To top it off, the festival grounds were hot, humid, rainy and muddy. Woodstock was conceived as a profit-making venture. And the answer appears to be no. During the three days of the Woodstock festival, there were no reported incidents of violence among the half-million people in the audience. When word got out that a event was in the works, locals had fought to cancel it. What unfolded over the next three days from August , became legendary—as a music event and as a generational moment.
I dig it all, the mud, the rain, the music, the hassles. Crowds walk along roads choked with traffic on the way to Woodstock. While the village of Woodstock, New York had been home to a group of artistic, idealistic people since the early 20th century, many residents of the older generation considered the young "hippies" to be slackers and even, in some cases, dangerous.
Over the years the village had passed ordinances that targeted behaviors like shirtlessness, public consumption of alcohol and loitering. A last-minute scramble to prepare for the concerts meant that there was no time to build fences around the venue. They stopped selling tickets, word was out—and all bets were off.
Youth from around the country were on their way to Bethel. So organizers found a last-minute replacement in folk singer Richie Havens. Some say he is the unsung hero of Woodstock.
I tend to agree. Woodstock's organizers told local residents they expected an attendance up to 50,, too guilty to confess they'd actually sold , tickets in advance. Somewhat ironically, by being such a spontaneous, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants affair, the original Woodstock made sure that later festivals were better organized. Where Woodstock was like a high stakes experiment wherein thousands came together to solve logistical problems as they arose, later festivals sought to address these concerns in advance, and when they didn't , crowds were usually less willing to endure or take responsibility for less-than-ideal conditions.
After Woodstock, concert promoters and investors sought to maximize their profit margins from live music events by installing facilities to offset increased prices and placing more stringent controls over ticket collection at the gate. Eventually, this quest for profit and convenience saw festivals move from pastoral outdoor settings like Woodstock to sports arenas and convention centers, limiting the experience to a single-day or evening with assigned seating.
Thus, the '70s stadium era supplanted the more egalitarian communal events of the '60s that had helped inspire it. According to a statement on Woodstock's cultural significance by the Bethel Performing Arts Center, the development of "arena rock" after the festival also marked the end of rock's "vaudeville circuit," resulting in the shutdown of many smaller concert halls in that had incubated diverse and innovative acts throughout the '60s.
The increasingly homogenized and expensive stadium settings for live music reportedly gave an advantage to heavily amplified, power chord playing hard rock bands that could better sonically fill these enormous new venues. Like any event that produces such a lasting cultural footprint, Woodstock's legacy is, in many ways, contradictory. Just as it inspired some to make live music events bigger and better organized than ever before, it's also inspired others to counter this trend by organizing their own outdoor, genre-bending music festivals as true spiritual successors to Woodstock, including the likes of Lollapalooza and the H.
Festival, with mixed success never equaling the original. Woodstock has become a legend we pass on in American culture, a subjective symbol for the events and ideals of an entire era that continues to impact how many of us think about the past and act in the present.
Unfortunately, those are the kinds of invisible and individualized impacts we can't really measure, but only sense. In this way, Woodstock's significance continues to unfold the further we get from it and the larger the legend becomes, whereas many at the time had little to no idea they were making history. Nonetheless, one of the clearest distillations of Woodstock's importance was published just days after the event by Time magazine , and it's this insight we'll end on: "The baffling history of mankind is full of obvious turning points and significant events: battles won, treaties signed, rulers elected or disposed, and now seemingly, planets conquered.
Equally important are the great groundswells of popular movements that affect the minds and values of a generation or more, not all of which can be neatly tied to a time or place. Looking back upon the America of the '60s, future historians may well search for the meaning of one such movement.
It drew the public's notice on the days and nights of Aug. If you buy through our links, we may earn a commission to support our work.
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