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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Music Festival, an event that encapsulated the music and culture of a generation and would go on to shape popular music for generations to come. To celebrate this watershed moment in music history, Martin is releasing a pair of special-edition guitars that capture the indelible spirit of that era: a vibrant DX-style guitar, designed with Woodstock’s iconic logo across the front by artist Robert Goetzl, and a finely inlaid D-35, the model introduced just a few years before the festival itself. “This is a passion project for me, and I am so excited about it,” says John McElroy, Martin Guitar’s In-House General Counsel who, along with Martin Director of Product Management Skip Beltz, helped turn Martin Chairman and CEO Chris Martin’s concept for a commemorative guitar into reality. “In 1969, I was 14 years old, and there was no way my mom was going to let me go,” recalls Martin. “But I had the record, and I played that thing till it wore out.” It was an era that was not only transformative for music but, as Beltz points out, for Martin Guitar as well: “This guitar plant was built in 1964 because Martin couldn't build enough guitars to keep up with demand in the North Street Factory. That combination of 1960s folk music and the era that Woodstock has come to represent had a huge impact on Martin Guitar and the people in the factory, the generations of people building those guitars.”
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D-35 Woodstock
The legacy of the folk music era—of world community, of change, or radical creativity—is one that continues to ripple through the company. “Fifty years later, let’s not forget,” Chris Martin says. “It was a moment in time—savor it when you have it, because it’s not permanent.” McElroy adds, “With the 50th anniversary of Woodstock coming up, a commemorative guitar felt like the perfect way to pay homage to that era. To me, Woodstock is the seminal event in rock and roll music, period: The Who, The Band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young playing their second show ever with a Martin D-45 on that stage. And as I learned more about the festival, I just became riveted by the story of how these four kids in their 20s pulled off the most influential rock and roll concert in history. It's amazing to me.” To help launch these special-edition instruments, we were lucky enough to speak to one of the “four kids” who created the Woodstock Festival: Joel Rosenman, Manager of Woodstock Ventures, LLC. Mr. Rosenman took a break from his work on a musical about Woodstock to discuss his love of Martin guitars, his thoughts on folk music, a n d th e s i tco m sc r i pt th at l a u n ched the most famous music festival in the world. This interview has been edited and rearranged for length and clarity. M: You mentioned that, before Woodstock, you had a modest musical career on a Martin guitar. Can you talk about how that came about? I started life, commercially, as a lifeguard. And you can imagine how boring that is, sitting on the tower watching—it was a town beach; it wasn't even a big beach—maybe 20 people in the water. It was so boring! But then one day, my aunt—who was a minor star on Broadway—had a guitar that she was getting rid of, and she gave it to me. It was a Spanish guitar with nylon strings, and I started taking it with me to work. I would sit on the tower and watch the water for trouble, and I’d practice my guitar. Only, back in those days, I loved flamenco music. So I learned a lot of flamenco, just sitting there in the sun.
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D-35 Woodstock
By the next summer, I had a job as the flamenco player at an Italian restaurant—a little bit of a culture mix but close enough for the little town I was in—and I was the dinner entertainment. But when I went off to college, not too long after that, I discovered that there was very little market for flamenco guitarists. But I did notice that folk music was definitely the rage. Since it seemed like a pretty easy transition from the complicated falsettos that make up flamenco music to the three, or four, or five chords that make up folk guitar music, I thought, “Well, I'll try this.” And it turned out to be pretty easy—so easy that I could actually sing along with it! You couldn't do that with flamenco—or at least I couldn't. So it became a rich sort of art form for me, which is no different from what was happening to a lot of people who were into folk music at the time. And it was fun to play and sing—we'd have parties and everything. I did notice, though, that I was the only one playing folk on a Spanish flamenco guitar, while a lot of the people I played with had Martins. And some of them were phenomenal musicians. Because I was young, I concluded that you must need a Martin to become a real good musician. So, I went and bought a Martin and started playing, and just put my nylon-string guitar on the shelf. I remember that guitar was great for folk and had this real big body; it was terrific. I loved the sound of it, and I started getting better traction as a musician. I began to sing around—I went to Princeton, and there were clubs around and parties on the university campus that I could get hired to play—and I had a little modest career. I was thrilled to be able to do it. And between the end of my last year at Princeton and my first year at Yale Law School, I had an unexpected windfall: An agent I sometimes worked with offered me a spot out at a hotel as a lounge act in Las Vegas.
