Useful Notes / Woodstock

"Three days of peace, love and music."

In the Summer of '69, a couple of extremely rich young men wanted to create something they could invest in related to entertainment, art, and creativity. After initially planning a TV series and an artists' colony, they decided to hold an outdoor festival in a field, with a few big-name acts. After a long fight to secure a venue, they made a deal with dairy farmer Max Yasgur for the use of his 600-acre property in Bethel, New York. The festival, held on the weekend of August 15–17, 1969, was called the Woodstock Music & Art Fair.

Originally tickets were sold by mail and through magazine ads, with plans to sell more at the door. Over 100,000 tickets were sold, but people started arriving several days early, before the fence and ticket gates were completed; faced with the choice between completing the stage and completing the fence, the promoters decided to get the stage in order and call it a free concert. With such an open invitation in place, over 500,000 people are believed to have shown up. Then it got worse.

In many ways, Woodstock was a giant catastrophe. The various artists couldn't get to the concert site and had to be flown in. Food and other facilities were ostensibly planned for 50,000 (even though the aforementioned 100,000 tickets had been sold), but city councilmen and others recognized that the provisions weren't even sufficient for that number, leading to the National Guard airlifting in food and water by helicopter. There was lots of rain and a giant thunderstorm struck, shutting things down for hours, and two people accidentally died.^note Plus one from a burst appendix, but that probably would have happened anyway.

But, at the same time, the festival was heralded for its sense of peace and community. The crowd was so well-behaved over the three days that even mainstream media like The New York Times and Time magazine praised the event for being so orderly. People were getting along and showing love to each other. And, of course, the roster of musical artists was impressive, featuring the likes of The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joe Cocker, Santana, The Band, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Joan Baez, Ravi Shankar, and Sha Na Na to name a few.

The festival was filmed and turned into the documentary of the same name, which proved to be so big a box-office hit that its earnings more than paid off the losses from the festival itself. In addition to the original three-record vinyl album and the followup two-record set Woodstock Two, there have been several CD box sets, multiple DVD and Blu-ray releases of the film (the latest version is 2014's, which presents all the footage in HD and includes interviews, radio coverage and art), and the independent, unauthorized Woodstock Complete project.

In August 2019, Back to the Garden, an authorized complete version of the 1969 Woodstock Music & Art Fair, was released on Rhino Records. The product of painstaking research and audio production, it had 38 audio discs plus a Blu-ray of the film and cost $800.

The festival's original location is currently home to the nonprofit Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. When visiting, be sure to check out its honest-to-goodness Woodstock Museum, which provides an in-depth look at the '60s counterculture that birthed the festival, as well as the events leading up to it.

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Woodstock performers (in order of appearance):

