Woodstock came from the minds of four men: John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld, and Michael Lang. All four men had some type of background in the music industry. For example, Lang organized and created up the successful Miami Music Festival in 1968, and Kornfeld was one of the youngest men to be a Vice President at Capitol Records. With the combination of four very successful men in the music industry, they formed Woodstock Ventures, Inc., to which they decided to host a music festival. Because of their successful names, they were able to book big-name talents to their festivals, which gave them credibility that attracted bigger names as well as the crowd.
Initially planned to have the festival hosted in Wallkill, New York, town officials backed out of the deal due to a law that didn’t permit them to hold concerts on turf. The four men explored other options, but all of them fell through. About one month before the festival was to be hosted, they were offered to rent a part of Max Yasgur's, a dairy farmer, land outside of Bethel, New York, around 70 miles away from the original location.
With everything starting to click together, logistics became the number one priority. Things like fencing, entrance gates, ticket booths, concessions stands, and bathrooms needed to be set up. However, people were arriving in the coming days, and many of these thingswere not yet set up. The four men then decided that they needed to prioritize for the comfort of the people, so they made the concert free for anyone to come. Due to this fact, more than the expected number of people came. At the start, around 50,000 were expected to come. However, this number soared and over 100,000 tickets were pre-sold. By the start of the festival, over one million people had arrived in Woodstock, jamming up highways and local roads. Many of these festival-goers decided to abandon their cars and walk the rest of the way, with about 500,000 actually reaching the venue.
Those who arrived at the venue created an atmosphere that was never seen before. Like I said at the start, unity and peace were at the forefront of the festival. Although they experienced bad weather, muddy grounds, and a lack of food, water, and sanitation, they “made love, not war”, where some literally did so whenever they wanted, used psychedelic drugs to enjoy themselves, and/or enjoy the artists that performed. With artists like The Greatful Dead, Arlo Guthrie, Nash and Young, and Jimi Hendrix, memorable memories were plentiful.
Best described by Max Yasgur, the farmer who lent his land for the occasion, he addressed the audience on day three saying, “…You’ve proven something to the world…the important thing that you’ve proven to the world is that a half a million kids, and I call you kids because I have children who are older than you are, a half a million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music and God bless you for it!”
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/woodstock-music-festival-concludes https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/woodstock https://www.history.com/news/remembering-richie-havens-ten-things-you-may-not-know-about-woodstock https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/08/woodstock-50-photos-1969/596107/
I found this post regarding Woodstock super interesting. Something I wanted to look at more was the direct impact it had on the youth generation that participated in it. According to participants, Woodstock offered a sense of security and love, as the participants would endure the unprepared weather, food, and performance conditions by sharing food, clothes, and money. Even others, such as Joe Dipone, who did not have a good experience, realized that the event opened his viewpoint up to the different types of American culture and the rising anti-culture. Musicians and attendees such as Richie Havens and Duke Devlin also claimed that the event's music spoke to the issues of Vietnam conflict as well as domestic civil rights movements, giving many participants a sense of action and voice. As many attendees claimed, "It made [them] feel [like they] could make a change in the world."
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This was a really intriguing topic to blog about! I was really hooked, so I did some more research. It turns out, the Woodstock festival actually marked a turning point in the Counterculture movement--it was at this point that the Counterculture movement began to disintegrate. Though people still continued the movement they had started before the festival, it seemed as if their fight was less urgent--they had already manifested their common goal. Furthermore, whether by causation or correlation, by the 1970s, the Consevative government started compromising with the counterculture revolutionaries. Woodstock clearly was more than just a music festival.
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https://nhdwoodstock.weebly.com/effects-of-woodstock.html