40 Years After Why Are People Still Talking About Woodstock?
It was 40 years ago this week. On a hot August day, a beeping, blaring, boiling, bloated river of vehicles was inching—slower than sludge—along the New York Thruway. Just about everyone was heading to one place: a farmer's field in the rural, upstate town of Bethel.
If you had been there, you would have seen long-haired teens in tie-dyed T-shirts, wacky vests, or wildly striped pants. You would have seen college students and working people, mothers and fathers and kids. Their destination was a rock concert billed as The Woodstock Music and Art Fair: Three Days of Peace and Music. And they were willing to put up with the gigantic traffic jam because they thought that Woodstock was going to be the coolest concert ever.
When it was all over, the event had been exactly that—and much more. The music is just one reason why, 40 years later, millions of Americans are still talking about the Woodstock music festival.
Music, Rain, and Mud The festival began on Friday, Aug. 15, 1969. It featured more than 30 musical acts. Many were big stars—singers Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker, guitar hero Jimi Hendrix, funky bands such as Sly & the Family Stone, and Santana. Each day, the musicians played from afternoon till early the next morning. British rock band The Who began performing at 4 a.m. on Sunday and played the longest set—25 songs.
"It was an incredible lineup of music," remembers Susan Reynolds, who has edited a new book about the concert, Woodstock Revisited. Reynolds, who was 18 at the time, went to the concert with her brother, her sister, and her sister's boyfriend.
More amazing than the music, however, was the scene. The event planners had estimated that 50,000 people would show up. But by the time the first musician, Richie Havens, began singing on Friday afternoon, at least 100,000 people were already in the field. And they kept coming. When the concert ended, police estimated that as many as 400,000 people had come.
Very few of them were dry. Rain began falling on Friday afternoon. It fell for hours, long and hard. The fields around the stage became muddier and muddier. The rain kept coming, on and off, through much of the weekend.
Rain wasn't the only problem. The organizers of the concert had not prepared for the size of the crowd. There were few food stands, not much drinking water, and only a few hundred toilets.
As reports started coming from the concert, some predicted violence—even riots—by wet, hungry, angry concertgoers. On TV news shows, Americans saw pictures of the enormous rain-soaked audience—and they expected the worst.
But the worst never happened. People from nearby towns brought water and food. Just as important, almost everyone in the crowd took the difficulties in stride. The music was great, and everybody seemed to be having a good time. "We were un-policed and unprepared and we had horrible conditions—raining and thundering and lightning—and only 600 restrooms for 400,000 people," remembers Reynolds. "We chose to police ourselves."
A Country Divided by War, Race, and GenerationsThe previous years had been difficult ones in the United States.
- President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were killed in 1968. Many people were horrified.
- Thousands of U.S. troops were dying in a war in Vietnam that seemed to be going nowhere. Many people were angry.
- American cities erupted with race riots as the rage and frustration of many African Americans boiled over. Many people were afraid.
- Young people and their parents seemed to be at odds about almost everything—music, hair and clothing styles, politics, and culture. A powerful and vivid youth movement of hippies questioned authority and social values. Many people were shocked.
In some ways, the whole country seemed tipped upside down.
Peace, Love, and Harmony But Woodstock somehow gave people a different feeling. Despite the enormous problems the crowd and the nearby towns faced, the festival turned out to be a peaceful, happy event. Older people and younger people helped one another. Woodstock seemed to prove that no matter how big our differences were, Americans could find a way to have a good time together.
Consider the words of Lou Yank, who at the time was chief of police in the nearby town of Monticello. You might have expected him to complain about the concertgoers who disrupted his town, and many others, for those four days, But here's what he said: "Notwithstanding their personality, their dress, and their ideas, they were and they are the most courteous, considerate, and well-behaved group of kids I have ever been in contact with in my 24 years of police work."
Nearly half a million people got together in a field, and instead of fighting about things, they helped one another. More than anything else, that was what made the Woodstock festival something remarkable—something that people still want to talk about, 40 years later.
Links Today, the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts owns and preserves the historic site where the Woodstock festival took place.
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