The backbone of Woodstock music festival – the co-creator and the promoter of Woodstock music festival Michael Lang breathed his last at the age of 77.
The 1969 Woodstock music festival served generations of music as a touchstone and a pivotal music festival which was followed by many all across the planet.
Michael Pagnotta, a spokesperson of Lang’s family stated that “the 77 years old Lang had been battling with non-Hodgkin lymphoma for a long time now and passed away at the New York memorial Sloan Kettering cancer center here on Saturday.”
“He was absolutely a historic figure, and also a great guy,” Pagnotta, who said he had known Lang for about 30 years, “both of those things go hand in hand.”
Michael Lang started the festival back in the summer of 1969 along with his partners’ John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, and Artie Kornfeld as a “three days of peace and music” as the Vietnam war raging high increasing depression and disaffected young Americans who wanted to celebrate their freedom of expression while embracing a totally different lifestyle.
“From the beginning, I believed that if we did our job right and from the heart, prepared the ground and set the right tone, people would reveal their higher selves and create something amazing,” Lang wrote in his memoir, “The Road to Woodstock.”
The Woodstock festival was often seen as a template for large-scale music festivals.
“A lot of them are modeled after Woodstock — Bonnaroo, and Coachella, in particular,” Lang said of other festivals in a 2009 interview. “There was a ritual that was created that keeps getting replicated.”
Michael Lang and several others commemorated the 50th anniversary of the original Woodstock in 2019 but unfortunately, the endeavor shut down because of security issues and financial issues.
