Woodstock
Led Zeppelin, The Doors and Jeff Beck turned it down; The Who demanded payment upfront in cash… Fifty years on, read 50 things you didn’t know about mother of all rock festivals.
Fifty years ago, on the weekend of August 15-18, 1969, nearly half a million people descended on Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, upstate New York to attend the Aquarian Exposition that was the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, with a heaven-sent line-up that included Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Santana, Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Jefferson Airplane. It was the decade’s ultimate counterculture love-in. Some events, such as Hendrix’s iconic bastardisation of The Star Spangled Banner, or The Who uncorking See Me, Feel Me just as the sun rose on the third morning, are firmly etched in rock lore. But, half a century after the fact, how much do you really know about the mother of all festivals? Here’s all you need and more.
1 Woodstock was sponsored by four men – John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang – and ultimately cost more than $2.4 million. The eldest of the four was 26.
2 Heir to a drugstore and toothpaste manufacturing fortune, John Roberts paid for the event via a multimillion-dollar trust fund and a lieutenant’s commission in the army. He had only ever seen one rock concert: the Beach Boys.
3 Woodstock was originally intended as a profitmaking venture. It became a free festival only when it became apparent that it was attracting hundreds of thousands more people than the organisers had prepared for. The final straw was when the fence was torn down by desperate groups of ticketless fans.
4 Woodstock concert tickets went on sale at $6 a day (and were due to sell for $8 on the gate), while three-day advance tickets were priced at $18. The price at the gate was set at $24.
5 The festival took six months of preparation. An estimated $50,000 was reportedly paid to rent the site, on around 600 acres of Max Yasgur’s farm.
6 Soon after the event, Yasgur revealed to Life magazine the details of a “deal” he’d made with promoter Lang. “If anything went wrong, I was going
to give him a crew cut. If everything was okay, I was going to let my hair grow long. I guess he won the bet, but I’m so bald I’ll never be able to pay it off.”
7 Yasgur (who had only three fingers on his right hand) had studied real estate law at NYU before moving back to the family farm in the 1940s. At the time of Woodstock, he was the biggest milk producer in Sullivan County.
8 Although the famous Woodstock logo – designed by artist Arnold Skolnick – featured a dove perched on the neck of a blue and green cartoon guitar, the originally design had a catbird sitting atop a flute; Skolnick was a major jazz head.
9 A Woodstock ‘warm-up’ festival took place on August 7 on the main stage as it was still being constructed. Boston rockers Quill, who also played the real festival, opened the show.
10 The Woodstock sound system was engineered by Bill Hanley, a sonic innovator and proud recipient of a prestigious Parnelli Award. Hanley built special speaker columns on the hills and set up 16 loudspeaker arrays in a square platform going up to the hill on 70-foot towers. “We set it all up for 150,000 to 200,000 people,” he recalled. “Of course, 500,000 showed up.”
11 Top audio equipment manufacturers Altec designed up to 15 marine ply speaker cabinets, six feet tall, four feet deep and a yard wide, weighing around half a ton each. Each woofer held four 15-inch speakers. The tweeters were made up of four two-cell and two 10-cell Altec horns. Years later, this set-up system became known as the ‘Woodstock Bins’.
12 To help cope with the unprecedented numbers attending, 346 off-duty New York City policemen were drafted in at $50 per day each, along with 100 local sheriffs, several hundred State Troopers and deputies from 12 counties.
13 There was an average wait of two hours to make a phone call. On the first day alone, over half a million long-distance calls were made.
14 The traffic jam on the main road leading to the site was 17 miles long. The Washington Post reported the hippie trail as “the most patient traffic jam” the Catskills had ever seen. Initial attendance figures were estimated at 60,000, but more than 400,000 people actually attended, while a further 250,000 never made it to the site.
15 Given the volume of traffic, it took an insane eight hours for commuters to drive the 98 miles from New York City to Bethel. After leaving their cars due to the conditions, festival-goers walked an average of 15 miles each to reach the site.
