were going to send an art installation from the Plastic Ono Band and also offered James Taylor and Billy Preston,” Lang continued to Billboard. “All three would have been great, but the letter arrived around the time we were losing the site in Wallkill and we were kind of distracted, so those never got finalized.” Zager & Evans were invited to play Woodstock and appear on American Bandstand, but Rick Evans was injured by a drunk driver in a crash. Frank Zappa was then with The Mothers of Invention; he said, "A lot of mud at Woodstock ... We were invited to play there, we turned it down." Media coverage Very few reporters from outside the immediate area were on the scene. During the first few days of the festival, national media coverage emphasized the problems. Front-page headlines in the Daily News read "Traffic Uptight at Hippiefest" and "Hippies Mired in a Sea of Mud". The New York Times ran an editorial titled "Nightmare in the Catskills", which read in part, "The dreams of marijuana and rock music that drew 300,000 fans and hippies to the Catskills had little more sanity than the impulses that drive the lemmings to march to their deaths in the sea. They ended in a nightmare of mud and stagnation ... What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?" Coverage became more positive by the end of the festival, in part because the parents of concertgoers called the media and told them, based on their children's phone calls, that their reporting was misleading. The New York Times covered the prelude to the festival and the move from Wallkill to Bethel. Barnard Collier, who reported from the event for The New York Times, asserts that he was pressured by on-duty editors at the paper to write a misleadingly negative article about the event. According to Collier, this led to acrimonious discussions and his threat to refuse to write the article until the paper's executive editor, James Reston, agreed to let him write the article as he saw fit. The eventual article dealt with issues of traffic jams and minor lawbreaking, but went on to emphasize cooperation, generosity, and the good nature of the festival goers. When the festival was over, Collier wrote another article about the exodus of fans from the festival site and the lack of violence at the event.