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3 days ago · Woodstock was the most famous of the 1960s rock festivals. Its full name was The Woodstock Music and Art Fair. It took place on a farm property in Bethel, New York, August 15–18, 1969.
- Ed Ward
- Woodstock featured a who’s who of 1960s rock acts, including Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, the Who, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, the...
- Although a few tickets were sold, some 400,000 people showed up at Woodstock. Many demanded free entry, which they got due to virtually nonexistent...
- Woodstock (1970) is a documentary film made by Michael Wadleigh film based on the Woodstock festival. The film became a smash hit.
- The Museum at Bethel Woods, a multimedia exhibit space attached to a performing arts center, opened in 2008, with the stated mission of preserving...
Location in New York. The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, commonly referred to as Woodstock, was a music festival held from August 15 to 18, 1969, on Max Yasgur 's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, [ 3 ][ 4 ] 40 miles (65 km) southwest of the town of Woodstock.
- Overview
- Woodstock’s organizers ran out of time to put up fencing around the venue.
- Richie Havens ended up starting the festival because everyone else was stuck in traffic.
- The Who’s lead singer accidentally dosed himself with LSD—and said Woodstock was miserable.
- The festival opened under blue skies but a brutal thunderstorm rolled in.
- Woodstock was one of the first concerts at which Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young played as a group.
- A crowd of only 30,000 heard Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of the U.S. national anthem.
The Woodstock music festival may not have been a smoothly run event, but it featured electric moments—musical and otherwise—that made it unforgettable.
Before mid-August in 1969, no one knew just how big the Woodstock music festival would become. It was organized by people who had originally just wanted to build a music studio in the upstate New York village. When word got out that a event was in the works, locals had fought to cancel it. And, while over 50,000 tickets were sold in advance of the event, ultimately more than 400,000 flooded to the venue on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm.
Woodstock Almost Never Happened
What unfolded over the next three days from August 15-18, 1969 became legendary—as a music event and as a generational moment. As a long-haired man identified as "Speed" told the New York Times on August 18, 1969, "The whole thing is a gas. I dig it all, the mud, the rain, the music, the hassles." Below are five things that made Woodstock so memorable.
During the months leading up to the festival, Woodstock’s organizers faced an all-out war from locals who tried to stop the event. While the village of Woodstock, New York had been home to a group of artistic, idealistic people since the early 20th century, many residents of the older generation considered the young "hippies" to be slackers and even, in some cases, dangerous.
Over the years the village had passed ordinances that targeted behaviors like shirtlessness, public consumption of alcohol and loitering. When word got out that a music festival was being planned, the village’s board passed a slew of regulations that effectively halted the festival’s prospects in the town of Wallkill. That’s when organizers found a new home for the event on a dairy farm in nearby Bethel, New York.
Richie Havens performing at Woodstock.
Woodstock’s first act on Friday evening was supposed to be Sweetwater, but its members—and those of three other bands—got stuck in traffic on the narrow country roads leading into Bethel. So organizers found a last-minute replacement in folk singer Richie Havens. Havens performed an extra long set, playing every song he knew while Woodstock staff finished building the stage around him.
After multiple encores, a sweat-soaked Havens came out to play one more song without any idea what it was going to be. That’s when he improvised “Freedom / Motherless Child”
“When you see me in [the Woodstock movie] tuning my guitar and strumming, I was actually trying to figure out what else I could possibly play!” wrote Havens in 2009. “I looked out at all of those faces in front of me and the word ‘freedom’ came to mind.”
The Who's lead singer Roger Daltrey accidentally dosed himself with LSD before performing.
The Who’s Roger Daltrey had, like so many others, spent hours in the traffic jams trying to get to the event. Then he and his band had waited backstage some 10 more hours before performing. Daltrey later said there wasn’t any food backstage that wasn’t laced with LSD and he accidentally dosed himself when he made a cup of tea before going onstage.
Rain soaked the crowds at Woodstock.
Back in 1969, there were no weather apps or 24-hour weather channels and few attendees had come prepared for bad weather. "We didn’t bring any rain gear or ponchos," says then 22-year-old Nancy Eisenstein. "And back then people didn’t have bottled water. We figured, ‘I’ll get there and there will be water. I’ll get there are there will be food.’”
Stephen Stills (left) and David Crosby of the group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young perform on stage at Woodstock on August 17, 1969.
Stephen Stills, David Crosby and Graham Nash had recently recruited Neil Young to join their band and add to their acoustic sound. Some say the four first sang together at the home of folk legend Joni Mitchell in Laurel Canyon. While they didn’t always get along (Young only agreed to sing at Woodstock if he wasn’t filmed), their voices together produced stunning harmonies. Woodstock was only their second concert appearance together.
Jimi Hendrix performs an unforgettable version of the U.S. national anthem at Woodstock.
Jimi Hendrix had been booked as a headliner at Woodstock, but he didn’t take the stage until the event was nearly over—Monday morning at 9 a.m. Part of the reason is Hendrix had a clause in his contract stipulating that no act could follow his performance. By the time Hendrix began his set, the exhausted Monday-morning crowd had dwindled to about 30,000.
But for anyone who witnessed it—or has even watched the clip on YouTube—there’s no forgetting Hendrix’s interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Its melody is drenched in feedback and bombarded by whammy-bar sirens, wails, machine gun fire and auditory “bombs bursting in air.”
Hendrix's subversive interpretation of the national anthem was a fitting end note for the three-day festival that came to epitomize a counter-culture generation.
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Mar 9, 2018 · The Woodstock Music Festival of 1969 was a three‑day event that survived venue changes and bad weather to became a highlight of the counterculture movement. The Woodstock Music Festival began on...
Aug 14, 2019 · To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, we’ve collected 50 facts about the iconic festival and the myths and legends it has spawned. This article covers the festival itself, and how it ...
Aug 27, 2019 · The 1969 event in upstate New York that would become known as Woodstock was originally billed as “three days of peace and music.” But as Harlan Lebo, author of 100 Days: How Four Events...
Woodstock History. The Story of a Generation. The year was 1969. The world was rapidly changing and a group of young Americans were searching for their place within it. In that time of conflict and uncertainty, three days of peace and music seemed to be just what a divided nation needed.
