Forget Lollapalooza, Coachella, Glastonbury, Wacken or Rock in Rio. If an alien landed on Earth wanting to discover the meaning of the term "music festival", what event photo would you show him? If the automatic answer isn't Woodstock, you probably haven't walked this planet in the last 50 years. "Landmark of the Counterculture", "Biggest Show on Earth" or "The Day Thousands of Cool Young People Decided to Show Up for a Free Show on a Farm", the festival held August 15-18, 1969 it went down in history as one of the most important and culturally impacting events of the 20th century. In three days of peace, love and music that defined a generation, the earth stopped - and freaked out. Exactly five decades later, with the surprising cancellation of the half-century-long edition of the world-changing festival, the question looms: could it be possible to make a new Woodstock, with the same or at least part of its original appeal and meaning, in fluid times? Internet and increasingly professional and media events, guided by the numbers of large corporations?
How the Dream Was Born:
Woodstock was born of the desire of a group of hippies who wanted to create an event as grand or bigger than the Monterey Pop Festival, when Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire and caused it to blaze. The head of the venture was Michael Lang, a young New York producer who, a year earlier, had promoted the successful Miami Pop Festival, which brought together 25,000 people. Struggling to find a suitable location in New York State, Lang turned to Max Yasgur, a Republican farmer and free speech advocate, who owns a 600-acre estate 70 km from Woodstock City. The idea was to charge $ 18 for a three-day ticket, $ 24 if purchased on the day - equivalent to $ 120 and $ 160 these days - bringing together a maximum of 50,000 people.
The unexpected that made history:
Due to budget constraints, the original Woodstock was released primarily by people only. Precisely for this reason the surprise of the organizers was the size of the audience that appeared on August 15, 1969, the first of three days of shows. About 400,000 hippies and supporters marched into the region, jamming traffic, tearing down fences and turning the hopeful profit festival into an unexpected free event. Inside the farm, there was a climate of peace, freedom, diversity. Drugs and sex were bush - and caught in the bush. Far from the judgmental eyes of family and society, young people could be as they were and do as they pleased, as long as they did not harm others. For three days, about half a million people experienced the aquarium-era utopia: a harmonious, revolutionary and essentially progressive society, free of what was meant by right (capitalism) and left (communism).
Woodstock's historic shows lined up promising and successful artists in rock and the world that revolved around it, from soul to folk. Psychedelia and peace messages were fuel in a genre that was entering adolescence. The first day of gigs, more Zen and with acoustic performances, had, among others, Richie Havens, Tim Hardin, Ravi Shankar and Joan Baez, who made the small wooden stage a colossal speech platform. Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, The Who and Jefferson Airplane made the blues jet amplified on the second day. The closing brought more historical performances by Joe Cocker, The Band, Johnny Winter, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Last onstage early in the morning with half the audience awake, Jimi Hendrix abused the distortion in an iconoclastic version of the American national anthem.
Not Everything Was Flower Power:
The gathering of so many legendary artists eclipsed serious logistical problems. On the first day, the Sweetwater group was stopped by police on their way to Woodstock and failed to open the festival. Several other artists were late. The rain gave no respite, and the Incredible String Band refused to play through the storm. On the second day, the Grateful Dead amplifiers failed in the middle of the show. Janis Joplin was not in her best condition, and on the closing day, after Joe Cocker's performance, a fresh heavy rain interrupted the festival for hours. Hendrix had to play in the early hours of the morning. The infrastructure was minimal enough to hold only 50,000 people: there was mud, lack of toilets, food and sanitary conditions in camps. Outside, chaotic traffic. The perrengues did not tarnish the dream. The happening happened, the festival became a movie, and the buzz generated by it served as a spring for the new generation and for the counterculture. The utopia of a new society, however, would be hit hard in the coming months, with the Hell's Angels murdering a man at the Altamont Festival - which made the event safe - during the Rolling Stones concert and the breakup of the Beatles. . Woodstock's accounts are numerous and often contradictory. Records at the time say a hundred people were arrested and there were no reports of incidents of violence. Other than at least one person would have died of an overdose, and a tractor would have crushed a person lying in his sleeping bag. And many witnesses describe the festival as a much more chaotic than emblematic experience, with rain, mud and drugs.
Woodstock 50 - Back to the Garden (2019)
Richie Havens 5:07 pm – 7:00 pm
Richie Havens 5:07 pm – 7:00 pm
Swami Satchidananda 7:10 pm – 7:20 pm
Sweetwater 7:30 pm – 8:10 pm
Bert Sommer 8:20 pm – 9:15 pm
Tim Hardin 9:20 pm – 9:45 pm
Ravi Shankar 10:00 pm – 10:35 pm
Melanie 10:50 pm – 11:20 pm
Arlo Guthrie 11:55 pm – 12:25 am
Joan Baez 12:55 am – 2:00 am
Quill 12:15 pm – 12:45 pm
Country Joe McDonald 1:00 pm – 1:30 pm
Santana 2:00 pm – 2:45 pm
John Sebastian 3:30 pm – 3:55 pm
Keef Hartley Band 4:45 pm – 5:30 pm
The Incredible String Band 6:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Canned Heat 7:30 pm – 8:30 pm
Mountain 9:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Grateful Dead 10:30 pm – 12:05 am
Creedence Clearwater Revival 12:30 am – 1:20 am
Janis Joplin with The Kozmic Blues Band 2:00 am – 3:00 am
Sly and the Family Stone 3:30 am – 4:20 am
The Who 5:00 am – 6:05 am
Jefferson Airplane 8:00 am – 9:40 am
Joe Cocker and The Grease Band 2:00 pm – 3:25 pm
Country Joe and the Fish 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Ten Years After 8:15 pm – 9:15 pm
The Band 10:00 pm – 10:50 pm
Johnny Winter 12:00 am – 1:05 am
Blood, Sweat & Tears 1:30 am – 2:30 am
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young 3:00 am – 4:00 am
Paul Butterfield Blues Band 6:00 am – 6:45 am
Sha Na Na 7:30 am – 8:00 am
Jimi Hendrix / Gypsy Sun & Rainbows 9:00 am – 11:10 am
BACK TO THE GARDEN is intended to let people hear the festival as it really happened.-
Producer Andy Zax says he, sound producer Brian Kehew and mastering engineer Dave Schultz avoided interfering with the tapes as much as possible in order to preserve their authenticity. “It’s not surprising that other producers’ first reaction to these tapes over the years has been ‘uh-oh,’ immediately followed by ‘we’ve gotta find a way to fix this.’ I'm not unsympathetic to that approach, but if there's a single overriding lesson that Brian Kehew and I have learned since we began working with the Woodstock tapes in 2005, it’s this: you can't fix them… That’s less grim than it seems, because once you’ve accepted the idea that there is no way to make these recordings sound slick, you realize that these tapes are the sonic equivalent of heirloom tomatoes — slightly imperfect, but delicious.”
Woodstock 50 - Back To The Garden [50th Anniversary Experience] (2019)
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