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Describing Woodstock as the 'big bang,' I think that's a great way to describe it, because the important thing about it wasn't how many people were there or that it was a lot of truly wonderful music that got played.

Woodstock is the only thing we have going for us in this part of the state in terms of national recognition. The idea is to extract what was good about Woodstock, repackage it, and present it to Middle America.

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

Woodstock was a business. A very poorly run business.

I know about Woodstock probably as much as your average person who is over 30, where I'd know Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead.

Woodstock was the antithesis of what the music industry turned into. And if anyone tries to tie another Woodstock festival to an obnoxious sponsor, I'll be out protesting again.

Describing something as the 'Woodstock of...' has taken to mean a one-of-a-kind historic gathering.

Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.

Even Woodstock turned out to be a disaster. Everybody was stuck in the mud and people got sick.

We can't recreate Woodstock, nor do we want to. We want to turn its notoriety into a place where we can shape controlled, scaled-down musical events of all sorts.