Michael Pagnotta, a rep for Lang and longtime family friend, confirmed the promoter’s death to Rolling Stone, adding that the cause was a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Alongside businessmen John Roberts and Joel Rosenman and music industry promoter Artie Kornfeld, Lang, who had previously promoted the 1968 Miami Pop festival, co-created the Woodstock Music and Art Fair the following year. Famously billed as “Three Days of Peace and Music,” the upstate New York festival drew up to 400,000 people to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, NY and featured dozens of rock’s biggest names, including Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Who, Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
Last summer HBO Max has released a new trailer for Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage, its upcoming documentary about the infamous three-day music festival. The film will arrive on the streaming service July 23rd. (Rolling Stone)
Thrown 30 years after the original Woodstock, Woodstock 99 was completely unlike the counter-cultural celebration of peace, love, and music. The trailer distills the chaos that ensued, from scorching heat and $4 bottles of water, to malfunctioning porta-potties and a whole lot of pent-up white male rage that was unleashed in the form of fights, fires, and multiple reports of sexual assault. Several talking heads featured in the trailer also theorize about how the bad energy released at Woodstock 99 still reverberates in American culture over 20 years later.