Michael Lang was frantic. His first big production, the Miami Pop Festival, was about to go down in flames on opening day. As Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention tore into their set at Gulfstream Race Track in Hallandale, Lang realized that members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, scheduled to go on next, were missing.

``We tracked them down through the airline and got a hold of Gerry Stickells, who was Jimi's road manager,'' Lang recalls from his home in upstate New York. ``Apparently they had missed the pick-up cars. So we arranged for a helicopter to come and get them.''

``That was a surprise to everybody,'' says photographer Ken Davidoff, then 19. Armed with a press pass from the Palm Beach Sheriff's Department, Davidoff snapped pictures of the dapper Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell as they scooted under the rotor blades of a chopper and made their way toward the stage set up on a flatbed truck.

``It was a precursor to our hiring every helicopter in New York state next time around,'' Lang says. Next time would occur 15 months later when almost half a million music lovers converged on a farm in Bethel, N.Y., for the cultural and generational milestone known as Woodstock. When the roads to the festival site became clogged with traffic, Lang, one of four organizers, once again called out the choppers to deliver his headliners. The ``Aquarian Exposition,'' which celebrates its 40th anniversary Saturday, made Lang a counter-culture icon.

With defining performances by Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Santana chronicled on film and vinyl, Woodstock still enjoys mythic status in the history of American music. Less well known: Had there been no Miami Pop Festival, which drew more than 40,000, there might have been no Woodstock. Also less well known: The seeds for both events were planted at a head shop in Coconut Grove.

A GROVE FAN

Lang, now 64, grew up in New York, but as a kid he often traveled to Miami Beach with his family. He later became enamored of the Grove and would drive down frequently with buddies while he attended the University of Tampa. As Lang reports in his recently published memoir The Road to Woodstock (Ecco, $29.99), he managed to convince the Army that he wasn't cut out for the military when his draft number was called, and he was hardly suited for academia.

``I thought the Grove would be the perfect place to go,'' Lang says. ``It was a very laid-back arts community. A dog could sleep in the middle of the road for half a day and not get run over. . . . There was kind of an interesting folk-music scene. I thought it was just one of the best places I'd ever been and decided to move there.''

This was in 1966. Lang wanted to open a head shop to cater to the burgeoning counterculture, but his first location on Sunset Drive near the University of Miami was shut down almost immediately for operating without a license.

Then property in the center of the Grove became available.

``It was just a stand-alone building, a typical wooden, Florida house,'' Lang remembers. ``There was a woodworker named Adam Turtle who was our direct neighbor, and, across the alleyway, Lester Sperling and his sculpture studio. And a guy named Michelangelo [Michael Alocca] had his sculpture studio, and Ludicio had his leather shop.''

``You had more like-mindedness [in the Grove],'' says Jack Connell, who runs the website www.themiamipopfestival.com and is working on a Miami Pop Festival documentary with his business partner, Davidoff.

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