Young Men with Unlimited Capital: The Inside Story of the Legendary Woodstock Festival Told By The Two People Who Paid for It

It started with this ad, placed by Joel Rosenman and John Roberts as a way to find interesting work after college. It led Rosenman and Roberts to stage a gathering that changed the face of popular culture: the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in August 1969. Woodstock is rightly remembered as the pivotal event that united a generation, but the behind-the-scenes story is less utopian -- and absolutely fascinating. Rosenman and Roberts describe their shock as they realized, after a long struggle to find a site and placate area residents, that the festival was attracting a crowd ten times larger than expected, stalling traffic for miles around, and forcing thousands of ticket holders to be turned away. The instant city of Woodstock created mind-boggling logistical and medical help, a death, births, bad drugs -- and waking up their local banker in the middle of the night to get $15,000 for The Who and the Grateful Dead, who refused to go onstage without cash in their pockets. By the time Jimi Hendrix played The Star-Spangled Banner at 6:30 Monday Morning, there were only 25,000 people left, but Rosenman and Roberts faced a sea of mud and trash, irate neighbors, bad press ( Nightmare in the Catskills ), staggering debts, and some seventy separate legal proceedings against them. But the ultimate impact of that weekend was far greater -- and far more triumphal for all involved. Young Men With Unlimited Capital is both an amazing and humorous story, and one that chronicles a defining event of 1960's America.