Legendary Woodstock Photos That Will Go Down In History
Woodstock: The Original Music Festival, a Symbol of the Sixties
Nearly half a million people flocked to Bethel, New. York’s undulating meadows to celebrate love, peace, friendship, life, and music (among other things) during the Woodstock event of 1969. There has never been anything precisely like it before. With these rare historical images from that year, you can see what those three days of peace, love, and music were actually like!
Woodstock was as unforgettable for the musicians that performed there as it was for the audience. Jefferson Airplane members are pictured here, with singer Grace Slick in the center, dressed in white. Over the three days, 33 performers performed, including many other stars. Performances from artists from all over the state were welcome. This inclusion encouraged mingling among stars and musicians, even encouraging duets and mixed performances. Peers mixed over the three days sharing drinks and meals whenever possible, knowing they wouldn’t see each other again in a while.
People nationally attended the music festival in upstate New York. Nobody could have predicted that it would become one of the most iconic concert series in history. And let’s be honest, you wouldn’t want to miss a concert with 33 of your favorite artists, would you? This event was going to be one of the biggest concerts yet. Just think about it! Thousands of people congregated in one location for three days, all to see their favorite singers perform. The anticipation was palpable, the performances were legendary, and the crowd did not disappoint, cheering and partying for three days. The festival’s original location is now home to the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which hosts performances throughout the year.
The Woodstock Music Festival
The Woodstock Music Festival began on August 15, 1969, as half a million people waited on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for the three-day music festival to start. Billed as “An Aquarian Experience: 3 Days of Peace and Music,” the epic event would later be known simply as Woodstock and become synonymous with the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Woodstock was a success, but the massive concert didn’t come off without a hitch: Last-minute venue changes, bad weather and the hordes of attendees caused major headaches. Still, despite—or because of—a lot of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and rain, Woodstock was a peaceful celebration and earned its hallowed place in pop culture history.
The Woodstock Music Festival was the brainchild of four men, all age 27 or younger, looking for an investment opportunity: John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang. Lang had organized the successful Miami Music Festival in 1968 and Kornfeld was the youngest vice president at Capitol Records. Roberts and Rosenman were New York entrepreneurs involved in building a Manhattan recording studio. The four men formed Woodstock Ventures, Inc., and decided to host a music festival. Creedence Clearwater Revival was the first big-name talent to sign on and gave Woodstock the credibility it needed to attract other well-known musicians.
The initial plan for Woodstock called for the event to be held at Howard Mills Industrial Park in Wallkill, New York. Wallkill town officials got spooked, however, and backed out of the deal, passing a law that eliminated any possibility of holding the concert on their turf. Woodstock Ventures explored a few other venues, but none panned out. Finally, just a month ahead of the concert, 49-year-old dairy farmer Max Yasgur offered to rent them part of his land in the White Lake area of Bethel, New York, surrounded by the verdant Catskill Mountains. With the concert just a month away, the four frantic partners jumped at the opportunity and paid his asking price.
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Riots, deaths, sexual assault: Maybe Woodstock was always a nightmare
Depending on your birth year, the word “Woodstock” probably conjures vastly different memories. For children of the 1960s, it’s often synonymous with peace and love, spiritual vibes and Utopian, antiwar sentiment. For those of the 1990s, it may summon visions of war itself, with its broken sewage mains, man-made fires, assaults and general anarchy. For some, it sounds like a joke along the lines of Fyre Festival — just another troubled production that never occurred.
Although there have been several iterations of the Woodstock festival, there are only three that matter: the original in 1969, memorialized in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary and sung about by Joni Mitchell (who didn’t attend); the boisterous, disastrous one in 1999; and this year’s, which imploded before coming to fruition.
So how did we go from a festival dedicated to good vibes — an event considered one of the most relevant in modern culture — to ones deemed disasters both literally and financially?
It is both easy and lazy “to say we were peace and love in the late ’60s, violent in the ’90s and now in 2019, too cynical to allow Woodstock to happen,” said Steven Hyden, a cultural critic who chronicled the 30th anniversary of the festival in the Ringer podcast “Break Stuff: The Story of Woodstock ’99.” “In reality, there’s a lot more similarity between these festivals than there might appear.”
The Woodstock Music & Art Fair
In August 1969, the Woodstock Music & Art Fair took place on a dairy farm in Bethel, NY. Over half a million people came to a 600-acre farm to hear 32 acts (leading and emerging performers of the time) play over the course of four days (August 15-18). Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Who, Janis Joplin and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were among the line-up. Woodstock is known as one of the greatest happenings of all time and –perhaps- the most pivotal moment in music history.
Joni Mitchell said, “Woodstock was a spark of beauty” where half-a-million kids “saw that they were part of a greater organism.” According to Michael Lang, one of four young men who formed Woodstock Ventures to produce the festival, “That’s what means the most to me – the connection to one another felt by all of us who worked on the festival, all those who came to it, and the millions who couldn’t be there but were touched by it.”