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M: Wow! That’s what I said—wow. And so I accepted it, of course, and I drove across the country. I guess I was about halfway there when I called—just to make sure that I was heading to the right place and that gig was still on, because I still couldn't believe it—and the guy in charge of entertainment at the Vegas hotel said, “Oh, one thing I forgot: You can play bass, can't you?” And I thought, Either I'm going to turn around and go back to New York, or I could lie. So I chose the ethical solution, and I said, “Of course! Only thing is, I left my bass in New York.” And he said, “That's alright, we have one for you.” So I went to Vegas and played upright bass in a trio, where I was also the emcee and singer. Luckily, bass and guitar turned out to not be that different, though it was a little difficult because there were no frets—I had to sort of pick it up on the fly. But the good thing was that the notes were so low that most people couldn’t tell whether I was even playing in the same key as the rest of the musicians. And then, gradually, I got into it, and it became a lot of fun to play bass. And every now and then, I would go out on stage with my trusty Martin guitar and just performed solo, which was a lot of fun for me. When my “Vegas career” ended, I headed back to New Haven, Connecticut, where you could find gigs around town, little clubs that would put you into the lineup for a week. After a while, I stopped playing guitar at those gigs and just was an emcee and singer. One of the other guys in the law school was a terrific accompanist on the piano, and we did two-man shows around town, and it was a lot of fun. So then I got out of law school and was hired by a law firm, and at night I performed in clubs around the city—it was kind of a dual life. And then one night, I was at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, the warm-up act to some real star, and, unbeknownst to me, sitting in the audience was a guy named John Hammond. Turns out he was the head of A&R at Columbia Records and had a string of “golden ear” kind of discoveries, from Billie Holiday to Bruce Springsteen to Dylan to Simon & Garfunkel. After the show—luckily he was there early, because everything was running late, and so much to my good luck he got to hear me—he came and gave me his card and said, “Why don't you come to my office, and we'll do some demos—I heard something in your voice that I think I can work with.” Two days later, I went to Columbia Studios and cut some demos. I played my own guitar—although sometimes they’ll give you a professional musician—but I felt more comfortable if I accompanied myself on my Martin—it seems like Martin’s sort of following me through all this stuff! And they listened to the demos and Hammond says, “Just as I thought. Here's a contract—you can become a Columbia recording artist.” But before I could answer, he said, “There's just one thing… I think you should take this contract home and think about it overnight. I usually offer this contract to people who have no alternatives—this is kind of it, their big break, and so forth. But with your education, you have a lot of alternatives, and this may not be the one you should choose for yourself. So why don’t you think about being a singer from the standpoint of being a success, rather than as a struggling musician, and see if you like that outcome. And if you don't like that, then you probably shouldn't do this. If you do like that, then I can help you get to that.”
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So, I took his advice and went home and thought about it. I picked a couple of vocal stars at the time—I think Frank Sinatra and a few others—and looked at their personal lives and thought, “Who wants this?” They were fantastically successful, but their personal lives were a mess, and then there was the constant media hounding, the privacy issue. As a musician, if you're not hounded by the paparazzi, something's wrong—talk about a double-edged sword. So the next morning, I went back to Hammond’s office, and I said, “I don't think I'm going to do it.” And he said, “I'm not surprised. I don't know whether I'm happy or sad about this—I would love to work with you, but I understand your choice.” So, he was a really good guy. And that was it. Ironically, the group cutting a demo in the little studio next to me a couple of days earlier was recording “The Sound of Silence,” and it became a big hit! And they got signed; I didn’t. I didn't know how momentous it was in my life; it just seemed like the right choice. I left his office, went back to the law firm, and sat down at my desk. And all of a sudden, with the music pathway having been sort of finished in my life, I couldn't sit at my desk at the law firm. I just couldn't sit there. So I went into the senior partner’s office, the guy who’d hired me, and I said, “I can't do this anymore. I have to leave the firm.” And he said, “Alright, we’ll miss you, but you have to do what you have to do.” So, I left. In the morning I had two careers, and by the afternoon I was unemployed. And that's when I decided to write the sitcom.
