Woodstock Festival (1969): Three Days of Peace and Music

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, held from 15 to 18 August 1969 on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, was the most famous rock festival of the 1960s. Promoted as “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music”, it drew an estimated 400,000 people, far more than the organisers had planned for. Despite rain, mud, food shortages and traffic jams, the gathering stayed largely peaceful, and it became an enduring symbol of the counterculture and its ideals.

Background: the counterculture and the festival boom

By the late 1960s, rock music had become the soundtrack of a youth culture that questioned the Vietnam War, traditional morality and consumer society. The Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967 and the Monterey Pop Festival that June had shown that large outdoor music events could attract tens of thousands of young people.

Woodstock was conceived by four young men: Michael Lang, a concert promoter, and Artie Kornfeld, a record company executive, joined forces with John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, two investors who had advertised for business ideas. Together they formed Woodstock Ventures. Their original idea included a recording studio in the town of Woodstock, an artists’ colony in New York’s Catskill region where Bob Dylan and other musicians lived.

The organisers signed leading bands with unusually high fees, which helped persuade other acts to join. Advance tickets cost $18 for all three days. The festival poster, designed by Arnold Skolnick, showed a bird perched on the neck of a guitar and became one of the best-known images of the era. Advertising in underground newspapers and on radio reached young people across the north-eastern United States.

Finding a site

The town of Woodstock itself was never the venue. The organisers first secured land in an industrial park at Wallkill, New York, but local residents objected, and in July 1969 the town passed a law that effectively banned the festival. With about a month to go, Woodstock Ventures needed a new site.

Max Yasgur, a dairy farmer in Bethel, Sullivan County, agreed to rent part of his farm, a large field sloping down into a natural bowl that made a ready-made amphitheatre. Some neighbours protested, but Yasgur defended the young people’s right to gather. The rush to move meant that stages, toilets, water supplies and fences were still unfinished when crowds began to arrive.

The festival: what happened

By Thursday 14 August, tens of thousands of people were already camping on the site. Roads for miles around were jammed, and many people abandoned their cars and walked. Because the ticket booths and fences were incomplete, the organisers announced on Friday that the festival would be free. Advance sales of about 186,000 tickets were overwhelmed by the crowd, which most estimates put at around 400,000.

The New York State Thruway was temporarily closed near the area, and Sullivan County declared a state of emergency. Performers had to be flown in by helicopter because the roads were blocked. Food and water ran short, sanitation was inadequate, and heavy thunderstorms turned the field into mud.

Volunteers filled the gaps. Members of the Hog Farm commune, led by Hugh Romney (later known as Wavy Gravy), ran free kitchens and a “please force” to keep order, and medical staff treated thousands of people for cuts, drug reactions and other problems. Local residents and the US military helped deliver food and medical supplies. Max Yasgur addressed the crowd from the stage on the Sunday, praising them for showing that half a million young people could spend three days together peacefully.

Life in the crowd

For many of those present, the experience of the crowd mattered more than the music. People shared food, water and shelter, swam naked in nearby ponds and slept in tents, cars and the open air. Drugs, especially marijuana, were used openly, and announcements from the stage warned people about bad batches of LSD. Medical teams treated many “bad trips” as well as injuries from bare feet on broken glass.

The music

Thirty-two acts performed over the long weekend, often hours behind schedule.

• Friday 15 August: Richie Havens opened the festival, improvising a long set because other acts had not arrived; he finished with a song later known as “Freedom”. Folk performers including Arlo Guthrie, Ravi Shankar and Joan Baez followed, with Baez closing the night.
• Saturday 16 August: Rock and soul dominated, with Santana, Canned Heat, Mountain, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone and The Who, who played into the early morning. Jefferson Airplane performed at dawn on Sunday.
• Sunday 17 August into Monday 18 August: Joe Cocker’s set was followed by a fierce storm that halted the music. Afterwards came Country Joe and the Fish, Ten Years After, The Band, Johnny Winter, Blood, Sweat & Tears and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who were playing only their second show together. Sha Na Na played before the final act.

Not every moment was harmonious. During The Who’s set in the early hours of Sunday, the activist Abbie Hoffman seized a microphone to make a political speech about the jailed poet John Sinclair, and guitarist Pete Townshend drove him off the stage with his guitar. Several performers later said that the delays, the mud and the poor sound on stage made it a difficult show to play, even if the recordings and film made it look effortless.

Jimi Hendrix, the highest-paid performer, closed the festival at about 9 a.m. on Monday 18 August. By then the crowd had shrunk to an estimated 30,000 to 40,000. His distorted, improvised version of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, imitating bombs and sirens, became one of the most famous performances in rock history and was widely heard as a comment on the Vietnam War.

By the numbers

Key people

• Michael Lang (1944–2022) was the festival’s creative driving force and later organised the anniversary festivals of 1994 and 1999.
• Artie Kornfeld, then a young executive at Capitol Records, handled publicity and record industry contacts.
• John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, two young New York investors, financed the event and dealt with its huge debts.
• Max Yasgur (1919–1973), the dairy farmer whose land hosted the festival, became a folk hero to many young Americans.

Consequences and legacy

Financially, Woodstock was a disaster for its organisers, who were left deep in debt once the event became free. They recovered largely through the documentary film Woodstock, directed by Michael Wadleigh and released in 1970, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and through the soundtrack albums.

The festival’s image as a peaceful utopia was quickly contrasted with the Altamont Free Concert in California on 6 December 1969, where violence by Hells Angels security guards ended with a concertgoer killed. Together, the two events are often seen as marking the high point and the end of 1960s idealism.

Joni Mitchell, who did not attend, wrote the song “Woodstock”, which Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young turned into a hit in 1970. The festival also inspired later events, including anniversary festivals in 1994 and 1999, the second of which ended in violence and fires. A planned 50th-anniversary festival in 2019 was cancelled.

The original site is now part of the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which opened in 2006 and includes a museum about the festival and the 1960s. The festival field was added to the US National Register of Historic Places in 2017.

Myths and facts

Myth: Woodstock happened in Woodstock. It took place in Bethel, some 40 miles away.

Myth: Everyone was soaked for three days. Heavy rain fell at times, especially on the Sunday, but Saturday was largely sunny and warm.

Myth: Bob Dylan and the Beatles played. Neither appeared; Dylan was the local celebrity the organisers had hoped to attract.

Fact: It was remarkably peaceful. For a crowd the size of a large city with very few police, there was little violence, although drug problems and medical emergencies were common.

Timeline

• 1969, early: Woodstock Ventures is formed by Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman.
• 1969, July: The town of Wallkill effectively bans the festival; Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel is secured.
• 1969, 15 August: Richie Havens opens the festival; the organisers declare it free.
• 1969, 16 August: A full day of rock, ending with The Who.
• 1969, 17 August: Jefferson Airplane plays at dawn; a storm interrupts the afternoon.
• 1969, 18 August, about 9 a.m.: Jimi Hendrix closes the festival.
• 1970, March: The documentary Woodstock is released.
• 2006: Bethel Woods Center for the Arts opens on the site.

Why it matters

Woodstock showed the size and confidence of the 1960s youth culture, which in the same summer saw the Apollo 11 Moon landing and growing opposition to the war. Its name became shorthand for a generation’s hopes of peace, music and community, and the model of the huge outdoor festival it popularised remains part of popular culture today.