Publishers Weekly
Tiber, who helped organize the iconic music festival, recounts the events that led up to Woodstock in this entertaining true story. He recreates the events in dramatic detail, offering readers a new take on a legendary event as well as sharing his own coming-of-age story, his grapples with his homosexuality and run-ins with some of the most celebrated musicians and visual artists of the day. Jim Frangione is the perfect choice for the material: his dramatic flair brings a subtle theatricality to the story. He is able to transcend time and space and transport both himself and his audience back to the 1960s. A Square One hardcover. (Aug.)
Kirkus Reviews
Think Woodstock was all peace and love? Sure, but it also involved lawyers, mobsters and a few assorted pieces of B&D gear. Tiber, ne Eliyahu Teichberg, lived two lives in the '60s: Although he was a well-regarded mural artist whose "paintings were also displayed in galleries and sold," by day, he helped his parents run a fleabag motel in the Catskills, and by night he haunted the gay bars of Greenwich Village, falling into the arms of the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and other rough men. "People with whom I had sex always pretended that they didn't know me when they saw me in the light of day," Tiber sighs in a characteristically self-doubtful moment. To trust his account, he was on the scene when, faced with yet another police raid, a barroom full of gay men and women decided to fight back. Regrettably, Tiber's account of the famed Stonewall Riot is less than glancing. Just so, his reminiscences concerning the detour the Woodstock Festival of 1969 made from Woodstock proper to Max Yasgur's farm outside Bethel-the site of that fleabag hotel, coincidentally-are disjointed and sometimes incoherent. The storyline, though, is of great interest to collectors of rock trivia and history, and it speaks less to the power of flowers than to that of greenbacks: Yasgur's escalating demands for cash; festival organizer Mike Lang's beatific grooviness amid trips to the bank with satchels full of cash; and the arrival on the scene of shady characters with drugs to sell, among other parasites. Clearly, though, Tiber had a good time amid the logistical headaches of hosting a million-plus visitors, even if his momma caught him kissing boys ("I am ashamed of you and Woodstock," she says toward the end ofher life, to which he rejoins, "Some things never change.") and his neighbors threatened to kill him for ruining their bucolic and apparently inbred retreat. Indifferently written, but a tale worth hearing. First printing of 25,000
DECEMBER 2009 - AudioFile
As a native of Woodstock, New York, author Eliot Tiber saw his town evolve from a Jewish resort community in the fifties—when he helped his family run a hotel there—to the mecca for hippies it became in the sixties. In between is a tale of friends, family, culture, and commerce—all against the backdrop of Tiber's coming-of-age as a gay man amid the social upheaval of the time. Listeners be warned—the story is explicit in parts. Jim Frangione's voice is delightful as he applies his nasal tone to the myriad characters—from the original Borscht Belt crowd to the campy denizens of Seventh Avenue, with whom Tiber was running by the late sixties. He was even on the scene of the Stonewall Riots, which he recounts vividly. J.S.H. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
