Taking Woodstock
A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Taking Woodstock is the funny, touching, and true story of Elliot Tiber, the man who was instrumental in arranging the site for the original Woodstock Concert. Elliot, whose parents owned an upstate New York motel, was working in Greenwich Village in the summer of 1969. He socialized with the likes of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and yet somehow managed to keep his gay life a secret from his family. Then on Friday, June 28, Elliot walked into the Stonewall Inn—and witnessed the riot that would galvanize the American gay movement and enable him to take stock of his own lifestyle. And on July 15, when Elliot learned that the Woodstock Concert promoters were unable to stage the show in Wallkill, he offered to find them a new venue. Soon he was swept up in a vortex that would change his life forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ahumble motel owner and his parents become the heroes in carrying off the momentous 1969 Woodstock rock concert in Tiber's occasionally improbable yet thoroughly entertaining tale. Tiber, n Teichberg of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, put on hold his personal ambition in the mid-1950s as an artist to help his aging Old World Jewish parents run their ramshackle resort motel in White Lake, deep in the Catskill Mountains. Hounded by the guilt that he can't live up to his parents' standards and riven by his own covert homosexuality, Tiber pokes fun at what he calls the Teichberg Curse, a scourge that won't allow the family to escape financial ruin. As head of the Chamber of Commerce in his small town, and possessed of the yearly permit to hold summer music concerts, Tiber gets wind of rock concert promoter Michael Lang's need for a venue to hold the Woodstock festival. A month of frenzied preparations ensues as Max Yasgur's farm is secured, the anticipated numbers swell, and tensions grow in the town. Yet the planning of the concert makes up only one part of Tiber's very human story, which includes affecting side chapters on brushes with artists and standing defiant when the cops raided the West Village gay bar Stonewall.
