Life After Woodstock

It is an unpleasant future that is contemplated in the 1971 science fiction film “The Omega Man,” one in which bloodthirsty radioactive mutants with poor complexions roam the Earth while only one example of humankind remains, and he’s Charlton Heston.

Heston’s character dodges the mutants so that he might slip into a movie theater, where, to maintain some shred of his humanity, he watches “Woodstock, the Movie” repeatedly, reciting along, word for word, as the 1969 fest’s phenomenally spaced-out-looking co-promoter Artie Kornfeld expounds on peace and love.

Now it is the real future--although one scarcely less conceivable from the vantage of Woodstock’s stage--and Kornfeld is still expounding on peace and love.

The tie-dyed generation now sports silk ties; the music and radio industries are controlled by lawyers and business school grads; popular culture has been so co-opted by corporations that the abiding image of 1994’s Woodstock II (of which Kornfeld proudly had no part) is the fest’s famed bird-on-a-guitar-neck logo emblazoned on a Pepsi can.

As if to really drive the point home, Kornfeld, a man who helped raise Woodstock from a pipe dream to the world’s largest peaceful gathering and the defining moment of his generation, has just had an infinitely less ambitious project crash on him. He had been helping to promote the Miracle in the Desert--a charity-aiding festival featuring Smash Mouth, John Easdale and others that would have taken place Saturday in Desert Hot Springs if the backers hadn’t pulled the plug because of poor advance sales.

Kornfeld says he was hampered by not being given the funds to properly advertise the event but believes the main thing lacking--the thing so in abundance three decades ago--was faith.

“I’m so peeved that it was canceled, because it would have been packed,” he insists. “You could feel it coming on. We could have made it happen.”

Standing at hippiedom’s ground zero in the Woodstock movie, Kornfeld had a dark, tousled beard and long hair, was shirtless but for a weathered leather vest, and had such a doe-eyed look of wonder on his face that no less an authority than Jerry Garcia decreed that Kornfeld was the most spaced-out guy in the entire film.

Though he was indeed dosed with LSD at midfest by the Dead’s notorious chemist Owsley Stanley, Kornfeld claims, “That look wasn’t due to drugs, but to seeing half a million people there as the living proof that you could have the most outlandish idea and see it come to a meaningful fruition. We’d proved that anything was possible.”

At 26, Woodstock was pretty much Kornfeld’s “Citizen Kane.” Now 55 and silver-haired, he looks as if he could be Dennis Hopper’s nearly normal brother. He’s spent those intervening decades either running record labels or, chiefly, working as an independent record promoter, but his answering machine still identifies him as “the same Artie Kornfeld who produced Woodstock.”

Like other promo men, Kornfeld does such a fine job of promoting himself that he could be easily rendered as a caricature were one willing to ignore his essence. In a recent two-hour chat--over turkey leg plates at Dolores on Santa Monica Boulevard--he dropped a phone book’s worth of names in an unstaunchable flow of Artie-centric stories that span from rock’s doo-wop era to alternative rock. But something comes through, where one walks away with the impression that Kornfeld is just a sweet-natured guy justifiably in awe of the cavalcade of great and sometimes tragic things that have come his way.

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The son of a Brooklyn cop, Kornfeld grew up playing symphonic trumpet but loving the budding rock music he heard. When the family moved to North Carolina in his early teens, he got a job hawking soda pop at the Charlotte Coliseum so he could see the likes of Elvis, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino.

By his midteens the family had moved back to Brooklyn, and Kornfeld was signed by the same manager who handled young rockers Tom and Jerry, later known by their real names, Simon & Garfunkel. Groomed to be a Fabian-like singer, Kornfeld cut demos backed by Dion & the Belmonts, but nothing came of them.

He spent a summer waxing cars so he could buy a budget Webcor tape recorder and a Martin guitar, and started writing songs.

“I read all the trade papers, and could tell you who wrote and published every song,” he said. “By the time I was in college I got a job selling shoes and used the money from that to cut a demo of a song I wrote called ‘The Fink.’ The hot publisher then was Don Kirshner, and I knew from the trades that a guy from my neighborhood, Charlie Koppelman, worked for him. I was going to night school at Queens College and fibbed to the guys on the basketball court there that I was taking this demo to my good friend Charlie Koppelman. The class bell rang, and most of them left, except for this guy, who said, ‘Let me introduce myself. I’m Charlie Koppelman.’ He was really gracious about it and actually took me in to Kirshner for him to hear my tape.”

