Posted on 06/18/2017 8:25:45 AM PDT by COBOL2Java
On August 15, 1969 more than 400,000 people flocked to a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for “3 days of music and peace.” Woodstock became a cultural icon representing the spirit of many of the young generation at the time. Check out some pictures from the event to see how crazy it actually was!
Woodstock was originally supposed to take place in Wallkill, Orange County, New York. However, the town board quickly passed a bill stating you must have permit in order to host any event over 5,000. A permit was applied for but was denied because the plan for the portable toilets were called inadequate. A dairy farmer in New York heard about the concert and its planning issues and offered up his farm for the event. Good thing, because the event saw a lot more than 5,000 people.
As stated before a dairy farmer in Sullivan County, New York, had heard about this concert and its issues. He offered his farm land as a space for the concert. His name was Max Yasgur and he was paid $75,000 for all 3 days. He is quoted as saying “If we join them, we can turn those adversities that are the problems of America today into a hope for a brighter and more peaceful future…” When Yasgur died he received a full page obituary in Rolling Stone Magazine. 
(Excerpt) Read more at greeningz.com ...
Monterey Pop is cited as being the grand daddy of these festivals although there was one in SF the week before Monterey Pop and there were the Newport jazz and folk fests before that.
There were a lot of these fests in 1969 before and after Woodstock, with a number of the same acts.
The movie omits a lot of the rock and roll from the fest. There’s 100 hours of footage, when screened concurrently (multiple angles of the same songs/scenes) it runs 18 hours.
Around 6 hours of footage has been officially released after all of this time.
There was a documentary/concert series that filled in some of the rock and roll gaps, it also had contemporary interviews with the investors.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0208579/combined
Woodstock Diary (1994)
Runtime:
Finland:172 min (3 parts) | Germany:115 min | Australia:174 min
It’s available on DVD.
There were also a couple crews with videotape systems at the show (two roaming through the crowd, one stationed at the stage during the Who, Jimi, Sly Stone, and Janis Joplin among others).
>>The societal earthquake happened between 1939 and 1969, where there is hardly one single thing in common between the generations. Compare a music festival in 1939 to Woodstock. Imagine the types of young people who would attend.
I dunno about that. There were “festivals” even in the 1920s. No “feature movie” and “soundtrack album” though. Saw an ad for one on the back of “Flapper” magazine from the 1920s encouraging drivers and picnickers to come in from out of state for a weekend event. That periodical allegedly had a circulation of 100,000 in its day.
And the 1930s had plenty of socialists/Communists congregating.
I’m reading a paperback by Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan’s basement tapes and he writes of the Communists/Socialists talking points behind the folk music movement. That stretches from the 1930s activism through the 1960s.
Supposedly one of the videotape crews filmed some of the performers at their hotel. I’m still waiting to see a copy someday (I’ve seen over an hour of the non-Jimi videotape footage).
The Who were not hippies and not into the hippie thing. Even the people from the Left coast found the “hippie” joiners to be an unsustainable lot (they could have a “free” shop if the numbers weren’t so large and the people so dependent). Hippies were like beatniks, the beats weren’t beatniks and the underground persons weren’t the “hippies” who bought the form and fashion of the era.
Even the Grateful Dead insisted on their payment (it was the Who and the Dead by my recall). The investors had to get cashiers checks drafted that weekend by an associate who opened the bank to draw up the checks).
There was a second stage behind the main stage where the performers played to one another. Here’s some footage of Jerry Garcia on that stage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld-g30MGJu4
There is but the festivals seem to have started to wane again. Coachella jumped the shark and I don't know how enjoyable it ever was but they booked a number of good old and newer names over the years.
There is a concert film that culled performances from 5 years of Coachella. I found it to be a mixed bag.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498900/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coachella_Festival_line-ups
I disliked much of the Woodstock lineup. As with others on this thread I am more interested in the bands on the Atlanta Pop Festival or even Texas Pop Festival.
Even The Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Festival was more interesting to me (Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Bo Diddley, Alice Cooper, The Doors, Plastic Ono Band...)
A number of name artists (Booker T., Otis Redding, etc.) went to Monterey Pop Festival with the agreement that they would not be paid for their appearance.
If they document it with a film and release an album, there is opportunity to make money on the back end. Plus the “exposure”.
But no, in this fragmented day and age, and a wide separation between the top earning entertainers and everyone else, it won’t have the same cultural impact.
Take away the film and soundtrack album from Woodstock and it’d be a footnote like so many of the other concerts of that era.
I never went to any of the big fests, but saw a lot of great acts in HS in Kiel Auditorium in St Louis and a small venue in Creve Coeur. I think my tinnitus was caused by all those shows.
Tinnitus plagues the performers as much as it does the audiences, it seems.
I don’t have “much” problem with it, but have experienced it from time to time myself.
Take a look at the book I wrote with Mark Stein, lead singer of Vanilla Fudge, called “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,”
There is a lot in there about how UN-liberal a lot of the artists were. There is still an unverified story about Abbie Hoffman climbing on stage with the Who and Pete Townsend smacking him with his guitar. Also see my chapter “A Steel Guitar Rocks the Iron Curtain” in “Seven Events that Made America America.” Both the book with Mark and the chapter have all sorts of interviews and new research about Woodstock, along with the great Doggett book, “You Say You Want a Revolution,” who is very critical of Woodstock from the left.
Much of my info came from a great piece by a lib/hippie who was there, and who was utterly disgusted by it. Check the end notes. It’s definitely worth reading.
I saw Hendrix in Minneapolis in 1968.
The ticket set me back three bucks, but I got to record the concert on my new portable cassette/player recorder.
Nobody seemed to mind that I was doing that.
Naturally, the tape tangled and broke within a few months, so I tossed it.
Mark was in Vanilla Fudge? Who knew!
Get off your knees and stop begging.........
The videotape from the stage at Woodstock shows (albeit glitchy and as aftermath) Townsend’s whacking of Hoffman. He butted the base of Hoffman’s neck with the neck of his guitar (with an upward thrust).
There is audio of the concert and you can hear it as well.
The Who called Woodstock the worst concert they ever had to play.
The MC5 played up being radicals (they were the band that played the Chicago 68 DNC convention protest, while the crowd was teased that it might be the Beatles or the Rolling Stones). Their manager founded the White Panthers. But the real radicals in New York called them out one night (in part, they weren’t feminist enough).
Here’s a link to a promo real from the MC5’s footage shot during the 68 DNC convention:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmnM-EBWZBM
Long Lost MC5 Footage! Democratic National Convention Riots - Chicago 1968
(Wayne Kramer)
The Eagles weren’t a band in ‘69. Neither was REO.
That’s a BS list.
What about The Clash? Only band that mattered.
LOL. It IS a really good section.
Stein is a much better singer than Steyn-—even today, at 60something, he can kill it.
We paid him and his band to do four songs for the “Rockin’ the Wall” soundtrack-—two originals (”We Are Survivors” and “Break it Down”) and two covers (”Ball of Confusion” and “People got to be Free.”) “Ball of Confusion” is awesome. I really thought it would kind of re-launch his career, it was that good.
Aerosmith was not yet a band in 1969. I wonder if your list is from the 1994 “Woodstock”.
Leftyloon Stephen Stills, in his famous comment “Man are you people tough-—three days!” or something like that, was airlifted out by helo right after the concert to a nice hotel.
That is the groups listed for the 1974 Ozark Music Festival I posted about in the prior post. There were 350k there and it was a big enough weekend for me.
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