D-35 Woodstock
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M: And this is the sitcom that would eventually lead you to Woodstock? How did that begin? I remember the afternoon we essentially brainstormed the idea into existence. It's actually simple: John Roberts, my late partner, and I were writing this sitcom about two young guys with a lot of money and not a lot of brains, who wanted to get into venture capital projects. And, because it was a sitcom, every week they would fall into some nutty venture and almost lose their shirts—sometimes, almost their lives! We pictured there’d be other characters in the office, and probably a spin-off, one guy who would have his own series—we were full of grandiose successes for this sitcom pilot.
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But the odd thing is, we took the pilot to a well-known TV agent, and he loved the idea. He said, “I could sell this! So, what sort of nutty ventures do these guys get into?” And neither one of us had enough business experience to even imagine one nutty venture. So we said, “We… we have those back at the office.” And he said, “Great! Bring in about ten of them for a season, and we'll get started.” So we went back to the apartment—we were suitemates—and we drew a complete blank. We had this great start, this fantastic opportunity that fell right out of the sky for us, and we couldn't develop it into a real success. Eventually, we hit on the solution: We took out classified ads in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and the ad read: “Young man with unlimited capital seeks interesting and legitimate business ventures.” We put the word “legitimate” in there to sound really stupid, and we must have succeeded because every con artist and criminal—in the world, it seems—wrote in response to that dear young man! “With your capital and my breakthrough idea to tap the power of the eighth dimension—” and so forth. But one idea came through that really did catch our interest, and it led us into enough venture capital so that we found ourselves the proprietors and founders of the number one recording studio in Manhattan [Media Sound Recording Studios]. Which was a fun project for a number of reasons—including that there was a lot music. Some time later, the two other guys in the Woodstock project—Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld—came to see us, because they’d heard that we built a recording studio in Manhattan, and they wanted to build one in Woodstock, New York. Their theory was that there were plenty of musicians in Woodstock, New York, and if they had enough publicity for the opening day of the studio, they could get around some of the disadvantages of being two hours away from Manhattan. We looked at this project from the standpoint of guys who were already in the business—for our own studio, we had done analysis before we began and realized there was enough traffic that we could take our small idea for a Manhattan studio and multiply it by ten, which we did. Looking at [Lang and Kornfeld’s] proposal, we just couldn't do the same kind of math. But, at the back page of their proposal, they had this idea for a cocktail party on opening day. It was a ribboncutting, where people would rub elbows with some of these famous musicians, and the idea was that word of this party would get around and down to New York, and it would seem pretty impressive because they would have Bob Dylan and people like that associated with the studio. And that was their solution to the anonymity of being stuck in the woods up in Woodstock, New York. I looked at that addendum to their proposal and said, “If these guys are willing to come to a cocktail party, why do we need a studio? Why don't we just put them all together in a concert?” So we started to think about that, but [Lang and Kornfeld] were a little reluctant because Michael had been an investor in a concert in Florida the year before that hadn't worked out well for him. Both of these guys said at one point or another, “We'd like bricks and mortar, something like a recording studio.” But they were keen on the concert idea because, the more we fleshed it out, the more it looked like we could have fun doing it and make it a success. And then we agreed: “Okay let's do both projects—let's do the concert and then with the profits”—ha! that’s a joke looking back on it—“we’ll build the recording studio.” They thought that was great progression, and we did, too, so that's how we got started.
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M: You’d mentioned the idea that Martin had followed you along on this journey from your job as a lifeguard all the way to Woodstock. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Well, thinking about it the other day, I realized that if you trace everything that happened to me after I got down from that lifeguard tower and into the creation of Woodstock, it is as if there were a Martin guitar slung over my shoulder every step of the way. In that span of time, I grew a mustache; in that space of time, I changed from slacks to bell-bottoms, from Brooks Brothers suits to tie-dye—but the Martin stayed the same. It was a nice touchstone for me, and very much fun to play. At Woodstock, there were obviously musicians who made my talent on the same guitar look insignificant— Robbie Robertson from the Band, Stephen Stills from Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joan Baez—these people were playing Martins, and they obviously loved them, too. But what they could do on a Martin was far more complicated and inspired than what I could do, and I just was in awe of their musicianship. I’ve always loved the sound that they can produce on this kind of guitar, from those Martins. So it wasn’t my Martin there, but it still seemed like a continuation. You may know, but the Band has that song “The Weight,” and he sings, “I pulled into Nazareth, was feeling 'bout half past dead…”—the rumor, and I think he confirmed this, is that Robbie Robertson got that line from looking into the soundhole of the guitar and seeing the Martin label, with the name of the town that Martins are made in: Nazareth, Pennsylvania. And that's why he threw that into the lyric. M: Thinking back to why Robbie Robertson might have come to be holding that Martin in his hands, what is it about the era that led to that folk-rock explosion? I'd be tempted to say that it wasn't that folk music “burst onto the scene,” but that it's all folk music—all of it. Everything today is folk music, everything in the century before, since Huddie Ledbetter came on the scene, or Bill Broonzy, or these other names from the 1940s or '50s; gospel music is folk music, and rap is folk music.
