Fearing hordes of unbathed tripping hippies and wild-eyed radicals, the town’s zoning board reversed a previous decision to allow the event. This, it seemed, was the end of the road for the three days of peace, love, and music that the organizers envisioned.

NEW YORK — In July 1969, the town of Wallkill, N.Y., dealt a potentially mortal blow to Woodstock Ventures, a group of rookie promoters hoping to organize a grand festival of rock music in rural New York.

Mr. Tiber stepped in after the Wallkill, N.Y., zoning board reversed a decision to allow the rock festival.

Enter Elliot Tiber, one of the unlikeliest heroes of the 1960s counterculture. A former yeshiva student from Brooklyn who did not even smoke marijuana, he spent his weekends helping his parents operate the shabby, money-losing El Monaco Motel in nearby Bethel. During the week, he worked as an interior decorator in Manhattan and frequented the city’s gay bars, a routine that had recently plunged him into the Stonewall uprising.


As luck would have it, Mr. Tiber, in his capacity as president of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce — an absurd post, he later said, “because there was no commerce” — held an official permit, written by himself to himself, to hold a music and arts festival. This was the golden key that unlocked the door that opened onto one of the defining events of the era.

With a fateful phone call, Mr. Tiber offered the permit, for $1, to Woodstock Ventures, along with the dubious charms of the El Monaco Motel as a headquarters for the festival and lodging for the stars.

In a matter of days, the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival was back on track, and Mr. Tiber, as its principal ticket agent and hotelier, embarked on six weeks of glory that clung to him, like a shimmering cloud, for the rest of his days.

It provided most of the material for two memoirs, “Knock on Woodstock: The Uproarious, Uncensored Story of the Woodstock Festival, the Gay Man Who Made It Happen, and How He Earned His Ticket to Freedom” (1994) and “Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life” (2007), written with Tom Monte.


The director Ang Lee used “Taking Woodstock” as the basis for his 2009 film of the same name, which starred the comedian Demetri Martin as Mr. Tiber.

Mr. Tiber died Aug. 3 in Boca Raton, Fla., from complications of a stroke, Elisa Ball, his art agent, said. He was 81.

“Those six weeks?” he recalled in an interview with the Miami Herald in 2008. “Wow. These people were so enriching to my life. They opened up whole new worlds to me. I didn’t feel fat, I didn’t feel ugly. It enabled me to meet all kinds of people, to enjoy myself. I got used to that.”

Mr. Tiber was born Eliyahu Teichberg on April 15, 1935, in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn. His father, Jack, was a roofer who had emigrated from Austria. His mother, Sonia, from Russia, ran a housewares shop. In 1955, seeking to improve their fortunes, the Teichbergs bought the El Monaco Motel and moved to Bethel.

After graduating from Midwood High School, Mr. Tiber changed his name, adding the middle name Michael as a flourish. He enrolled in Brooklyn College, where he studied art, and earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Hunter College. He later attended Pratt Institute.


A career as an abstract artist failed to materialize. Instead, he worked as a decorator for the W. & J. Sloane department store on Fifth Avenue and developed a successful practice decorating private homes and apartments.

His design career ended in spectacular fashion, as he recounted in “Palm Trees on the Hudson: A True Story of the Mob, Judy Garland, & Interior Decorating” (2011). Approached by a nightclub owner to do the decorations for a cruise-ship party, he pulled out all the stops.

“I was given ‘carte blanche,’ ” he told Publishers Weekly in 2011, “so I conjured up a heady mix of Arabian Nights décor; a bevy of muscle boys covered in gold body paint and stationed as servers throughout the boat; and at least a hundred rented palm trees.”

During the cruise, a fight broke out at the bar, then spread to the dining room and beyond. Mr. Tiber cowered behind an overturned table with Judy Garland, an idol of his since childhood. The palm trees ended up in the river. Left holding the bill, Mr. Tiber retreated to Bethel.

Key details about the origin of the Woodstock festival and Mr. Tiber’s role remain unclear. Mr. Tiber said he introduced Michael Lang, one of the festival’s main organizers, to Max Yasgur, the farmer who rented his land for the festival, after the 75 acres next to the El Monaco Motel were deemed unsuitable. Lang said that Mr. Tiber introduced him and his partners to a local real estate agent, who brought them to Yasgur.


At a screening of Michael Wadleigh’s documentary film “Woodstock” in Beverly Hills in 2006, Mr. Tiber and several of the concert organizers gathered for a discussion of the event. No one could agree on anything.

“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be here,” Mr. Tiber said. “I had the permit for a festival for 10 years in stinking Nazi-controlled Bethel-White Lake.” When Lang and others offered different recollections, Mr. Tiber cut them off. “You were all on drugs,” he said. “I was the only one there that didn’t do drugs.”

In an e-mail, Lang wrote: “Elliot was part of the magic of Woodstock. Without his phone call bringing me to Bethel, Woodstock might never have happened, and for that I am eternally grateful.”

Flush with $50,000 in Woodstock cash, Mr. Tiber bought a Cadillac Eldorado and headed to Los Angeles with plans to become a set designer. He failed to break into the film industry and returned to New York, where he met and fell in love with the Belgian theater director André Ernotte, whom he followed back to Brussels.

Through Ernotte, he landed an interview with a Belgian television producer. Mr. Tiber wrote in “After Woodstock: The True Story of a Belgian Movie, an Israeli Wedding, and a Manhattan Breakdown,” (2015) that after he expressed his enthusiasm for “I Love Lucy,” the producer mistakenly concluded that Mr. Tiber had been the show’s chief writer and hired him on the spot.


With Ernotte, he developed a successful comedy series, “Sketch-Up.” He also wrote a novel, published in Ernotte’s French translation in 1975 as “Rue Haute,” about a woman who loses her husband in the Holocaust and haunts the streets of Brussels, screaming his name.

The partners developed the novel into a film, also called “Rue Haute.” Directed by Ernotte, it became Belgium’s entry for best foreign-language film at the 1976 Academy Awards. The novel was published in the United States in 1977 as “High Street,” and the film, with the same title, was given an American release that year.

Ernotte died in 1999. Mr. Tiber leaves two sisters.

Mr. Tiber later developed a one-man show, “Woodstock Daddy,’’ based on his Woodstock experiences.

“When I talk about Woodstock, or when I talk to my friends, it’s like time hasn’t passed,” Mr. Tiber told the Miami Herald. “Then yesterday I got out of the shower and thought, ‘My God, I look like my mother.’ ”