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Woodstock was a music festival organized by four men in 1969 in upstate New York. The original budget was $500,000, but the event ended up being free for over 500,000 visitors due to a lack of ticket sales. The festival was held on a farmer’s clover field and featured famous musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. Despite a lack of resources, the community spirit engendered by the music was remembered for years after the event.
What began as a fundraising proposal for a recording studio has ended up being a cultural touchstone for an entire generation. In 1969, four men, John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang, met in a New York City skyscraper to discuss plans for an arts and music festival to be held in a rural area of upstate New York called Woodstock. Many famous musicians, such as Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison and others already lived in the Woodstock area, creating a bohemian atmosphere perfect for a large-scale counterculture event.
The four men formed a business partnership, Woodstock Ventures, with Roberts and Rosenman handling the finances, leaving Kornfeld and Lang to organize artists and musicians. The original budget for the three-day Woodstock festival was $500,000 (USD), with an estimated attendance of 100,000 paying customers. This would be the first of many miscalculations regarding Woodstock. The second problem arose when word of the proposed festival reached the ears of the Woodstock City Council.
The city of Woodstock was generally supportive of artists seeking refuge there, but the idea of thousands descending on their city simply wasn’t appealing. There simply weren’t suitable venues to hold the event in Woodstock and the city’s infrastructure was not going to support the surge in visitors. Woodstock’s promoters found an industrial park 70 miles away from Woodstock that would provide essential services and easy access to a major highway, but Lang and Kornfeld felt the site was too sterile and corporate for a true counterculture event.
Eventually, a local farmer named Max Yasgur agreed to lease several hundred acres of land to Woodstock developers, but at a significantly higher rate than originally suggested. Yasgur had learned of the difficulties developers faced in the city of Woodstock, so he knew that his rights to the land were extremely valuable. Yasgur’s farm was located near the town of Bethel, 70 miles from Woodstock.
As a potential venue for music, Yasgur’s clover field offered some acoustic advantages. The land was vaguely bowl-shaped, with a lake nearby. Finally, the promoters of Woodstock had a place to hold their festival, which was billed as “Three Days of Peace and Music” or “An Aquarian Exposition”.
Although several thousand tickets were pre-sold, only a handful of ticket booths arrived in time for the festival itself. The subsequent crush of potential ticket buyers soon overwhelmed the staff. Many people began climbing over the security barriers, which prompted promoters to abandon the idea of ticket sales altogether to avoid a riot. Woodstock would become a financial bloodbath for promoters, but a totally free event for over 500,000 visitors. Food, sanitation and medical supplies would be desperately scarce, but the community spirit engendered by the music would be remembered for years after the event.
Woodstock’s roster of talent looked like a Who’s Who of late 1960s pop, folk, and rock musicians. Bands like The Who, Jefferson Airplane and The Band have played alongside unknowns like Sweetwater and Melanie. Folk singer Richie Havens delivered a three-hour program as concert promoters frantically waited for more artists to arrive.
The first day was dedicated to folk singers, with the notable exception of Sly and the Family Stone. Subsequent performances, which would run from dusk to dawn, included retro rockers ShaNaNa and a very nervous rookie trio called Crosby, Stills and Nash. Guitar legend Jimi Hendrix was the final performer, infamously playing his rendition of the Star Spangled Banner as the sun rose over the exhausted crowd.
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