By Wednesday, August 13, some 60,000 people had already arrived and set up camp. On Friday, the roads were so clogged with cars that performing artists had to arrive by helicopter. Though over 100,000 tickets were sold prior to the festival weekend, they became unnecessary as swarms of people descended on the concert grounds to take part in this historic and peaceful happening. Four days of music… half a million people… rain, and the rest is history.
Woodstock - American music festival [1969]
Spectators at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, New York, August 1969
The festival began to go wrong almost immediately, when the towns of both Woodstock and Wallkill, New York, denied permission to stage it. (Nevertheless, the name Woodstock was retained because of the cachet of hipness associated with the town, where Bob Dylan and several other musicians were known to live and which had been an artists’ retreat since the turn of the century.) Ultimately, farmer Max Yasgur made his land available for the festival. Few tickets were sold, but some 400,000 people showed up, mostly demanding free entry, which they got due to virtually nonexistent security. Rain then turned the festival site into a sea of mud, but somehow the audience bonded—possibly because large amounts of marijuana and psychedelics were consumed—and the festival went on.
Although it featured memorable performances by Crosby, Stills and Nash (performing together in public for only the second time), Santana (whose fame at that point had not spread far beyond the San Francisco Bay area), Joe Cocker (then new to American audiences), and Hendrix, the festival left its promoters virtually bankrupt. They had, however, held onto the film and recording rights and more than made their money back when Michael Wadleigh’s documentary film Woodstock (1970) became a smash hit. The legend of Woodstock’s “Three Days of Peace and Music,” as its advertising promised, became enshrined in American history, at least partly because few of the festivals that followed were as star-studded or enjoyable.
The Artists Who Performed at the First Woodstock Music Festival
On August 15, 1969, thousands of people gathered at a 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for what would become one of the biggest events in music history. The idea behind the first Woodstock musical festival — which was conceived by John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfield and Michael Lang — was simply to raise enough money to build a recording studio in Woodstock, New York.
But the three days of “peace and music” that unfolded from August 15-18 far exceeded anyone’s expectations. Ahead of Woodstock, 186,000 tickets were sold — but the actual turnout was so high that the festival was opened up to the public for free. The festival, which featured 32 acts total, was chaotic, rainy, and forever changed the history of music.
Richie Havens opened Woodstock at 5:07 p.m. on Friday evening, and because many of the other musicians were stuck in traffic, he was on stage for a while and claimed he’d played every song he knew. That came out to 11 songs total, including “From The Prison,” “With A Little Help From My Friends” and “High Flying Bird." "One of my strongest memories of that day is flying in the helicopter over that vast, spectacular crowd that had already stretched back over the hills and well out of view of the stage. Looking down, my only thought was, "This is incredible. ... We're really here and they can't hide us anymore," Havens told CNN.com.
Woodstock Music and Art Fair
Woodstock festival site with the stage
Commonly referred to simply as Woodstock, was a music festival held August 15–18, 1969, on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, 40 miles (65 km) southwest of the town of Woodstock. Billed as "an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music" and alternatively referred to as the Woodstock Rock Festival, it attracted an audience of more than 400,000. Thirty-two acts performed outdoors despite sporadic rain.
The festival has become widely regarded as a pivotal moment in popular music history as well as a defining event for the counterculture generation. The event's significance was reinforced by a 1970 documentary film, an accompanying soundtrack album, and a song written by Joni Mitchell that became a major hit for both Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Matthews Southern Comfort. Music events bearing the Woodstock name were planned for anniversaries, which included the tenth, twentieth, twenty-fifth, thirtieth, fortieth, and fiftieth. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine listed it as number 19 of the 50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll. In 2017, the festival site became listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Woodstock was initiated through the efforts of Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, Joel Rosenman, and John P. Roberts. Roberts and Rosenman financed the project. Lang had some experience as a promoter, having co-organized the Miami Pop Festival on the East Coast the previous year, where an estimated 25,000 people attended the two-day event. Early in 1969, Roberts and Rosenman were New York City entrepreneurs, in the process of building Mediasound, a recording studio complex in Manhattan. Lang and Kornfeld's lawyer, Miles Lourie, who had done legal work on the Mediasound project, suggested that they contact Roberts and Rosenman about financing a similar, but much smaller, studio Kornfeld and Lang hoped to build in Woodstock, New York. Unpersuaded by this Studio-in-the-Woods proposal, Roberts and Rosenman counter-proposed a concert featuring the kind of artists known to frequent the Woodstock area (such as Bob Dylan and The Band). Kornfeld and Lang agreed to the new plan, and Woodstock Ventures was formed in January 1969. The company offices were located in an oddly decorated floor of 47 West 57th Street in Manhattan. Burt Cohen, and his design group, Curtain Call Productions, oversaw the psychedelic transformation of the office.
