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Woodstock
GenreRock and Folk, including Blues-Rock, Folk-Rock, Jazz-Rock, Latin rock and Psychedelic rock styles. Alternative Rock and Rap were played at post-1969 Woodstock festivals.
DatesThe original festival was scheduled for three days (Friday, August 15, 1969 through Sunday, August 17, 1969), but owing to technical and weather delays, the festival ended at about 10:00 a.m. on Monday, August 18, 1969, following Jimi Hendrix's performance.
Location(s)United States
Years activeOriginal festival held in 1969; namesake events held in 1979, 1989, 1994, and 1999.
FoundersMichael Lang, John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld

The Woodstock Music and old fArt Fair was an historic event held at Max Yasgur's 600 acre (2.4 km²) dairy farm in the rural town of Bethel, New York from August 15 to August 18 1969(about 2 days and 23 hours too long). Bethel (Sullivan County) is 43 miles southwest of the town of Woodstock, New York, which is in adjoining Ulster County. Well actually it was, but the vibration of ear piercing noises from filthy hippies(and thier bands too) physically moved this town to 45 miles southwest of Woodstock, New York.

To many, the festival exemplified the counterculture of the 1960s and the "hippie era." Thirty-two of the best-known musicians of this time period appeared during the sometimes rainy weekend. Though attempts have been made over the years to recreate the festival, the original Woodstock Festival of 1969 has proven to be unique and legendary. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest moments in music history and was listed on Rolling Stone's 50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll.

The event was captured in a successful 1970 movie, Woodstock, and Joni Mitchell's song "Woodstock", which memorialized the event, became a major hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The concert signaled the end of the so-called "Flower Generation".

Introduction

Woodstock has been idealized in the American popular culture as one of peak events of the hippie movement — a festival where nearly 500,000 "flower children" came together to celebrate. At the time, it held the record for the largest music audience in the world until the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen in 1973 held 100,000 more people. Hippie activist Abbie Hoffman crystallized this view of the event in his book, Woodstock Nation, written shortly afterwards.

Although the festival was remarkably peaceful given the number of people and conditions involved, there were three fatalities: one from a drug overdose; another caused by an occupied sleeping bag accidentally being run over by a tractor in a nearby hayfield; and a third when a festival participant fell off a scaffold. There were also three miscarriages and two births recorded at the event. Oral testimony in the film supports the overdose and run-over deaths and at least one birth, along with many colossal logistical headaches. Furthermore, because Woodstock was not intended for such a large crowd, there were not enough resources such as portable toilets and first-aid tents.

Woodstock began as a profit-making venture; it only became a free festival after it became obvious that the concert was drawing hundreds of thousands more people than the organizers had prepared for, and that the fence had been torn down by eager, unticketed arrivals. Tickets for the event cost US$18 in advance (approximately US$100 today adjusted for inflation) and $24 at the gate for all three days. Ticket sales were limited to record stores in the greater New York City area, or by mail via a Post Office Box at the Radio City Station Post Office located in Midtown Manhattan.

Yet, in tune with the idealistic hopes of the 1960s, Woodstock satisfied most attendees. Especially memorable were the sense of social harmony, the quality of music, and the overwhelming mass of people, many sporting bohemian dress, behavior, and attitudes.

Sound for the concert was engineered by Bill Hanley, whose innovations in the sound industry have earned him the prestigious Parnelli Award."It worked very well," he says of the event. "I built special speaker columns on the hills and had 16 loudspeaker arrays in a square platform going up to the hill on 70-foot towers. We set it up for 150,000 to 200,000 people. Of course, 500,000 showed up."

ALTEC designed 4 - 15 marine ply cabinets that weighed in at half a ton a piece, stood 6 feet straight up, almost 4 feet deep & a yard wide. Each of these woofers carried four 15-inch JBL LANSING D140 loudspeakers. The tweeters consisted of 4 x 2-Cell & 2 x 10-Cell Altec Horns. For many years this system was collectively referred to as the WOODSTOCK BINS.

Performing artists and sequence of events

File:Stamp-ctc-woodstock.gif
A stamp commemorating the original concert

Friday, August 15

Country Joe McDonald probably played on August 16th.

  • John Sebastian
    1. How Have You Been
    2. Rainbows Over Your Blues
    3. I Had A Dream
    4. Darlin' Be Home Soon
    5. Younger Generation

John Sebastian probably played on August 16th.

Incredible String Band probably played on August 16th.

