50: Festival

1969 Woodstock Festival

The Woodstock Festival (aka An Aquarian Exposition: Three Days of Peace and Music) was a three-day concert (which rolled into a fourth day) that involved lots of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll, plus a lot of mud. The Woodstock Music Festival of 1969 has become an icon of the 1960s hippie counterculture. The festival took place on August 15-18, 1969, at Max Yasgur's dairy farm in the town of Bethel (outside of White Lake, New York).

The Organizers of Woodstock 

The organizers of the Woodstock Festival were four young men: John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld, and Mike Lang. The oldest of the four was only 27 years old at the time of the Woodstock Festival. Roberts, an heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, and his friend Rosenman were looking for a way to use Roberts' money to invest in an idea that would make them even more money. After placing an ad in The New York Times that stated: "Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions," they met Kornfeld and Lang.

The Plan for the Woodstock Festival 

Kornfeld and Lang's original proposal was to build a recording studio and a retreat for rock musicians up in Woodstock, New York (where Bob Dylan and other musicians already lived). The idea morphed into creating a two-day rock concert for 50,000 people with the hope that the concert would raise enough money to pay for the studio. The four young men then got to work on organizing a large music festival. They found a location for the event up in an industrial park in nearby Wallkill, New York. They printed tickets ($7 for one day, $13 for two days, and $18 for three days), which could be purchased in select stores or via mail order. The men also worked on organizing food, signing musicians, and hiring security.

Things Go Very Wrong 

The first of many things to go wrong with the Woodstock Festival was the location. No matter how the young men and their lawyers spun it, the citizens of Wallkill did not want a bunch of drugged-out hippies descending on their town. After much wrangling, the town of Wallkill passed a law on July 2, 1969, that effectively banned the concert from their vicinity. Everyone involved with the Woodstock Festival panicked. Stores refused to sell any more tickets and the negotiations with the musicians got shaky. Only a month-and-a-half before the Woodstock Festival was to begin, a new location had to be found. Luckily, in mid-July, before too many people began demanding refunds for their pre-purchased tickets, Max Yasgur offered up his 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York for the location for the Woodstock Festival. As lucky as the organizers were to have found a new location, the last minute change of venue seriously set back the Festival timeline. New contracts to rent the dairy farm and surrounding areas had to be drawn up and permits to allow the Woodstock Festival in the town had to be acquired. Construction of the stage, a performers' pavilion, parking lots, concession stands, and a children's playground all got a late start and barely got finished in time for the event. Some things, like ticket booths and gates, did not get finished in time. As the date got closer, more problems sprung up. It soon appeared that their 50,000 people estimate was way too low and the new estimate jumped to upwards of 200,000 people. The young men then tried to bring in more toilets, more water, and more food. However, the food concessionaires kept threatening to cancel at the last minute (the organizers had accidentally hired people who had no experience in concessions) so they had to worry about whether or not they could airlift in rice as a backup food supply. Also troublesome was the last-minute ban on off-duty police officers from working at the Woodstock Festival.

Hundreds of Thousands Arrive at the Woodstock Festival 

On Wednesday, August 13 (two days before the festival was to begin), there were already approximately 50,000 people camping near the stage. These early arrivals had walked right through the huge gaps in the fence where the gates had not yet been placed. Since there was no way to get the 50,000 people to leave the area in order to pay for tickets and there was no time to erect the numerous gates to prevent even more people from just walking in, the organizers were forced to make the event a free concert. This declaration of a free concert had two dire effects. The first of which was that the organizers were going to lose massive amounts of money by putting on this event. The second effect was that as news spread that it was now a free concert, an estimated one million people headed to Bethel, New York. Police had to turn away thousands of cars. It is estimated that about 500,000 people actually made it to the Woodstock Festival. No one had planned for half a million people. The highways in the area literally became parking lots as people abandoned their cars in the middle of the street and just walked the final distance to the Woodstock Festival. Traffic was so bad that the organizers had to hire helicopters to shuttle the performers from their hotels to the stage.

The Music Starts 

Despite all the organizers' troubles, the Woodstock Festival got started nearly on time. On Friday evening, August 15, Richie Havens got up on stage and officially started the Festival. Sweetwater, Joan Baez, and other folk artists also played Friday night. The music started up again shortly after noon on Saturday with Quill and continued non-stop until Sunday morning around 9 AM. The day of psychedelic bands continued with such musicians as Santana, Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, and The Who, to name just a few. It was obvious to everyone that on Sunday, the Woodstock Festival was winding down. Most of the crowd left throughout the day, leaving about 150,000 people on Sunday night. When Jimi Hendrix, the last musician to play at Woodstock, finished his set early on Monday morning, the crowd was down to only 25,000. Despite the 30-minute lines for water and at least hour-long wait to use a toilet, the Woodstock Festival was a huge success. There were a lot of drugs, a lot of sex and nudity, and a lot of mud (created by the rain).

After the Woodstock Festival 

The organizers of Woodstock were dazed at the end of the Woodstock Festival. They didn't have time to focus on the fact that they had created the most popular music event in history, for they first had to deal with their incredible debt (over $1 million) and the 70 lawsuits that had been filed against them. To their great relief, the film of the Woodstock Festival turned into a hit movie and the profits from the movie covered a large chunk of the debt from the Festival. By the time that everything was paid off, they were still $100,000 in debt.

https://www.thoughtco.com/the-woodstock-festival-of-1969-1779367