Woodstock

A watershed generational moment for the 1960s counterculture, The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, was an outdoor music festival held from Friday, August 15 to Monday, August 18 1969, in Bethel, New York.

Billed as “an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music,” the event attracted an estimated half-a-million concertgoers to hear sets by Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Santana, Sly & the Family Stone, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, among many others. Woodstock was organized by two fledgling concert promoters, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld, and held in a 600 acre meadow owned by Max Yasgur. Attendance on the first day was so far beyond expectations that security gates were removed and about a third of the crowd that arrived throughout the weekend got in for free. (Whatever was lost in gate receipts was made up for with sales from the Woodstock concert movie and album).

With roads clogged, many musicians had to be flown in via helicopter, and as the event unfolded heavy rains and inadequate facilities turned the campsite into a massive muddy free-for-all. Drugs were omnipresent, including the “brown acid” attendees were famously told to avoid in an announcement from the stage. “You kind of felt you were going into a war,” the Band’s Levon Helm later recalled. “There weren’t any dressing rooms because they’d been turned into emergency clinics… The crowd was real tired and a little unhealthy.”

The first day’s lineup was mainly folk artists like Richie Havens, Joan Baez, and Arlo Guthrie. The biggest performances on Saturday came from Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, and Santana. The final day was highlighted by Sly and the Family Stone, the Band, the Who, Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, and, making only their second live performance, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Due to delays, Jimi Hendrix did not perform until Monday morning, wowing the crowd with an explosive rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

While much of the coverage in the mainstream press was bemused, if not downright negative (“what kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?” asked the New York Times), the weekend was hailed within the hippie movement and emerging rock establishment as a transcendent success. “Yes it was a concert — that was the principle reason everybody showed up — but the reason we remember it is because of the way people reacted to the circumstances, the conditions and the obligations that they presented,” recalled longtime Rolling Stone writer David Fricke, who was 17 when he attended Woodstock. “The music was the thing that inspired us to keep doing that.”