  • Bert Sommer
    1. Jennifer
    2. The Road To Travel
    3. I Wondered Where You Be
    4. She's Gone
    5. Things Are Going my Way
    6. And When It's Over
    7. Jeanette
    8. America
    9. A Note That Read
    10. Smile
  • Tim Hardin, an hour-long set
    1. If I Were A Carpenter
    2. Misty Roses
  • Ravi Shankar, with a 5-song set, played through the rain
    1. Raga Puriya-Dhanashri/Gat In Sawarital
    2. Tabla Solo In Jhaptal
    3. Raga Manj Kmahaj
    4. Iap Jor
    5. Dhun In Kaharwa Tal
  • Melanie
    1. Tuning My Guitar
    2. Beautiful People
  • Arlo Guthrie--order of set list unknown
    1. Coming Into Los Angeles
    2. Walking Down the Line
    3. Story about Moses and the Brownies
    4. Amazing Grace (which closed set)
  • Joan Baez
    1. Story about how the Federal Marshalls came to take David Harris into custody.
    2. Joe Hill
    3. Sweet Sir Galahad
    4. Drugstore Truck Driving Man
    5. Sweet Sunny South
    6. Warm and Tender Love
    7. Swing Low Sweet Chariot
    8. We Shall Overcome

Baez Source: Arthur Levy, annotator of the expanded editions of the 12 Joan Baez CDs on Vanguard

Saturday, August 16

The day opened at 12:15 pm, and featured some of the event's biggest psychedelic and guitar rock headliners.

  • Quill, forty minute set of four songs
    1. They Live the Life
    2. BBY
    3. Waitin' For You
    4. Jam
  • Keef Hartley Band
    1. Spanish Fly
    2. Believe In You
    3. Rock Me Baby
    4. Medley
    5. Leavin' Trunk
    6. Sinnin' For You
  • Santana
    1. Waiting
    2. You Just Don't Care
    3. Savior
    4. Jingo
    5. Persuasion
    6. Soul Sacrifice
    7. Fried Neckbones
  • Canned Heat
    1. A Change Is Gonna Come/Leaving This Town
    2. Going Up The Country
    3. Let's Work Together
    4. Woodstock Boogie
  • Mountain, hour-long set including Jack Bruce's "Theme For An Imaginary Western"
    1. Blood of the Sun
    2. Stormy Monday
    3. Long Red
    4. Who Am I But You And The Sun
    5. Beside The Sea
    6. For Yasgur's Farm (then untitled)
    7. You and Me
    8. Theme For An Imaginary Western
    9. Waiting To Take You Away
    10. Dreams of Milk and Honey
    11. Blind Man
    12. Blue Suede Shoes
    13. Southbound Train
  • Janis Joplin (Performed 2 encores; Piece of My Heart and Ball & Chain)
    1. Raise Your Hand
    2. As Good As You've Been To This World
    3. To Love Somebody
    4. Summertime
    5. Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)
    6. Kosmic Blues
    7. Can't Turn you Loose
    8. Work Me Lord
    9. Piece of My Heart
    10. Ball & Chain
  • Sly & the Family Stone started at 1:30 am (3 encores. Actually played just before The Who)
    1. M’Lady
    2. Sing A Simple Song
    3. You Can Make It If You Try
    4. Everyday People
    5. Dance To The Music
    6. I Want To Take You Higher
    7. Love City
    8. Stand!
  • Grateful Dead
    1. St. Stephen
    2. Mama Tried
    3. Dark Star/High Time
    4. Turn On Your Love Light

Grateful Dead's performance was plagued by technical problems, including a faulty electrical ground (which their roadie insisted on being fixed prior to the band's performance) and members Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir reported getting shocked every time they touched their guitars. While bootleg footage and audio of this performance exists, the Dead called it their worst performance ever and they were left out of the movie. At one point, Jerry Garcia appears in the film holding a joint, saying, "Marijuana. Exhibit A."

File:Original woodstock poster.jpg
The Original Woodstock Poster with the Wallkill, New York location

Sunday, August 17 to Monday, August 18

Joe Cocker was the first act on the last officially booked day (Sunday); he opened up the day's events at 2 PM.

Cancelled appearances

  • The Jeff Beck Group was scheduled to perform at Woodstock, but failed to make an appearance because the band broke up the week before.
  • Iron Butterfly was stuck at an airport, and their manager demanded helicopters and special arrangements just for them. They were wired back and told, as impolitely as Western Union would allow, "to get lost", but in other 'words'.
  • Neil Young 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 month after the festival at the Fillmore East dance hall.
  • Joni Mitchell was slated to perform but her agent informed her that it was more important that she appear on "The Dick Cavett Show" on Monday, with its national audience, rather than "sit around in a field with 500 people." Ironically, David Crosby & Stephen Stills as well as Jefferson Airplane (who all performed at the festival) also made it to the show. She wrote and recorded the song "Woodstock" that was also a major hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
  • Canadian band Lighthouse was originally scheduled to play at Woodstock, but in the end they decided not to, fearing that it would be a bad scene. Later, several members of the group would say that they regretted the decision.

