Woodstock Music Festival (1969)
The Festival The festival was a blur of good music, pot, LSD, "grooving", lovemaking, and skinny dipping paired with dancing in the rain, mud, garbage, broken limbs, dysentery, two deaths, and one birth.
Attendance far exceeded what the promoters were suspecting. More than 400,000 people attended the festival. A majority of the audience got into the festival for free. As an event, it would take on a legendary quality in American history. In later years, it would be seen as the transforming experience of the 60s--the idyllic, painfully short moment in time in which tens of thousands of young people were merged together as "Woodstock Nation": a a symbolic representation of the hippie counterculture world that dissolved into the desolate mist of the 1970s. I lost my legs in Vietnam, but blew my mind at Woodstock. |
Origins The festival's promoters were two rich students, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, who had just finished college and proceeded to place an ad in the New York Times asking for "Young men with an Unlimited Capital looking for interesting investment opportunities and business propositions."
In early 1969, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfield, two young men of the hippie counterculture, arrived at their office in New York with the proposal to create a recording studio for rock musicians in Woodstock, New York, to be launched with a massive rock festival. Roberts and Rosenman were immediately entranced by the idea and were on-board, agreeing to put up seed money for it. Several conflicts ensued before the festival took place. The town of Woodstock was too small for the crowds that were expected to arrive. After some chaotic months of looking for a tract of open land, Rosenman and Roberts made a deal with Max Yasgur, a dairy farmer in Bethel (New York), to lease his acres for $50,000 dollars with another $75,000 to escrow against damage and liabilities. The quest to find popular groups to perform was resolved at promises of $7,500 to $15,000 an appearance. By the eve of the festival, a glut of some of the biggest names in 60s music--Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Who, Santana, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, and Arlo Guthrie--were all participating in the festival. It was a very, very moving and powerful time because I think it was that night when I was so connected with the music and with everything that was going on around me...that's when I seemed to have a sense that it was all kind of a oneness of experience, that everybody was there together and enjoying themselves and celebrating in that sense of togetherness... Jimi Hendrix's rendition of the Star Spangled Banner is still known today as being one of the most iconic and rebellious versions of the American national anthem. The angry guitar riffs and the raw sounds of the anthem that flowed from Hendrix's musical hands were meant to symbolize the corruption of the American government, and the pain felt by the American people as more and more young men returned home in black coffins. This is perhaps the most famous moment of the Woodstock Festival.
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