Woodstock Festival

(Redirected from Woodstock)

Categories: 1969 | 1970 films | Music festivals | Concerts

Woodstock redirects here. For other uses, see Woodstock (disambiguation)

The Woodstock Music and Art Festival was the most famous rock festival of its era. It was held at Max Yasgur's 600 acre (2.4 km²) dairy farm in Bethel, New York, on 15, 16, and 17 August, 1969. The Woodstock Festival represented the culmination of the counterculture of the 1960s and the ultimate climax of the "hippie era". Many of the best-known musicians of the times appeared during the rain-plagued weekend, much of which was captured in a successful 1970 movie, Woodstock.

The festival

The festival bears the name "Woodstock" because it was originally scheduled to take place in the town of Woodstock, in Ulster County; local opposition arose, however, and the event was almost cancelled altogether. But Sam Yasgur persuaded his father Max to allow the concert to be held on the family's property, located in Sullivan County, which lies to the south and to the west of Ulster County.

Although the show had been planned for a maximum 50,000 attendees, over 500,000 eventually attended, most of whom did not pay admission. The highways leading to the concert were jammed with traffic and people as they abandoned their cars and walked for miles to the concert area. The weekend was rainy, facilities were overcrowded, and attendees shared food, alcoholic beverages, and drugs. Local residents of this modest tourist-oriented area gave blankets and food to the obviously poorly-prepared arrivals. A tiny number of law enforcement officers looked on helplessly as open drug use and nudity signalled a relaxation of many social conventions. However, no violence was reported and the fact that attendees were remarkably well behaved was particularly noted.

The festival did not initially make money for the promoters, although, thanks to record sales and proceeds from the highly regarded film of the event, it did eventually become profitable.

There were three deaths at Woodstock: one from a heroin overdose, one from a ruptured appendix, and one from being run over by a tractor. Two unconfirmed births reportedly occurred at Woodstock.

The promoters of the original Woodstock were Michael Lang, Artie Kornfield, John Roberts, and Joel Rosenmann. Roberts was the money man, with a trust fund bankroll; his friend Rosenmann, a graduate of Yale Law, was a lounge guitarist. Their associate Kornfield was a vice-president at Capitol Records, fond of drugs and well-connected. The idea, though, came from Lang, who had previously produced the Miami Pop Festival. An unlikely businessman, Lang was a light-hearted hippie who had owned a head shop, and now hoped to eventually build a recording studio in the Woodstock area to serve artists such as Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, who had homes nearby, and saw a festival as a way to underwrite and promote the studio. After toying with an Age of Aquarius theme, they settled on the slogan "Three Days of Peace and Music", partly as a way to placate suspicious local officials, and partly to appeal to anti-war sentiment. They hired commercial artist Arnold Skolnick to design the artwork, which incorporated a catbird design Skolnick had in his notebooks.

Lang would go on to produce successor concerts in 1994 and 1999, although he had nothing to do with the Woodstock-named concerts of 1979 and 1989.

Artists who performed at Woodstock

• Joan Baez
• The Band
• Blood, Sweat & Tears
• Paul Butterfield Blues Band
• Canned Heat
• Joe Cocker
• Country Joe and the Fish
• Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
• Grateful Dead
• Arlo Guthrie
• Tim Hardin
• Keef Hartley
• Richie Havens
• Jimi Hendrix
• Incredible String Band
• Janis Joplin
• Jefferson Airplane
• Melanie
• Mountain
• Quill
• Santana
• John Sebastian
• Sha-Na-Na
• Ravi Shankar
• Sly and the Family Stone
• Bert Sommer
• Sweetwater
• Ten Years After
• The Who
• Johnny Winter

Note: The Jeff Beck Group was scheduled to perform at Woodstock but failed to make an appearance. Iron Butterfly were also expected to perform, but were stuck at an airport. Neil Young also joined Crosby, Stills, & Nash but refused to be filmed; by his own report Young felt the filming was distracting both performers and audience from the music. Young's "Sea Of Madness," heard on the album, was actually recorded a few days before the festival, at the Fillmore East dance hall. Joni Mitchell was also slated to perform but she was unable to get there due to the closure of the New York State Thruway. Led Zeppelin was asked to perform, but refused after they were offered a gig with higher pay.

Myths of Woodstock

Woodstock has been romanticized and idealized in American popular culture as the culmination of the hippie movement -- a free festival where nearly 500,000 people came together to celebrate peace and love. Although the festival was remarkably trouble-free given the number of people and conditions involved, the reality was less than perfect: Woodstock did have some amount of crime and other misbehavior, as well as a drug overdose, an accidental tractor death and logistical headaches; as stated before, Woodstock was not intended for such a large crowd and thus, many needed facilities were not present, such as a sufficient number of toilets and first-aid tents. Some who attended the festival felt that it was chaotic and did not report having a positive experience.

Also sometimes forgotten is that Woodstock began as a profit-making venture (unlike the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, whose profits were earmarked for charity) and that it only became a free festival after it became obvious that the concert was drawing hundreds of thousands more people than the organizers had expected or prepared for, and that the entry gates erected had been torn down by eager arrivals. Tickets for the "Woodstock Music and Art Fair - An Aquarian Exposition" cost $18 for 3-day tickets and, there being no internet or telephone credit card sales, were ordered by mail from a Radio City Station NY Post Office Box. At least one fan still has her tickets and the original envelopes in which they were mailed.

On the other hand, many, perhaps most, who attended the festival found the atmosphere and music there to contain an unprecedentedly high degree of excellence; a beatifically eye-opening experience, and an epochal event confirming the power of the post-WWII generation's cultural influence. Those who attended often still find their experiences worthy of a lifetime’s reflection. For an article that gathers detailed contemporaneous newspaper and magazine reports of the event - including extracts from the New York Times and Rolling Stone - see Simon Warner's chapter "Reporting Woodstock" in the book Remembering Woodstock (edited by Andy Bennett, 2004).

The film

Main article: Woodstock (1970 film)

The albums

Woodstock - music from the original soundtrack and more (3 LP set 1970, double CD 2003)

Woodstock 2 (1971)
(appeared original 1971 as double album and 1994 on CD)

See also

• Woodstock '79 (1979), Woodstock '89 (1989), Woodstock '94 (1994), Woodstock '99 (1999)
• Monterey Pop Festival
• The Woodstock Stopde:Woodstock Festival

es:Festival de Woodstock fr:Festival de Woodstock he:פסטיבל וודסטוק it:Festival di Woodstock nl:Woodstock (muziekfestival) ja:ウッドストック・フェスティバル pl:Festiwal w Woodstock pt:Woodstock sk:Woodstock sv:Woodstockfestivalen

External links

• 1969 Woodstock Festival & Concert
• WWW-VL: 1960s History
• CJFishlegacy.com