Woodstock Opens: 400,000 Gather for Peace and Music

Four hundred thousand people descended on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, over the weekend of August 15-18, 1969, for what was billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace and Music." They got rain, mud, inadequate food and sanitation, and some of the most legendary musical performances ever recorded. Woodstock became the defining cultural event of the 1960s counterculture and a permanent symbol of a generation's belief that the world could be remade through music and communal goodwill. The festival was originally planned for the town of Woodstock in Ulster County, then moved to Wallkill in Orange County when a site was secured, then moved again to Bethel after Wallkill's town board passed a law banning the event. Yasgur, a politically conservative dairy farmer, agreed to rent his 600-acre property for $75,000. The organizers, four young men in their twenties, had expected perhaps 50,000 attendees. When ten times that number materialized, the fences came down and the festival became free. Thirty-two acts performed over four days, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Hendrix's closing performance, a distorted, feedback-drenched solo rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" played at 9 AM on Monday morning to a crowd that had dwindled to roughly 30,000, became the festival's most enduring musical moment. Richie Havens improvised "Freedom" as his encore when he ran out of prepared material. Santana, largely unknown, played a set fueled by mescaline that launched their career. Three people died during the festival, two from drug overdoses and one from a tractor accident. Two babies were born. The lack of food, water, and medical facilities created conditions that could have produced a disaster, yet the crowd remained largely peaceful. Governor Nelson Rockefeller considered sending in the National Guard but was talked out of it. Rolling Stone later named Woodstock one of the 50 moments that changed rock and roll. The festival's mythology has only grown in the decades since, though attempts to recreate it, most notoriously Woodstock '99, have demonstrated that the original was a product of a specific cultural moment that could not be manufactured again.