In 1967, John Roberts and a friend placed this ad in The New York Times: “Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting and legitimate business enterprises.”
More than 5,000 proposals poured in, including one about a bicycle with skis and one about an edible golf ball.
The winning idea?
Something called Woodstock.
Mr. Roberts, a businessman who used inheritance money to produce the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, the mammoth rock festival that attracted nearly a half-million of the nation’s youth to a tiny, sodden upstate New York farm for three days in 1969, died Oct. 27 in New York.
He was 56. The cause of death was cancer.
In the late 1960s, Mr. Roberts was a University of Pennsylvania graduate who was learning to be a stock analyst on Wall Street. He also had a trust fund from his mother, whose family had owned the company that made Polident and Pycopay toothbrushes.
In 1966 he met Joel Rosenman, a young lawyer not long out of Yale University who was not terribly interested in the law. They became friends, roommates and co-conspirators in a plan to write a television sitcom about “two guys just out of school with a lot of money and not a lot of brains,” Rosenman recalled.
To get material for the sitcom, they placed the ad in The New York Times and soon found themselves deluged with nutty business schemes.
What started as a lark eventually became a serious partnership for Mr. Roberts and Rosenman. They backed what became Mediasound Recording Studios in New York, where most of the disco stars of the 1970s as well as the Rolling Stones and Frank Sinatra recorded.
Mr. Roberts and Rosenman joined Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld to form a company called Woodstock Ventures. The idea was to throw a large concert that would generate enough money to build the studio.
They borrowed $1.8 million against Mr. Roberts’ trust fund and began planning “Three Days of Peace and Music,” to take place over a long weekend in August 1969.
The money quickly evaporated. They lost thousands of dollars trying to find suitable locations in Woodstock and in Wallkill, in the Catskills.
The concert wound up costing more than $3 million. At the end, Mr. Roberts was drawing money out of his personal accounts to buy emergency supplies of food and medicine for the soggy masses of music fans.
It would take him until 1980 to fully clear the debts from the concert.
