Woodstock Festival 69

The Woodstock Music and Art Festival was a rock music festival at Max Yasgurs 600 acre (2.4km2) dairy farm in town of Bethel, New York between 15 August and 18 August 1969. It might be the most famous rock concert and festival ever held. For many, it showed the counterculture of the 1960s and the Hippie movement.

Many of the most famous musicians at the time showed up during the weekend, as can be seen in a 1970 movie called Woodstock. Joni Mitchells song Woodstock, about the event, also became a major hit song for Crosby, Stills, and Nash & Young. In recent years, a number of attempts were made to recreate it, but the original Woodstock69 has proven to be legendary.

The Festival was Called Woodstock, because Woodstock Ventures an investment company had put money into the concert, it was supposed to be in the town of Wallkill, in Ulster County; but the town would not give a place for such a large event, because they thought that over a million people would come. A place was found in the town of Bethel, Max Yasgur let the concert happen on the familys dairy farm.

Although the show was planned for as many as 200.000 fans, over 400.000 came; most of these did not pay to get in. The roads to the concert were jammed with traffic. People left their cars and walked for miles to get the concert area. The weekend was rainy and overcrowded, and fans shared food, alcoholic drinks, and drugs. Some

people who lived there, including those at nearby Camp Ma-Ho-Ge, gave blankets and food to some concert-goers. After two days of rain, there was a deep mud in many places. There was almost no water for washing, and not enough toilets. Many of the concert-goers had brought small tents to sleep in; some of these turned into piles of cloth and mud. Even though may not have been the most comfortable place, the crowd kept up kindness and good cheer among themselves. As the half-million people in the audience became aware of this, a warm feeling of friendship spread to everyone.

The festival did not make any money at first, but from the later record sales and the famous movie, it did make money.

Some of the music stars of Woodstock were The Who and Jimi Hendrix. Because of arguments about getting paid, The Who and Jimi Hendrix stage until about 4:00 in the morning. One part of The Whos show was the song See Me, Feel Me, when the sun rose just as lead singer Roger Daltrey started to sing the chorus. When The Who was still playing, Abbie Hoffman jumped to stage stopping the show, and tried to stir up the crowd with yippie slogans, but he was knocked off the stage by the guitar of the bands leader, Pete Townshend, to the delight of the audience. At the end of The

Who's set, Townshend slammed his guitar into the stage and threw it into the crowd. This helped set up The Who as superstars, and caused their album Tommy to sell multi-platinum.

Jimi Hendrix had a big show with the songs he played, including a new version of "The Star Spangled Banner". The song caused some disagreements, because the Vietnam War was going on, and the sounds that Hendrix made with his guitar were like the sounds of the violence of the war. Fans remember these two acts as some of the greatest in rock history, although both The Who and Hendrix thought of their performances as not the best.

Woodstock was put on by Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman. Roberts was the financer, backed by a trust fund; his friend Rosenman, a graduate of Yale Law, was an amateur guitarist. Their friends were Kornfeld, vicepresident at Capitol Records, and Michael Lang. Lang was a lighthearted hippie who had owned a head shop, and hoped to build a studio in the Woodstock area to serve singers such as Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, who had homes nearby. When Lang and Kornfeld told the idea to Rosenman and Roberts, Rosenman got the idea of a rock concert with the same musicians. They picked the slogan "Three Days of Peace and Music". They hired artist Arnold Skolnick to design the artwork for the poster with the bird. In 1997, the concert place and 1,400 surrounding acres were bought by Alan Gerry, and have become the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. It opened on July 1 2006 with the New York Philharmonic playing. On August 13 2006, Crosby Stills Nash & Young amazed 16,000 fans at the new Center -- exactly 37 years after they played at Woodstock.