The Road to Woodstock by Michael Lang Read Free Book Online Page B

somewhere. He’d proved his business prowess in Miami with our poster company. We’d started out with a couple posters, and then all of a sudden we were having them printed by the thousands. He distributed them all around the country. Quite a bit of money was made from those posters.
    I’d take the Trailways bus from Woodstock to Port Authority to work with Train. On one of those rides I thought: Wouldn’t it be great if there were a studio in Woodstock where artists could record in the country? Just like Miami had Criteria, which was an outreach for Atlantic Records, Woodstock needed a recording studio. More and more musicians were spending time upstate—Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin. Fred Neil moved up from Coconut Grove.
    I started looking around and found a dilapidated Victorian house and some outbuildings on a secluded wooded property just outside town. Originally, it had been the Tapooz Country Inn, a vacation spot operated by an Armenian family, with cabins, a dance hall, a swimming pool shaped like a grand piano, and a gazebo. Alexander Tapooz, a colorful character who was a rug dealer, said the thirty acres and buildings could be had for around $50,000. Down a rutted, tree-lined drive off Yerry Hill Road, the place was in serious disrepair, butI could envision converting the dance hall into a studio. With financial backing, I thought, I could build a state-of-the-art recording facility, a retreat for musicians who wanted to get away from it all while recording.
    Meanwhile, on a late October day when I was in the city with Train, Abby Rader told me about a label guy he knew. “He’s a bigshot at Capitol Records,” Abby said. “Artie Kornfeld. He’s originally from Bensonhurst, same as you.” We were standing on the sidewalk and I spotted a phone booth. “Got a dime?” I asked. I called Capitol and reached Artie’s office.
    ARTIE KORNFELD: I was vice president of A & R at Capitol. I had been a musician and a songwriter originally, working with [Gerry] Goffin and [Carole] King and [Neil] Sedaka and Leiber and Stoller at the Brill Building. Then I’d been at Mercury, where I wrote and produced some big hits for the Cowsills. I was only twenty-four when I got to Capitol. One day my secretary told me, “There’s a guy named Michael Lang to see you.” I said, “Who’s Michael Lang?” and she said, “He said, ‘Tell him I’m from the neighborhood,’” so right away I knew—Bensonhurst. That’s why I said, “Okay, send him in.”
    Michael was my second hippie. I had signed Debbie Harry—later of Blondie—and her band the Wind in the Willows, so they were the first hippies I’d met. Michael and I had an immediate affinity for each other. We talked about the neighborhood—we smoked a J and it was better than anything I’d ever smoked. I sort of fell in love with Michael because intellectually we were very close—and we were both nuts. We connected on a very high level.
    When I first walked into Artie’s office, with gold records on the wall, I was expecting someone much more corporate. Instead, there’sArtie sitting cross-legged on his desk—it was a little bit of that square attempt at being cool. But he was very sweet and really welcoming. The son of a cop, he definitely had the “neighborhood” kind of personality—someone I immediately understood. We talked about people we both knew in Bensonhurst and hit it off immediately.
    Artie and I got together very soon thereafter, and I brought the band up to see him. Train didn’t have all their songs worked out. A chaotic kind of band, they were pulling from what Coltrane was doing, a lot of improvisation and jamming on keyboards. Bob Lenox, in particular, was a very interesting jazz player. Though it took them a while to lock in, there were moments when they were on—and when it was all working, it sounded great.
    ARTIE KORNFELD: Train was terrible. But I liked Michael, so I gave him a $10,000 budget. I said I’d take them