Refused invitations

  • The promoters contacted John Lennon, requesting The Beatles to perform. Lennon said that he couldn't get the Beatles, but offered to play with his Plastic Ono Band. The promoters turned him down.
  • The Doors were considered as a potential performing band, but cancelled at the last moment. Contrary to popular belief, this occurrence was not related in some fashion to lead singer Jim Morrison's arrest for indecent exposure while performing earlier that year; the cancellation was most likely due to Morrison's known and vocal distaste for performing in large outdoor venues. There also was a widely spread legend that Morrison, in a fit of paranoia, was fearful that someone would take a shot at him while he was onstage. Drummer John Densmore attended; in the film, he can be seen on the side of the stage during Joe Cocker's set.
  • Led Zeppelin was asked to perform, their manager Peter Grant stating, "We were asked to do Woodstock and Atlantic were very keen, and so was our US promoter, Frank Barcelona. I said no because at Woodstock we'd have just been another band on the bill." "Led Zeppelin: The Concert Files", Lewis & Pallett, 1997, Omnibus Press, ISBN 0.7119.5307.4
  • Jethro Tull refused to perform; there are varying accounts of the reasons for this decision. One claim is that they thought it wouldn't be a big deal; Ian Anderson is reported to have said he "didn't want to spend weekend in a field of unwashed hippies;" and another theory proposes that the band felt the event would be "too big a deal" and might kill their career before it started.
  • The Moody Blues declined to perform, because they were booked for another event in Paris at the same time and decided to play there instead of Woodstock, a decision they later regretted. They were promoted as being a performer on the third day on early posters that listed the site as Wallkill.
  • Tommy James and the Shondells declined an invitation. Lead singer Tommy James stated later, "We could have just kicked ourselves. We were in Hawaii, and my secretary called and said, 'Yeah, listen, there's this pig farmer in upstate New York that wants you to play in his field.' That's how it was put to me. So we passed, and we realized what we'd missed a couple of days later."
  • The Clarence White-era Byrds were given an opportunity to play, but refused to do so after a melee during their performance at the Atlanta Pop Festival earlier that summer.
  • Paul Revere & The Raiders declined to perform.
  • Bob Dylan was in negotiations to play, but pulled out when his son became ill. He also was unhappy about the number of hippies piling up outside his house near the originally planned site. He would go on to perform at the Isle of Wight Festival two weeks later. At the June 30, 2007 concert at Bethel Woods, the original site of the Woodstock festival, Dylan joked (just before he performed 'All Along the Watchtower' - a song associated with Jimi Hendrix): "It's nice to be back here. Last time we played here, it was six in the morning. And it was a-raining. And there was mud in the field."
  • Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention Quote: "A lot of mud at Woodstock. We were invited to play there, we turned it down" - FZ. Citation: "Class of the 20th Century," U.S. network television special in serial format, circa 1995.
  • Free were asked to perform and declined.
  • Spirit were asked to perform but declined and went on a promotional tour.

Media coverage and The New York Times

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As the only reporter at Woodstock for the first 36 hours or so, Barnard Law Collier of the New York Times was almost continually pressed by his editors in New York to make the story about the immense traffic jams, the less-than-sanitary conditions, the rampant drug use, the lack of "proper policing," and the presumed dangerousness of so many young people congregating. Collier recalls: "Every major Times editor up to and including executive editor James Reston insisted that the tenor of the story must be a social catastrophe in the making. It was difficult to persuade them that the relative lack of serious mischief and the fascinating cooperation, caring and politeness among so many people was the significant point. I had to resort to refusing to write the story unless it reflected to a great extent my on-the-scene conviction that 'peace' and 'love' was the actual emphasis, not the preconceived opinions of Manhattan-bound editors. After many acrimonious telephone exchanges, the editors agreed to publish the story as I saw it, and although the nuts-and-bolts matters of gridlock and minor lawbreaking were put close to the lead of the stories, the real flavor of the gathering was permitted to get across. After the first day's Times story appeared on Page 1, the event was widely recognized for the amazing and beautiful accident it was."

The Abbie Hoffman incident

Abbie Hoffman interrupted The Who's performance during Woodstock 1969 to attempt a protest speech against the jailing of John Sinclair of the White Panther Party. He grabbed a microphone and yelled, "I think this is a pile of shit! While John Sinclair rots in prison..." The Who's guitarist, Pete Townshend, cut Hoffman off in mid-sentence, saying, "Fuck off! Fuck off my fucking stage!" He then struck Hoffman with his guitar, sending the interloper tumbling offstage, to the roaring approval of the crowd. Townshend later said he actually agreed with Hoffman on Sinclair's imprisonment, though he made the point that he would have knocked him offstage regardless of his message.

