019. “It was probably the most peaceful event of its kind in history. That was because of expectations and what people wanted to create there.”

Lang staged two anniversary shows for the festival, Variety reported. In 1994, to mark the festival’s 25th birthday, Lang co-produced Woodstock ‘94 in Saugerties, about 70 miles from the original concert site.

The festival was dubbed Mudstock after the second and third days of the event were marked by rainstorms that turned much of the field into a giant mud pit. Five years later, Woodstock ‘99 was held in Rome, New York, and drew a crowd of more than 400,000 and a pay-per-view audience, according to Variety.

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