The year summer of 1969 was arguably the most event-filled in modern world history. There was the first man on the moon; the first death of a rock star (Brian Jones); the Charles Manson murders; and there was Woodstock.
The Woodstock Music & Art Fair (An Aquarian Exposition) was the brainchild of Michale Lang and Artie Kornfield, backed by financiers John Roberts and Joel Rosenman. The open-air music and arts festival was actually designed as a profit-making venture and was officially called “Woodstock Ventures”. Around 186,000 tickets were sold beforehand and organizers anticipated approximately 200,000 festival-goers would turn up. The “free concert” idea came about after it became obvious that the event was turning into a monstrous human wave as hundreds of thousands more people showed up than the organizers were prepared to handle.
The idea to use the original site in Orange County was voted down by the town’s people so Lang approached a middle-aged farmer named Mat Yasgur and they used his 600 acres for the site. As fate would have it Yasgur’s land formed a natural bowl sloping down to Filippini Pond so the stage would be set at the bottom of the hill with the pond behind it.
The throngs of people who set upon the rural concert site in Bethel created a massive traffic jam and literally closed the New York State Thruway. For that many people the food and sanitation, as well as the first aid, facilities were not adequate. And when it rained the hundreds of thousands of people found themselves mired in mud with no food and or bathroom facilities.
Yasgur’s farm became, for four days, a mini-nation of counterculture. The world watched while drugs were used, people bathed nude in the pond and love was free. The world and music changed forever in the months following that weekend as the domination of post-World War II ideas slowly began to slide away. It was almost as though John F. Kennedy had predicted it 8 1/2 years before when he proclaimed that a man would walk on the moon before the end of the decade. It would all come to a head the next April at Kent State, when National Guardsmen opened fire on anti-war demonstrators, but Woodstock shifted the huge boulder.
Most of the fairly unknown performers like Santana, Sha-Na-Na, Ritchie Havens and Canned Heat became instant celebrities and the filmed Woodstock documentary became the defining chronicle showing the end of one generation and the emerging of a new one.
The Bill
Friday, August 15th
- Richie Havens
- Swami Satchidananda
- Sweetwater
- The Incredible String Band
- Bert Sommer
- Tim Hardin
- Ravi Shankar
- Melanie
- Arlo Guthrie
- Joan Baez
Saturday, August 16th
- Quill
- Keef Hartley Band
- Country Joe McDonald
- John B. Sebastien
- Santana
- Canned Heat
- Mountain
- Grateful Dead
- Creedence Clearwater Revival
- Sly & the Family Stone
- Janis Joplin with the Kozmic Blues Band
- The Who
- Jefferson Airplane
Sunday and Monday (16th and 17th)
- Joe Cocker
- Country Joe and the Fish
- Ten Years After
- The Band
- Blood, Sweat and Tears
- Johnny Winter (with Edgar Winter)
- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
- Paul Butterfield Blues Band
- Sha-Na-Na
- Jimi Hendrix