Joni Mitchell backed by Larry Klein (b), Brian Blade (d) and Mark Isham (tp) celebrates the 29th anniversary of the Woodstock festival at “A Day In The Garden”, Yasgur’s Farm in Bethel, NY .
In the least surprising news of the year 2019, the organizers behind Woodstock 50 gave into the inevitable on Wednesday and announced that the festival would not be taking place. “Unfortunately, we ran out of time,” Michael Lang told Rolling Stone shortly after the news broke. “It was an unfortunate venture, but I chalk it up to having the wrong partners early on. We did everything we could have done and we had the right motivations. We put together what I thought was an amazing lineup of talent. I thought we had all that right.”
Lang’s last major concert was Woodstock 99, a notoriously disastrous event that culminated in a fiery riot. What far fewer people remember is another Woodstock event was held the year before that, one that Lang had nothing to do with. It was called A Day in the Garden and, unlike Woodstock 94 and Woodstock 99, it was held at the site of the original festival in Bethel, New York. This time around, nobody slept there and the capacity was capped at 30,000 people.
The most impressive booking was Joni Mitchell, who toured very infrequently throughout the 1980s and 1990s and would essentially retire from the road in 2000. She was supposed to play the original Woodstock in 1969, but her manager David Geffen worried that the chaos of the event would make it impossible for her to make a planned appearance on the The Dick Cavett Show the following day. She was a new artist then and he felt that national TV exposure was far more valuable than playing a single concert.
