Members of the Woodstock Town Council and Chamber of Commerce with Bike Rack on 4/22/10

On the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day members of the Town Council and Chamber of Commerce gathered to officially welcome two bright red bicycle-shaped bike racks to Woodstock. The new racks were purchased with funds raised through last summer’s Roots of Woodstock Live Concert and Eco Raffle. The racks are intended as functional sculpture—signaling to visitors and residents that Woodstock is serious about its 2007 Zero-Carbon Initiative. One rack is located in front of the Woodstock Chamber booth at 10 Rock City Road. The second is at H. Houst & Son (an Eco Raffle sponsor), 4 Mill Hill Road. In honor of the occasion publisher WoodstockArts designed a 20.4 mile bicycle route featuring “Stories of Woodstock.” Click here to download the PDF.

Other green initiatives underway in Woodstock during this 40^th anniversary year include the following:

• The Chamber’s Experience Woodstock Card. Available to residents and visitors for just $25, this card is a passport to a festival of special offers at many of Woodstock’s leading shops, galleries, performance spaces and other venues in the area. Its purpose is to encourage everyone to think globally but shop locally, thereby helping Woodstock and the environment. The card is currently accessible online at the Chamber web site, as well as at Lotus Fine Art & Design (33 Rock City Road), Coldwell Banker Village Green Realty (11-13 Mill Hill Road) and Rondout Savings Bank, (295-4 Route 375, near the Hurley Ridge Market in West Hurley).
• Publication of the 2010 Woodstock, NY Travel Guide, devoted this year to “celebrating 40 years of Earth Day.”
• Walkable Woodstock, being organized by Robin Segal, chair of the Woodstock Chamber’s Green Committee, with a map and web site. Visitors will be encouraged to enjoy auto-free vacations in Woodstock by walking to the many treasures that Woodstock offers within a half-mile of the Village Green.
• Liz Simonson’s workshop inspired by local author David Gershon’s Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5,000 Pounds.
• Publication of The Green Guide, a downloadable Woodstock Environment Commission document designed to help us conserve our natural resources. It’s available on the Town web site at www.woodstockny.org.

Contact: David Salidor

Phone: 212-245-5909

Email: DSalidorCompany@aol.com

Roots of Woodstock Live Concert 

40th Anniversary Concert Brings Festival Home to Woodstock 

Woodstock, NY—May 19, 2009—Weston Blelock, author and editor of WoodstockArts’ forthcoming Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to “Woodstock,“ has confirmed a rumored 40^th anniversary concert to be held on August 15 at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock. Blelock will co-produce the show with his sister, Julia, in association with Steve Walter, formerly of The Cutting Room in New York City.

Walter, whose Cutting Room club hosted a series of top-notch music acts like Sheryl Crow, Stills and Nash, Paolo Nutini and Keane, notes, “I am booking bands that will evoke the original festival energy and bring it back home to Woodstock.” Blelock adds, “The town has long been at the epicenter of music festivals-from those on the Maverick beginning in the 1900s, to the Sound-Outs in the 1960s, and the mega-concert of 1969. Simply due to space constraints, some of these failed to happen in the town of Woodstock itself.”

Part of the proceeds of the concert will fund the town’s Zero-Carbon Initiative, passed in 2007. The concert team is also in discussion with a media partner to film and record the event. According to Walter, “We want to mix sixties acts with the up-and-coming to connect with the Woodstock legacy, but also to embrace the cutting-edge vibe of tomorrow.”

Concert developments can be tracked at www.RootsOfWoodstock.com.

About the Blelocks:

Weston and Julia Blelock have had a presence in the Woodstock area since 1956. During the sixties Weston was at school in the UK, but summered in Woodstock. He attended several Sound-Outs and the ’69 festival in Bethel. During the 1990s he was a radio journalist in Canada. More recently he co-founded WoodstockArts, a publishing and production company. He is currently Vice President of the Historical Society of Woodstock.

Julia Blelock also grew up in Woodstock. She left town to pursue a marketing career in information technology, based in New York City and Los Angeles. She recently returned to Woodstock and has become an ardent promoter of area artists through her work for the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce & Arts and the Woodstock Arts Consortium. She is a co-founder of WoodstockArts.

About Steve Walter:

Managing partner and booker for The Cutting Room from 1999 to 2009, Walter is a graduate of Boston’s Berklee College of Music. He began his career as a lighting director at the Sunshine Inn on the Jersey shore, for acts like Procol Harum, Johnny Winter, Seals & Croft and Richie Havens. In 1999 he launched The Cutting Room, and within ten years it became one of New York’s top showcases for talent as diverse as Sting, Donovan, Melanie, Alanis Morrisette and Mary Wilson of The Supremes.

