Michael Lang, a co-creator of a world-renowned musical festival, died on Saturday.
Lang, one of the co-creators and promoters of the 1969 Woodstock musical festival, died at the New York Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He had been battling non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer that starts out in your lymphatic system, affects white blood cell growth, and can result in tumors, according to the Mayo Clinic.
“He was absolutely an historic figure, and also a great guy,” Michael Pagnotta, a family friend, told the Associated Press. “Both of those thing go hand in hand.”
Lang created Woodstock along with co-creators Artie Kornfield, John Roberts, and Joel Rosenman. The four of them advertised the festival as being “three days of peace and music” during the summer of 1969, while the Vietnam War continued.
“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.
Woodstock, held in Bethel, New York, ended up seeing around 400,000 people flock to hear musicians and bands such as Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Carlos Santana, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Santana perform.
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Since Woodstock, many other festivals have attempted to model themselves a bit similarly, such as the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California and Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee.
Lang said that a lot of music festivals have been “modeled after Woodstock — Bonnaroo and Coachella, in particular,” adding that “there was a ritual that was created that keeps getting replicated.”