16 A whopping 1,300lbs of food was brought into the site by helicopter. Over 500,000 hamburgers and hot dogs were chomped on the first day of the festival, costing one dollar each.
17 Ever ready for an emergency, the Women’s Group of the Jewish Community Centre of Monticello prepared 30,000 sandwiches for festival punters. They were handed out by the Sisters of the Convent Of St. Thomas.
18 As a guide to the cost of living in 1969, a loaf of bread cost 20 cents, a gallon of petrol was 30 cents and a new car approximately $2,000. The average income for a single American was $6,500, and the average cost of new house was $40,000.
19 The minimum hourly wage paid to workers preparing the festival site was a measly $1.60. Santana’s hourly fee, on the other hand (based on their 45-minute set), was $2,000.
20 The going rate for acid and mescaline was $4. It’s estimated that more than 400 festival-goers partook of the notorious ‘brown acid’ (legendary radio DJ Wavy Gravy took to the stage to warn of bad trips off it). A total of 33 people were arrested for various drug offences. 21 One teenager was suspected of having the largest supply of LSD at Woodstock, and the acid he was selling was responsible for many an unpleasant trip. The Washington Post observed that “the drug was said to be available at below market prices… and that the LSD was actually strychnine or rat poison.”
22 Political and social activist Abbie Hoffman persuaded Woodstock producers to donate $10,000 to his Yippies (the Youth International Party) to fund various community projects. He’d apparently threatened to disrupt the festival if they’d refused.
23 At exactly 5:07pm on Friday, August 15, Richie Havens opened the festival with
Minstrel From Gault. His song Freedom was improvised on the spot. Called back for so many encores that he simply ran out of songs, Havens picked up his guitar and started singing, taking lyrics from the old spiritual staple Sometimes I Feel Like
A Motherless Child. 24 Only three female artists performed solo at Woodstock: Janis Joplin, Joan Baez and Melanie. Joni Mitchell was slated to appear, but was convinced by her manager that it was a better career move to appear on Monday’s The Dick Cavett Show rather than “sit around in a field with 500 people”. She has since admitted it was one of the biggest regrets of her life.
25 The Grateful Dead’s set was beleaguered by technical problems, including a “faulty electrical ground”. Both Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir experienced shocks every time they touched their guitars. The Dead called Woodstock their worst ever performance, and they were left out of Michael Wadleigh’s subsequent movie. 26 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young played only their second ever live gig at Woodstock. Stephen Stills admitted to the crowd that “we’re scared shitless”. Young, meanwhile, refused to be filmed for the event, saying the cameras were a distraction. “Woodstock was a bullshit gig,” he told biographer Jimmy McDonough. “Everybody was on this Hollywood trip with the fuckin’ cameras.”
27 The Who, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead all refused to play on the Saturday night until they were paid in advance in cash. A local bank manager, Charlie Prince, put up the money at the last minute.
28 Of the top earners, Jefferson Airplane were paid $12,000, Creedence Clearwater Revival $11,500, The Who $11,200 and the Grateful Dead $7,500.
29 Ex-Lovin’ Spoonful man John Sebastian wasn’t scheduled to appear. While having 30 Unrecognised Melanie wasn’t by even Woodstock issued a performer’s officials, pass. show Before her driving she was licence allowed and on sing stage, Beautiful she had People to as proof of identity.
31 With her husband imprisoned for resisting an army draft, Joan Baez sang the redneckbaiting Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man with Jeffrey Shurtleff, who dedicated it to then Governor of California and keen draft advocate Ronald Reagan.
32 Eighteen doctors and 36 nurses treated 5,162 festival patients, according to a Health Department report released in October 1969. The report listed 797 documented cases of drug abuse.
33 Although there were two reported births at Woodstock, neither of them were recorded in the festival medical tent. However, Health Department officials were told of eight miscarriages.