About WoodstockArts:

WoodstockArts is a publishing and production company based in Woodstock, NY. As a publisher it specializes in quality regional art books. A recent title, Woodstock History and Hearsay, is an award-winning art history of the town. As producers the company’s principals have worked on a number of local projects. One such was staging a guitar sculpture auction in conjunction with Sotheby’s/eBay in 2002 for the town’s Byrdcliffe Art Colony centennial celebration. Last August WoodstockArts produced the Roots of ’69 Woodstock Festival panel discussion and Contemporary Sound-Out. The firm is planning a July release of Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to “Woodstock.”

Contact: David Salidor

Phone: 212-245-5909

Email: DSalidorCompany@aol.com

Why Woodstock?

Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival 

Woodstock, NY-April 13, 2009-The town of Woodstock is poised to launch a series of fortieth anniversary celebrations of the 1969 Woodstock mega-concert. Prime among these is the July 15, 2009, launch of a new book from publisher WoodstockArts, Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to “Woodstock.” It explains definitively and for the first time why the festival was named Woodstock, and why it continues to be so closely associated with the town, even though the concert actually took place in Bethel, NY.

The forthcoming book began last summer as a panel discussion among townspeople knowledgeable about the music scene in the late sixties. It was held on August 9, 2008, at the Colony Café in Woodstock (and followed by a contemporary “Sound-Out”). Panelists included Michael Lang, a Woodstock resident and legendary 1969 Woodstock Festival promoter; Jean Young, co-author with Lang of Woodstock Festival Remembered; Bill West, active in local government since the 1960s; Jeremy Wilber, former Town Supervisor and bartender during the sixties at the Sled Hill Café; and Paul McMahon, a local music icon and bona fide hippie. During the course of the wide-ranging conversation the audience learned how Lang and his partners developed the concept for the world-renowned Woodstock Music and Art Fair, and how their thinking was shaped by Woodstock’s legacy of art and music festivals.

 A richly illustrated panel discussion transcript comprises the first part of the book. It is followed by a “roots of Woodstock” photo essay that chronicles the Arts and Crafts origins of the town, from its glass-making era in the 1800s to the founding of the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in 1902. It details the town’s hallowed tradition of weekend-long music concerts-beginning in the early 1900s with Woodstock’s Maverick festivals, and stretching up through the countercultural Sound-Outs of the 1960s. Weston Blelock, one of the book’s co-editors, interviewed more than thirty musicians and artists prominent in the sixties; their comments and anecdotes provide a wonderful counterpoint to the photographic record.

 The sixties’ Sound-Outs were launched by John “Jocko” Moffitt and produced on a Woodstock-area farm belonging to Pansy “Pan” Copeland. These festivals-largely unknown beyond the immediate Woodstock region-drew passionate audiences, and featured such performers as Tim Hardin, the Blues Magoos, The Mothers of Invention, Paul Butterfield, Van Morrison and Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys. Michael Lang noted in the panel discussion that “the Sound-Outs were kind of the spark for the Woodstock Festival. I’d done a series of concerts in Florida . . . . The Sound-Outs . . . had a great feel, and [they were] in the country and . . . provided all the guidelines that I needed . . . .”

 The book also highlights such Woodstock artists, writers and performers as Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, and Richie Havens. Bob Fass, Woodstock Sound-Out emcee and host of WBAI’s Radio Unnameable for more than forty years, has contributed a brilliant and evocative foreword to the book. Also included are a compendium of important Woodstock players, a map of historic 1960s locations in the Woodstock area, and 115 images-many of them rare, vintage photos of the Woodstock music and art scenes.

 About the Editors

Weston and Julia Blelock have had a presence in the Woodstock area since 1956. A close friend of their family wrote the first history of the town in 1959. (WoodstockArts recently published an “art book edition” of that early title.)

 During the sixties Weston was at school in the UK, but summered in Woodstock. He attended several Sound-Outs and the ’69 Festival in Bethel. During the 1990s he was a radio journalist in Canada. More recently he co-founded WoodstockArts, a publishing and production company. He is currently Vice President of the Historical Society of Woodstock.

 Julia Blelock also grew up in Woodstock. She left town to pursue a marketing career in information technology, based in New York City and Los Angeles. She recently returned to Woodstock and has become an ardent promoter of area artists through her work for the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce & Arts and the Woodstock Arts Consortium. She is a co-founder of WoodstockArts.

 About WoodstockArts (www.woodstockarts.com)

WoodstockArts is a publishing and production company based in Woodstock, NY. As a publisher it specializes in quality regional art books. A recent title, Woodstock History and Hearsay, is an award-winning art history of the town. As producers the company’s principals have worked on a number of local projects. One such was staging a guitar sculpture auction in conjunction with Sotheby’s/eBay in 2002 for the town’s Byrdcliffe Art Colony centennial celebration. Last August WoodstockArts produced the Roots of ’69 Woodstock Festival panel discussion and Contemporary Sound-Out. The firm is currently at work on a fortieth anniversary concert scheduled to take place in Woodstock on August 15, 2009.

 Part of the proceeds from Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival will be donated to the Historical Society of Woodstock and the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce & Arts.