The man pictured here Friday, flashing the peace sign at Woodstock,
is Max Yasgur, the Bethel, New York, dairy farmer who agreed to let Michael Lang and his team stage their 1969 concert on some of his land.
Woodstock Ventures had been working on getting the concert organized at a different upstate New York location; after work and negotiations, etc., some townspeople and town board people went negative on the concert people, so they moved the project over to Bethel Township, & started over.
Then after the deal was done there, and the concert organizers were setting up, some folks in that community got riled up and tried to stop the event. Max Yasgur was the one who talked to the nay-sayers and asked, Have these concert organizers lived up to the agreement, point by point, which you made with them?
They had.
Is there a point here in the agreement, anywhere, which Michael has signed off on, but not followed through?
There wasn't.
And Max Yasgur said something like, Then they are going to go ahead and have the concert, just as everyone has agreed.
Max Yasgur was -- like -- the voice of reason.
The Voice Of Reason is always my hero.
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