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“I was trying to find someone who could do a sound
system for Woodstock, and there was no one who had ever done something
like that before,” says Michael Lang, promoter of both Woodstocks. “Then
there was this crazy guy in Boston who might want to take a shot at it.”
Lang says they spoke at length, and it left him feeling that Hanley
understood the Herculean task at hand. He points out that in those days,
you couldn’t rent systems—they needed to be built from scratch.
When the first location for the event fell through, Hanley went with
Lang to Max’s farm in a limo, visualized where the stages and sound
equipment would go and said, “this is it.” He liked the spot because
he could set up the stages and equipment in a big “V,” a design that
provided crowd control as well as giving free flowing access to
backstage performers. Plus, it meant sound from one stage wouldn’t
bleed into another.
In the beginning, Hanley was handling much of the production—picking
the crew, even handling the master recording. “It worked very well,”
he says of the event. “I built special speaker columns on the hills
and had 16 loudspeaker arrays in a square platform going up to the hill
on 70-foot towers. We set it up for 150,000 to 200,000 people.
“Of course, 500,000 showed up.”
“I thought the sound was great, and everyone I talked to thought the
sound was great,” Lang adds. “Everyone could hear, nothing blew up,
and it all hung together perfectly. And it was all mostly on Bill’s
instincts.”
Hanley’s social conscience lead him to do work on several anti-war
protest rallies and send an entire sound system to South Africa for
their Anti-Apartheid Movement, among many other causes.
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