34 Three deaths occurred at the festival: two died from drug overdoses, while the other, 17-year-old Raymond Mizak, died in his sleeping bag when he was run over by a tractor. The driver was
never identified and never charged. A Sullivan County grand jury later declared there wasn’t enough evidence to indict anyone.
35 Of the other two deaths, one was an 18-year-old Marine on leave. He’d served in Vietnam and had emerged from the war unscathed.
36 Final act Jimi Hendrix was scheduled to begin at midnight on the Sunday, but didn’t take the stage until 9am on Monday, August 18. His two-hour set was delivered to a dwindling audience of between 30,000 and 80,000. Halfway through Red House, Hendrix’s high E-string broke, so he finished the song with just five strings.
37 Hendrix, whose contract stipulated that no act could follow him, was the highest earner at Woodstock, receiving $32,000. Woodstock Ventures spent a total of $180,000 on artist fees.
38 Promoter Michael Lang admitted that his original idea was to have country cowboy Roy Rogers close Woodstock with his signature hit Happy Trails.
39 Several acts were unable to honour their invitation to play Woodstock. With particularly bad timing, the Jeff Beck Group had broken up just weeks beforehand. Iron Butterfly were stranded at the airport. They might still have made it, had their fuming manager not demanded helicopters and special transport arrangements to the site. The band were promptly wired back via Western Union and told to “get lost”.
40 The Beatles turned down the invitation to appear, John Lennon saying he couldn’t get them all together. He did offer to play with his Plastic Ono Band, but the promoters turned him down. Other declined invitations came back from Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Bob Dylan, the Moody Blues, Jethro Tull and The Byrds.
41 Perhaps the most regretted decline came from the unfortunate Tommy James & The Shondells. Misinformed about the size and scope of Woodstock, they turned it down immediately. “We could have just kicked ourselves,” James rued later. “We were in Hawaii and my secretary called and said: ‘Yeah, listen, there’s this pig farmer in upstate New York that wants you to play in his field.’ That’s how it was put to me. So we passed, and we realised what we’d missed a couple of days later.”
42 Four months after Woodstock, Max Yasgur was sued by his neighbours for property damage supposedly caused by festival-goers. The damage to his own property was far worse though, and a year later he was awarded a $50,000 settlement.
43 Less than two years later, he sold the farm. In 1973 he died of a heart attack, aged 53.
Rolling Stone accorded him a full-page obituary, one of the few non-musicians to receive such a tribute.
44 Michael Wadleigh’s acclaimed documentary film, Woodstock, edited by Thelma Schoonmaker and one Martin Scorsese, was released in 1970. It won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
45 The 27-year-old Wadleigh was a Columbia University dropout who had given up neurology to become a filmmaker. At Woodstock he shot 315,000 feet of film.
46 Wadleigh went on to make 1974’s Janis, a rock doc on Janis Joplin, featuring performance footage of her bands Big Brother And The Holding Company, Kosmic Blues Band and the Full Tilt Boogie Band.
47 In early 1970, an investigation by the State Attorney General’s office ended with Woodstock Ventures being forced to make refunds on 12,000-18,000 tickets bought by people who were unable to attend the festival due to the roads being closed.
48 A total of 80 lawsuits were filed after the concert. In one instance, the filmmakers and distributors were sued by the man who appeared in the film being interviewed while he was cleaning the Port-O-San portable toilets. The grounds for his complaint? Mental anguish, embarrassment, public ridicule and invasion of privacy.
49 During Neil Young’s 1979 US tour, announcements from the original Woodstock festival were broadcast in between the songs, including the one about “brown acid”. This bizarre scenario is captured in Young’s Rust Never Sleeps concert film.
50 In 1996, US billionaire Alan Gerry (once listed by Forbes magazine among the 300 richest Americans) reportedly forked out $1m for the 73.5-acre natural amphitheatre section of the Woodstock site.