• Friday night (mostly folk-oriented acts to ease the crowd into the festival)
  • Richie Havens^note The Folk Music singer was hurriedly asked to go on when scheduled opener Sweetwater got stuck in a traffic jam
  • Sweetwater^note Psychedelic Rock band whose incredible string of near-misses and bad luck gained some attention later on, including a VH1 movie with Amy Jo Johnson as lead singer Nansi Nevins
  • Bert Sommer^note A former Hair cast member and one-time bandmate of Michael McKean in The Left Banke, making his debut as a singer-songwriter. He failed to get much boost from his appearance, mostly because as a Capitol Records artist he couldn't appear in the film or record album, which were from Warner. He died in 1990 at age 41.
  • Tim Hardin^note Talented, but self-destructive, Folk Music figure, who wrote "If I Were a Carpenter" and "Reason to Believe". He also died young (at age 39 in 1980)
  • Ravi Shankar
  • Melanie^note A folkie from New Jersey, Melanie Safka's Breakthrough Hit came in 1970 with a song she wrote about Woodstock, "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)". She is also known for "Brand New Key" and "Peace Will Come." She is still around as of 2021 and still performing, often with her children.
  • Arlo Guthrie
  • Joan Baez
• Saturday afternoon/night into Sunday morning (mainly a showcase for big-name acts from San Francisco)
  • Quill^note This Boston-based Progressive Rock band was easily the most obscure act at Woodstock. With a strong local following in their hometown, they were chosen for the festival despite not having a recording contract. They also did some advance work before the festival, entertaining the festival employees as they were setting things up, and acting as goodwill ambassadors by playing free shows in the area around Bethel. They scored a record deal in the wake of their Woodstock performance, but only released one album
  • Country Joe McDonald^note The leader of Country Joe & The Fish was asked to go on and do a solo acoustic set when a reshuffling of the schedule left the organizers with some open slots
  • Santana
  • John Sebastian
  • The Keef Hartley Band^note Hartley was a longtime figure on the UK rock scene, having taken over as drummer of Rory Storm & The Hurricanes after The Beatles poached Ringo Starr, then drumming in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. His band played a Jazz/Blues/Rock mix
  • The Incredible String Band ^note British Psychedelic Folk, considered a Cult Classic in some circles, as well as an acknowledged influence on Led Zeppelin's acoustic ballad material. They were scheduled for Friday, but didn't want to play in the rain (Melanie took their slot) and got moved to Saturday
  • Canned Heat^note Blues Rock. Yes, they did perform "Going Up the Country", the official Hollywood "hippie" song
  • Mountain^note Considered Heavy Metal pioneers. A song they debuted here was later recorded as "For Yasgur's Farm".
  • The Grateful Dead
  • Creedence Clearwater Revival
  • Janis Joplin
  • Sly and the Family Stone
  • The Who
  • Jefferson Airplane
• Sunday afternoon/night into Monday morning (a mix of headliners and acts who got moved after the schedule was reshuffled)
  • Joe Cocker
  • Country Joe & The Fish^note Their formal set after Joe's solo set the day before
  • Ten Years After^note British Blues band, featuring the memorable Epic Rocking performance of "I'm Going Home"
  • The Band
  • Johnny Winter^note The guitarist was joined by his brother Edgar Winter
  • Blood, Sweat & Tears^note The Jazz-Rock band had a huge year in 1969, with a #1 album and three songs that got to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100
  • Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
  • The Paul Butterfield Blues Band^note Another Woodstock performer who died tragically young, at age 44 in 1987
  • Sha Na Na
  • Jimi Hendrix

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References to Woodstock in fiction:

Comic Books

• One story in a Fantastic Four annual has the Human Torch pulled into the past to encounter some of the Long-Lived superhumans of the ClanDestine, who are attending Woodstock at the time.

Film

• The 2009 film Taking Woodstock tells a fictionalized version of the story behind the concert.
• A Walk on the Moon is set in the summer of 1969, against the backdrop of the moon-landing and Woodstock.

Newspaper Comics

• Woodstock, the bird in Peanuts, was named after the festival.

Live-Action TV

• In the Stargate SG-1 episode "1969", SG-1 is accidentally sent back in time to the titular year. They hitch a ride with a couple of hippies named Michael and Jenny, who are headed to "upstate New York, some big concert."
• In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Death Wish", it is revealed that, after receiving a lift from a member of the Q Continuum later known as Quinn, the tower three spotlight operator Maury Ginsburg noticed that an extension cord had been disconnected and reconnected it. Had he not noticed it, the festival would not have been able to go ahead as the entire sound system had failed.
• In the Weird Science episode "By the Time We Got to Woodstock", Lisa attends the festival as she is suffering from amnesia and believes that she is a hippie. Gary Wallace, Wyatt Donnelly and his brother Chett see her on television and manage to restore her memory when they get to Woodstock. Lisa then returns the four of them to 1996.
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "School Hard", Spike mentions that he fed off a flower person at Woodstock and spent the next six hours watching his hand move.
• In the Taxi episode "Reverend Jim: A Space Odyssey", Reverend Jim mentions that he was at Woodstock. ("Half a million people. Hey, you know, if I hadn't been there, there'd only have been... 499,999 people. Lucky thing for them I went.")

Western Animation

• In the Animaniacs short "Woodstock Slappy", Slappy Squirrel and her nephew Skippy go to spend a quiet weekend in a tree in the country in 1969, not knowing that it's on the Woodstock concert site. Awoken by the cacophony, an incredibly-annoyed Slappy tries to end the concert, memorably getting into an extended Who's on First? argument with Skippy over the names of The Who, The Band and Yes (who Skippy kept pointing out weren't even at the festival). Besides The Who, it also features No Celebrities Were Harmed versions of Joe Cocker, Country Joe McDonald and Melanie (and a very brief appearance of a Jimi Hendrix caricature).
• My Little Pony: Make Your Mark: The eponymous music festival in "Bridlewoodstock" is a reference to the real-life Woodstock concert.

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"If you remember Woodstock, you weren't there."

— Anonymous

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