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It’s the music of the people, and it comes in all kinds of forms. In the '50s and up to the '60s, the form was [the chord progression] I-IV-V. Does it mean music in I-IV-V was folk music and the other stuff wasn’t? No, it just means it was I-IV-V and that guitars predominated instead of saxophone, or harp, or other instruments from time immemorial. But the motivation was the same, which was to speak to whichever community you were in, to share concepts and ideas, some of them startling but all of them designed to create a musical framework for your civilization, your society, your small clan—whatever it was. I think that's pure continuity, that's never been different. So when somebody says “folk music,” they might mean steel-string guitars in I-IV-V, but for me, it's everywhere. I love that it was guitar and I-IV-V, because I could do that, and it sounded so good on my Martin, and it sounded so good on other people's Martins. There was a lot of room for expression; you could get a lot of lyrics into it. There was a lot of opportunity for comment on what was going on in the world or what was going on in your heart after your girlfriend left, or how much fun it was to have grandchildren—there were so many different themes that you could create a song out of. So for me, it wasn’t so much a genre as a style of a larger genre, in the same way bell-bottoms were a style. So the question might better be: Why was it I-IV-V on steel-string guitars? I think you can trace music from the early 1900s to the 1960s and see why it was. It's a different question, though—why were we buying Martins instead of some other brand? I think that's purely because they were fun to play physically with your fingers, the way the strings work with the frets, and that beautiful, rich sound that came out of them. It was an invention that totally supported that style of music. It's kind of wrong to say “the tools make the carpenter,” but in a way, having a Martin guitar was an advantage. Given that everybody had equal talent, if you had a guitar that sounded better, that was on your side, that was a help at an audition.
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Left: DX-Woodstock Right: D-35 Woodstock
M: In a way, working on these 50th Anniversary guitars mirrors the continuity you talk about. There is sort of innate desire in everybody—most people—to seize on things like Woodstock and make them touchstones of history. It helps them with their bearings, how to place themselves in this historical continuity. A lot of times, when you hear about the '60s, a disproportionate amount of time, you hear that it was the “Woodstock generation” or that “we've come a long way since 1969 and the Woodstock Festival.” And I guess the same would be true about Martin guitars. If you trace Martin's evolution through the course of history from 1833 to 1969, that’s over 130 years before Woodstock, and then afterwards, another 50 years to today— almost two centuries. And if you follow the line of Martin guitars only, you'll see so much of world history that is touched by just that one thing—just Martin guitars. You can single that out and follow the rise and fall of different elements and factions in society, different cultural shifts. All these things attached to what the guitar was used for at various points throughout its history, and by the time you get to Woodstock, it's still the same thing. You pull out your Martin guitar, and you make a statement about the times. About Vietnam, about the woman or the guy who left you, the guy who’s in jail, or just how fun it is “bringing in a couple of keys from L.A.,” if you know that Arlo Guthrie song. All the themes are right there. And you always had Martin guitars there as well. M: Music’s role in building community, world community, is mirrored in the acoustic guitar and the way people gather around it and communicate through that instrument. It's true. There is something intimate about it that makes you feel as if you're family. And if you’re family through music, then you could be family about a lot of things. Singing together is another way that happens. Listening to somebody play the guitar well is inspiring and a lot of fun, but if you are singing along with everybody in your area and everybody can hear everybody else singing the same song, that's another powerful emblem of community. And it’s also a lot of fun—there's something physical about the guitar that you can't really describe in words. There’s the old saying that if you can describe that thing in words, then that probably isn't it. And now, half a century later, there’s this continuity from Woodstock to this instrument. We have these great Commemorative-Edition guitars for an event that was so immediate, and scary at times. It just seems like a whole lifetime that’s contained in one instrument. And I think that's great—it’s an achievement that contains all of the achievements we’ve been discussing. It’s wonderful.
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