Kirshner was suitably impressed and signed him to a songwriting contract, with a $500 advance, a $150 bonus and a salary of $75 a week, at a time when Kornfeld’s dad was making $80 a week. Nice, but what thrilled Kornfeld was suddenly finding himself working alongside, and sometimes with, such songwriting heroes as Carole King, Barry Mann, Gerry Goffin and Neil Sedaka. Within six months, four of Kornfeld’s compositions were on the Billboard charts, performed by such groups as the Angels, as a follow-up to their hit “My Boyfriend’s Back,” Wayne Newton and the Shirelles.

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In 1963, he was sent out to L.A. to write with Jan Berry of Jan & Dean, with the notable result being the car crash classic, “Dead Man’s Curve.”

Kornfeld recalled, “I was living in an apartment with Jan, and Brian Wilson and I were sitting around there one day. Brian had just got a Honda motorbike, and we took it for a ride to his girlfriend’s mother’s house. Brian was going too fast, and we skidded and wiped out. As we walked the bike back, I told Brian, ‘Let’s write an accident song since we just wiped out.’ Jan had let me drive his Stingray for a couple of weeks, so I just started singing, ‘I was cruising in my Stingray late one night, when an XKE . . .’ and then Brian came in with something. We had the title from the deejay, Roger Christian, and Jan added other parts later, but ‘Dead Man’s Curve’ was primarily Brian and me at the piano for three hours.”

Along with writing songs for others, Kornfeld had his own brief stint as a pop star in 1965 and ’66 when his group, the Changin’ Times, had one of two hit versions of his song “Pied Piper,” a tune that John Lennon singled out as a favorite in interviews at the time. With that hit, Kornfeld toured the U.S. as an opening act for Sonny and Cher.

Years later, he had occasion to meet Lennon when they were using adjacent recording halls.

“I was in the restroom, leaning over the urinal snorting coke. Without his glasses on, Lennon couldn’t see a thing, and all of a sudden I felt this wet stream running down the back of my leg. I turn around and go, ‘Oh, my God, John Lennon! And, by the way, you’re peeing on me.’

“He said, ‘Who are you?’ I identified myself, and he said, ‘I know you’ but didn’t say anything about Woodstock. Instead, he told me that ‘Pied Piper’ was one of his favorite songs. That made me feel real good, because then, in the early ‘70s, people only knew me as Artie Woodstock.”

By 1968, Kornfeld was Capitol Records’ East Coast vice president of Artists and Repertoire. He helped sign the Band, Debbie Harry’s first group and other acts to the label; assisted Paul McCartney in setting up the Beatles’ Apple Records; hung out with Frank Zappa; had a “drug friendship” with Jimi Hendrix and otherwise comported himself in the manner of the times.

Hence, Kornfeld was standing on his desk one day sucking on a hash pipe when his secretary told him there was a Michael Lang to see him. Lang was from his Brooklyn neighborhood and was a musical aspirant who had run a Miami head shop and been involved in an abortive pop festival there.

The two hit it off as friends, and Lang virtually moved in with Kornfeld and his wife, Linda. The recollections of Kornfeld and his Woodstock Ventures partners--Lang and money men Joel Rosenman and John Roberts--differ, but he recalls the idea for the festival to end all festivals arising as he, Linda and Lang were smoking some weed at the kitchen table one night.

“I wanted to challenge the war in Vietnam, to show them how many of us there really were that didn’t want our brothers and sisters getting killed over a senseless war, with a president we knew was dishonest, with our civil liberties disappearing like crazy. Woodstock was our statement, that through music we were going to let them know how many rock ‘n’ roll babies there really were, that we were the future and the times were a-changin’. That was my agenda, that and, selfishly, I wanted to see all these great acts,” Kornfeld said, laughing.

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In the months preceding the festival, Kornfeld said he was tailed and his phone was bugged. He suspects government pressure was behind the festival being denied its original site four weeks before the event. It was a mad scramble to find and prepare a new location. When attendance soared beyond anyone’s dreams or nightmares, Woodstock could easily have been a mortal disaster rather than just a monetary one.

