BETHEL, N.Y. -- Here at what was Max Yasgur's farm, workers busily prepare the grounds for the first major weekend of concerts since the original Woodstock Festival made it a hippie mecca 29 years ago.

As backhoes scratch the red earth, tie-dyed attendees of the 1969 event -- "alumni," as they call themselves -- gather at the Woodstock monument, a modest concrete marker. But it's not just the 50-year-olds who are drawn here; a car filled with teens wearing Metallica T-shirts pulls in to check out the site.

What is it about this hilly dairy farm in southwestern New York that attracts such interest?

"It's really a very good vibe," says Danny Socolof, executive producer of A Day in the Garden, a three-day event that begins Friday. "When you step on to this land, you get this magical, peaceful feeling that's different than anywhere else."
The vibe that has brought alumni and young people alike to the site for more than a quarter-century is the same force that drove millionaire Alan Gerry, who started with a local appliance store and became one of the nation's cable TV giants, to buy the site and plan the event.

The festival will feature giants from the '60s -- including Joni Mitchell, who wrote the song "Woodstock," and Pete Townshend, whose band The Who played Woodstock -- as well as Don Henley, Stevie Nicks, Lou Reed, and a roster of contemporary rock bands such as Goo Goo Dolls and Third Eye Blind.

Gerry's foundation is producing the event to help stimulate the economy of this corner of New York along the Pennsylvania line. It is being called "the first step in a long-range program to develop the site as a cultural, music and performing arts and entertainment complex."

Jonathan Quitt, the director of production, says he considers the event a dress rehearsal for the 30th anniversary of Woodstock.

He is not deterred by ticket sales so slow that the original price of $70 each for Friday and Saturday concerts was abandoned; the tickets are now two-for-ones. Organizers are planning on having only 30,000 a day at the shows, far from the estimated 400,000 who choked the site and defined a youth culture in 1969.

Perhaps people are holding off buying tickets until they hear definitive weather forecasts for a festival that brings to mind mud baths of '69 and '94, when a 25th anniversary concert was staged 60 miles away in Saugerties, N.Y. A spontaneous rival 25th anniversary gathering drew 20,000 to this site.

The negative images of Woodstock's past -- mud, nudity, traffic snarls, portable-restroom purgatory, bad acid -- all had to be overcome, first on the local governmental level and now for the public.

"Local people didn't want to see the disorganization and uncontrolled event of 1969," Socolof says.

"We are trying to redefine people's concept of what it means to have a concert at this site," says Quitt, as he points out the establishment of roads, water, 10,000 square feet of white tents imported from Holland, and the same huge portable stage Garth Brooks used in Central Park last summer. He hopes the site will develop into a "real venue."

Philadelphia Inquirer
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