Woodstock Music Festival (1969)
From August 15 to 18, 1969, between 400,000 and 500,000 people descended on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York for "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music." Woodstock brought together 32 acts — including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, and Jefferson Airplane — and became the defining cultural event of the 1960s counterculture.
From Idea to Chaos
Woodstock was conceived by four young entrepreneurs — Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, John Roberts, and Joel Rosenman — who planned a weekend music festival that would attract perhaps 50,000 people to a site in the Catskill Mountains. Their original venue fell through, then a second site in Wallkill, New York rejected them after local opposition. With weeks to spare, dairy farmer Max Yasgur agreed to lease his 600-acre farm in Bethel — about 40 miles from the town of Woodstock, which had nothing to do with the festival beyond giving it its name. Tickets were sold for $7 a day or $18 for the weekend. But when the crowd swelled far beyond any estimate on August 14 and 15, organizers were overwhelmed. Traffic jammed for miles on every approach road. Fences went down. The New York State Thruway closed for the first time in its history. Governor Rockefeller considered calling in the National Guard. With no way to collect tickets and no infrastructure to support the crowd, Woodstock was declared a free festival.
Did You Know?
Jimi Hendrix was the highest-paid performer at Woodstock, earning $18,000, and was scheduled to close the festival on Sunday night. Because of delays, he didn't perform until Monday morning, August 18, before a crowd that had shrunk from 400,000 to perhaps 30,000. His sprawling, deconstructed version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" became one of rock music's most iconic performances — heard live by the exhausted few who stayed.
Three Days of Music
Despite the logistical chaos — food shortages, mud from rain, overwhelmed medical facilities — the festival was largely peaceful. The 32 acts that performed over four days included Richie Havens, who improvised "Freedom" after being asked to play for an extra 40 minutes to stall for time; Joan Baez; Jefferson Airplane; Creedence Clearwater Revival; Janis Joplin; The Grateful Dead; The Who; Jefferson Airplane; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (in just their second live performance); Santana; and Sly and the Family Stone. Three people died at the festival — one of a heroin overdose, one of a burst appendix, and one run over by a tractor while sleeping in a field. Two babies were born. The Army sent helicopters to deliver food and medicine. The surrounding community, initially hostile, mobilized to feed the crowd. The Hog Farm commune, led by Wavy Gravy, ran a free kitchen and a "please don't freak out" service for bad drug trips.
A Moment Frozen in Time
The organizers lost money — the free festival had cost about $3.1 million to produce, and the gate revenue never materialized. They recouped through the 1970 documentary film and the live album, both of which became enormous commercial successes. Woodstock entered the cultural imagination as the symbol of the 1960s counterculture: idealistic, chaotic, muddy, sometimes dangerous, and somehow beautiful. Joni Mitchell, who did not perform at Woodstock, wrote the festival's most famous song from secondhand accounts. In later years, the farm in Bethel became a museum and performing arts center. Subsequent attempts to recreate the magic — including an official 25th anniversary festival in 1994 and a disastrous 30th anniversary event in 1999 that ended in fires and assaults — confirmed what participants had long intuited: Woodstock was unrepeatable, a specific collision of time, place, music, and a generation that was never coming back.