“I think the fact we advertised it as ‘three days of peace and music’--my phrase--helped set the mood. And the fact that, with the time we had, we decided to put up a good stage instead of good fences. Everyone says we didn’t know what we were doing, but you know what? It held. There was no security to speak of, but there were no fights, no break in the sense of community. All that separated the backstage area from the crowd was a line, not a fence, but nobody crossed it.”

Nobody except for one fellow on acid who came after Kornfeld with a gun.

“He was saying, ‘I’m going to blow you away, you hippie capitalist pig.’ While I tried to talk him down, Leo, the road manager for Crosby, Stills and Nash jumped him and got the gun away.”

Then Kornfeld had his own lysergic moment. In Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock,” she envisioned bombers turning into butterflies. Not knowing he’d been dosed with powerful Owsley acid, Kornfeld had rather the opposite experience.

“I’d never taken a psychedelic except for some organic mescaline Debbie Harry found for me after I read Huxley’s ‘The Doors of Perception.’ At Woodstock I was sitting on Robbie Robertson’s amp as the Band was playing, and I started crying because I got into how hard these 1,600 workers had been working for us, that it was such a beautiful thing they did for the audience. Michael and I had been on the site the whole time, while John and Joel had showed up maybe twice and otherwise were holed up in a hotel because they were afraid to be there.

“When the Band finished playing, my emotions got carried away, and suddenly I saw Woodstock unfold as a tragedy. It was real to me, with riots and the National Guard helicopters dropping paratroopers and killing people. I got so strongly into it that they had to bring me down medicinally in the med tent. I finally started to come down just as Hendrix was playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’

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“And I had to go straight from that to a helicopter to go face John and Joel’s fathers at Citibank. Wall Street was just letting out, and everyone was in these suits, while I was full of mud, still wearing the leather vest I’d been in for three days. I walk into the office of the vice president of Citibank, and he’s feeding raw meat into his tank of piranhas, and that wasn’t a hallucination. There it was, the epitome of our society’s capitalism, right after that incredible weekend.”

In the legal machinations that followed Woodstock, the partners split into factions, and none of them saw a fraction of the millions raked in by the subsequent movie and albums. Kornfeld wasn’t even paid for his screen time in “The Omega Man.”

He and Lang were briefly partners in a Miami-based record label but had a falling out, with Kornfeld now saying, “Michael was magic, but he was a hippie hustler, and you knew he’d eventually get the better of you. But how can I help but love him? We had a baby together.”

Kornfeld said he had a difficult 15 years coming down from Woodstock.

“I was Artie Woodstock, you know, and had the ego to go with it.”

He started doing cocaine, and, where he had once sought enlightenment, now he only sought more coke. His childhood sweetheart and wife, Linda, died in his arms of a brain aneurysm. Working as a promo man, Kornfeld relocated to Zuma Beach and says that one night he prayed to get off coke and the next day stopped doing it, cold. Sixty days into being clean, though, his 16-year-old daughter died of an injected cocaine overdose.

As a promo man--whose job is convincing radio stations to play his acts--Kornfeld has helped break some hits he’s proud of, including Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” and some he’s less than proud of. He needed the income to help pay for massive medical bills incurred treating his second wife, Lesle, for a life-threatening stomach ulcer.

Kornfeld said his life’s losses and struggles, and the love he’s found amid them, has put professional triumphs like Woodstock and little failures like the Miracle in the Desert in perspective.

“If Woodstock had a message, it’s what the Beatles were saying: ‘All you need is love.’ That’s the precious thing. That’s what gets you through,” he said.

He’s had to sell his house and cars, living modestly now in a Canyon Country townhouse. He continues to promote records he likes, continues to write songs--one of which was recently recorded by B.B. King--and is intent that the desert debacle won’t be his last show.

Neither his life nor the future has panned out quite the way it seemed it would from the vantage of Woodstock’s stage, when it seemed obvious that nothing would ever be the same, but Kornfeld says that’s OK.

“We were showing them that we weren’t going to follow in our fathers’ footsteps like every other generation. The irony to me is that eventually we did. I had my Infiniti 245, you know? I never said it was bad to make money; I just thought it was good to make money writing songs and getting people off. And even though things may seem to have returned to normal now, our idea of normal has changed, where there is a balance of people concerned about the ozone layer and racism, people who are very righteous in their beliefs and activism. It’s not what we thought it would be, but it lives on.”