Woodstock '94: Peace, Love - And A Whole Lot Of Money

No tickets will be sold at the gate.

Eight-foot fences, 1,300-strong "peer security" and a $135 ticket will limit attendance to 250,000 people.

In the weeks before the Aug. 13, 14 event, a million-dollar campaign will urge people to stay away and watch it on pay-per-view television.

This is not your father's Woodstock, and not just because ticket prices have been inflated from the original fabled festival's $18 for three days.

"There might be some people who try to come - we're not being naive - but we believe we have a great ability to cut off access to people getting anywhere near the place," says Woodstock '94 promoter John Scher.

And if you do want tickets, chances are you'll be taking a bus or plane to Woodstock '94 because a package tour is the only way to get a ticket until Sunday, when the remainder will be offered (in blocks of four with a single parking pass per block).

For all its subsequent cultural significance, the first Woodstock festival was a bit disorganized. After all, 300,000 people slipped in for free. Ask Michael Lang, one of the four organizers of the original Woodstock, whether the planning is better thought out this time and he laughs. "Very. This is quite a different operation."

It took 15 years to break even from the first festival, and almost 20 years for Lang and his then-partner, Artie Kornfeld, to mend relations with John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, two young entrepreneurs who had originally placed the now-famous New York Times classified ad: "Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions." Lang and Kornfeld replied with the idea of an open-air rock concert, the two young men bit, and after that there was no stopping.

"No individual in his right mind would take that risk today," says Roberts. The costs this time are so high, he says, "we had to go to a partner with major capital." PolyGram Diversified Ventures is backing the event to the tune of $30 million. Polygram also holds film and worldwide television and music rights and merchandising.

In 1969, the total talent costs ran $250,000; now many acts are likely to make that much by themselves. Santana played the first festival as the Santana Blues Band for $750 (the same fee as Melanie). The highest fee went to Jimi Hendrix ($18,000).

"Probably the lowest-paid act will be paid significantly more than 100 times Santana's $750," says Scher, a veteran concert promoter and the man responsible for booking Woodstock '94, which he calls "probably the most eclectic lineup put together since the original Woodstock." Among them: Metallica, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bob Dylan, and Crosby, Stills and Nash.

In August 1969, Scher had just promoted his first show. "I had tickets to Woodstock, but a friend called me early that Friday morning and said, `Don't bother, I can't get near the place.' I went back to sleep."

For legislators and the media, however, Woodstock was a wake-up call. "The last time we were able to sort of sneak up on people, nobody really had any idea what we had in mind," says Lang. Within a year, New York passed a mass-gathering act, "basically to keep anything like Woodstock from ever happening again," he says. This is the first time since that the state has issued a mass-gathering permit.

It's not likely that many of the original festival-goers will opt for Woodstock '94: The lineup is too modern and the old "Woodstock" notions seem particularly innocent in today's marketing schemes.

Lang says he feels the weight of history "and the expectation that this has to be more than a big rock-'n'-roll show. There's the expectation that something very special and very spiritual should come out of it. Whether it should or shouldn't, it would be wonderful if it did."