The most famous festival in history was not held in Woodstock, nearly bankrupted its organisers, and — though it had been billed as "three days of peace and music" from the outset — became a free-for-all only because the fences were never finished. In August 1969, on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York — a good sixty-five kilometres from the town of Woodstock itself — around 400,000 people converged on a site built for a fraction of that number, and the result was declared a disaster area, a generational miracle, or both, depending on which end of the muddy field you stood in.
The venture began as a business plan. Four young men — promoters Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld, and investors John Roberts and Joel Rosenman — formed Woodstock Ventures to stage a profit-making festival that would also fund a recording studio near Woodstock, where Bob Dylan and the Band had settled. The original site was an industrial park in Wallkill, New York, but in July 1969, barely a month before the show, the town passed a law effectively banning it. Salvation came from a conservative dairy farmer named Max Yasgur, who leased his sloping alfalfa field in Bethel and defended the longhairs to his hostile neighbours; a sign reading "Stop Max's Hippy Music Festival" appeared locally, and Yasgur went ahead anyway.
The fence that saved the festival
Losing the site cost a month of construction time, and the crew faced a brutal choice: finish the stage or finish the fences and ticket booths. They chose the stage. By the time the crowds began streaming in — many days early — there was simply no way to make anyone pay. The organisers bowed to arithmetic and announced from the stage that it was now a free concert. Roughly 186,000 tickets had been sold in advance at eighteen dollars for three days; perhaps double that number ultimately arrived, jamming the New York State Thruway in what was reported as one of the worst traffic jams in American history. Performers had to be shuttled in by helicopter, and food, water and medical supplies followed the same way, with the US Army lending aircraft.
What followed was, by any municipal standard, chaos: rain turned the field to a bog, food ran out, and the sound system fought thunderstorms. Yet the feared catastrophe never came. Two people died — one from an overdose, one run over by a tractor while asleep under a sleeping bag — remarkably few for a temporary city of 400,000, and the enduring memory became cooperation: the Hog Farm commune serving free food, locals handing sandwiches over fences, announcements about bad acid delivered gently from the stage.
The music itself ran hopelessly late and gloriously long. Richie Havens opened on Friday and improvised "Freedom" when told to keep playing. Joe Cocker reinvented "With a Little Help from My Friends"; Sly and the Family Stone detonated the small hours; Creedence, the Who and Janis Joplin played to the sleeping and the transported. And the festival's most iconic moment came when almost everyone had gone: Jimi Hendrix, closing on Monday morning to a field of perhaps 30,000 stragglers, tore the American national anthem into feedback and bomb-fall — the sound of 1969 arguing with itself. Among the famous absentees: Dylan himself, the Beatles, and Led Zeppelin, while Joni Mitchell, kept away by a television booking, wrote the anthem "Woodstock" from Graham Nash's descriptions.
The bill
Woodstock Ventures ended the weekend more than a million dollars in debt, and lawsuits — reportedly dozens of them — rained down for years. The rescue came from the movies: the 1970 documentary Woodstock, directed by Michael Wadleigh and edited in part by a young Martin Scorsese, won the Academy Award for best documentary and earned the fortune the festival never did, though it took roughly a decade for the partners to climb back to zero. The brand proved durable and cursed in equal measure: the 1994 anniversary festival was a muddy success, while Woodstock '99 collapsed into fires and violence, and a fiftieth-anniversary event in 2019 was cancelled outright.
Max Yasgur, who died in 1973, told the crowd from the stage that they had proved "half a million kids can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music". That was the accounting that stuck. The festival lost money on every ticket it never sold — and bought a generation its founding myth at the bargain price of one ruined alfalfa field.
Quiz nuggets
- Woodstock was held on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, in August 1969 — about 65 km from the town of Woodstock.
- The original host town, Wallkill, effectively banned the festival a month beforehand.
- Unfinished fences forced organisers to declare Woodstock a free concert; around 400,000 people came.
- Jimi Hendrix closed the festival on Monday morning, playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" to a thinned-out crowd.
- The 1970 Woodstock documentary won an Oscar and eventually repaid the festival's seven-figure debts.