According to Hoffman, in his autobiography, the incident played out like this: "If you ever heard about me in connection with the festival it was not for playing Florence Nightingale to the flower children. What you heard was the following: 'Oh, him, yeah, didn't he grab the microphone, try to make a speech when Peter Townshend cracked him over the head with his guitar?' I've seen countless references to the incident, even a mammoth mural of the scene. What I've failed to find was a single photo of the incident. Why? Because it didn't really happen."

I grabbed the microphone all right and made a little speech about John Sinclair, who had just been sentenced to ten years in the Michigan State Penitentiary for giving two joints of grass to two undercover cops, and how we should take the strength we had at Woodstock home to free our brothers and sisters in jail. Something like that. Townshend, who had been tuning up, turned around and bumped into me. A non-incident really. Hundreds of photos and miles of film exist depicting the events on that stage, but none of this much-talked about scene.

A fifteen-second sound bite of the incident can be heard on The Who compilation set entitled Thirty Years of Maximum R&B (Disc 2). The Woodstock documentary also depicts this event.

The film

Main article: Woodstock (film)

A documentary film, Woodstock, directed by Michael Wadleigh and edited by Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese, was released in 1970. It received the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. The film has been deemed culturally significant by the United States Library of Congress. In 1994, the "director's cut" was released; it included performances by Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin, who were not in the original version of the film.

Woodstock today

A man points to where the original stage stood in 1969.

In 1997, the site of the concert and 1,400 surrounding acres was purchased by Alan Gerry for the purpose of creating the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. It opened on July 1, 2006 with a performance of the New York Philharmonic. On August 13, 2006, Crosby Stills Nash & Young performed to 16,000 fans at the new Center — exactly 37 years after their historic performance at Woodstock. A new interpretive center dedicated to the Woodstock Festival and its meaning is scheduled to open in Spring 2008.

In August 2007, the 103-acre parcel that contains Max Yasgur's former homestead was placed on the market for $8 million by its current owners, Roy Howard and Jeryl Abramson. The home, barn, fieldhouse, and acreage, which are listed by Joshpe Real Estate of New York City, have been the site of frequent Woodstock reunions.

Woodstock Plaque

A plaque has been placed commemorating the festival. The field and the stage area remain preserved and well kept in their rural upstate New York setting. On the field are the remnants of a neon flower and bass from the original concert. In the middle of the field, there is a totem pole with wood carvings of Jimi Hendrix on the bottom, Janis Joplin in the middle, and Jerry Garcia on top. A concert hall has been erected up the hill, and the fields of the old Yasgur farm are still visited by people of all generations.

There are currently groups of people on the social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook that support the idea of planning a "Woodstock 2009." This future festival, if carried out, would celebrate the 40th anniversary of the original event. The main problem is that another festival would only be possible if permission was given by Woodstock Ventures Ltd. to use the name "Woodstock," which is copyrighted.

The Woodstock stage area facing sloping field at Bethel Woods.

Miscellanea

This article contains a list of miscellaneous information. Please relocate any relevant information into other sections or articles. (June 2007)
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  • Jimi Hendrix's high E-string broke when he was playing Red House and he played the rest of the song with five strings.
  • John Sebastian wasn't originally scheduled to perform. He was enlisted to perform when several of the acts were late in arriving because of the traffic going to the festival.
  • Richie Havens's song "Freedom" was totally improvised. He was called back for so many encores that he ran out of songs to sing, so he just picked up his guitar and started singing "Freedom." The song includes lyrics from the Negro spiritual, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."
  • Country Joe McDonald wasn't scheduled to perform the first day. He was forced into it because many of the acts that were scheduled to perform that day hadn't arrived yet. He also performed on Day Three with the rest of The Fish.
  • Michael Lang once said that his original idea was to have Roy Rogers close the festival by singing "Happy Trails."
  • The character named "Woodstock" from Peanuts was named after the festival (Woodstock's appearance was also modeled after the bird in the Festival logo).
  • Warren Buffet refers to his annual shareholder's meeting for Berkshire Hathaway as "Woodstock for Capitalists."
  • An anarchist group called Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers cut the fences at Woodstock, allowing hundreds to enter for free.
  • Billy Joel was there as a fan- not a performer- and said in an interview "Rain, mud, b.o. and acid. You didn't miss anything."
  • There is a pub in West Didsbury Manchester which is named in honour of the festival and every summer holds a mini music festival.

References

  1. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/6085488/woodstock_in_1969
  2. Simon Warner's chapter "Reporting Woodstock" in the book Remembering Woodstock, Ashgate Publishing, Andy Bennett, editor, May, 2004.
  3. "The Doors decline Woodstock". Digital Dream Door. 2007-01-26. Retrieved 2007-02-01. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  4. Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume One, p. 116
  5. "Reviews of Dylan concert, June 30, 1997". Bob Links. 2007-07-01. Retrieved 2007-09-01.


See also

External links

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