Happy 50th Woodstock!

We watched the movie so you don’t have to

Our take on the best and the worst

Woodstock, as you may have already heard to an excessive degree by now, defined in some ways the entire baby boom generation. You know, three days of peace, love and understanding and all that jazz.

The truth is this: There were some 400,000 people who actually attended the event over three days in August 1969. But most of us experienced it through the documentary—and the soundtrack—that came out about six months after the event.

The music was all-in-all pretty great, and a lot of acts from Joe Cocker to The Who to Sly and the Family Stone to Santana and, of course, Jimi Hendrix, had star turns.

The documentary itself? If you’re as jaded and cynical as we are, the answer is “meh”; better at the time, in other words. There’s only so much you can take of watching people rolling around in the mud and traffic jams—and announcements about staying away from the brown acid. And while some bad performances were mercifully left on the cutting room floor, so were a few great ones. To find some acts that were unjustly left out of the original version of the film and album (and some that should have been left out), we sat through the recently re-released director’s cut and scoured the Internet. Here’s what we came up with.