Woodstock

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Woodstock
Promotional poster designed by Arnold Skolnick; dove on guitar originally resembled a catbird perched on a guitar.
Genre	Rock and folk, including blues rock, folk rock, jazz fusion, hard rock, latin rock, psychedelic rock
Dates	Scheduled: August 15–17, 1969 Actual: August 15–18, 1969
Location(s)	Bethel, White Lake, New York, U.S. (original)
Years active	1969 (original) 49 years ago Namesake events: 1979, 1989, 1994, 1999, 2009, 2019
Founded by	Artie Kornfeld Michael Lang John P. Roberts Joel Rosenman Woodstock Ventures
Attendance	400,000 (estimate)
Website	www.woodstock.com

Bethel 

Location in the United States

 

Max Yasgur's
farm 

Location in New York

 

Woodstock was a music festival held between August 15–18, 1969, which attracted an audience of more than 400,000. Billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music", it was held at Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm near White Lake in Bethel, New York, 43 miles (70 km) southwest of Woodstock.

Over the sometimes rainy weekend, 32 acts performed outdoors. It is widely regarded as a pivotal moment in popular music history, as well as the definitive nexus for the larger counterculture generation. Rolling Stone listed it as number 19 of the 50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll.

The event was captured in the Academy Award-winning 1970 documentary film Woodstock, an accompanying soundtrack album, and Joni Mitchell's song "Woodstock", which commemorated the event and became a major hit for both Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Matthews Southern Comfort. Joni Mitchell said, "Woodstock was a spark of beauty" where half-a-million kids "saw that they were part of a greater organism". In 2017, the festival site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Planning and preparation

Woodstock was initiated through the efforts of Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, Joel Rosenman, and John P. Roberts. Roberts and Rosenman financed the project. Lang had some experience as a promoter, having co-organized a festival on the East Coast the prior year, the Miami Pop Festival, where an estimated 25,000 people attended the two-day event. 

Early in 1969, Roberts and Rosenman were New York City entrepreneurs, in the process of building Media Sound, a large audio recording studio complex in Manhattan. Lang and Kornfeld's lawyer, Miles Lourie, who had done legal work on the Media Sound project, suggested that they contact Roberts and Rosenman about financing a similar, but much smaller, studio Kornfeld and Lang hoped to build in Woodstock, New York. Unpersuaded by this Studio-in-the-Woods proposal, Roberts and Rosenman counter-proposed a concert featuring the kind of artists known to frequent the Woodstock area (such as Bob Dylan and The Band). Kornfeld and Lang agreed to the new plan, and Woodstock Ventures was formed in January 1969. The company offices were located in an oddly decorated floor of 47 West 57th Street in Manhattan. Burt Cohen, and his design group, Curtain Call Productions, oversaw the psychedelic transformation of the office.

From the start, there were differences in approach among the four: Roberts was disciplined and knew what was needed for the venture to succeed, while the laid-back Lang saw Woodstock as a new, "relaxed" way of bringing entrepreneurs together. When Lang was unable to find a site for the concert, Roberts and Rosenman, growing increasingly concerned, took to the road and eventually came up with a venue. Similar differences about financial discipline made Roberts and Rosenman wonder whether to pull the plug or to continue pumping money into the project.

In April 1969, Creedence Clearwater Revival became the first act to sign a contract for the event, agreeing to play for $10,000 (equivalent to $68,000 today). The promoters had experienced difficulty landing big-name groups prior to Creedence committing to play. Creedence drummer Doug Clifford later commented, "Once Creedence signed, everyone else jumped in line and all the other big acts came on." Given their 3 a.m. start time and omission from the Woodstock film (at Creedence frontman John Fogerty's insistence), Creedence members have expressed bitterness over their experiences regarding the festival.

Woodstock was designed as a profit-making venture. It became a "free concert" only after the event drew hundreds of thousands more people than the organizers had prepared for. Tickets for the three-day event cost $18 in advance and $24 at the gate (equivalent to about $120 and $160 today). Ticket sales were limited to record stores in the greater New York City area, or by mail via a post office box at the Radio City Station Post Office located in Midtown Manhattan. Around 186,000 advance tickets were sold, and the organizers anticipated approximately 200,000 festival-goers would turn up.

Selection of the venue

The original venue plan was for the festival to take place in Wallkill, New York, possibly near the proposed recording studio site owned by Alexander Tapooz. After local residents quickly shot down that idea, Lang and Kornfeld thought they had found another possible location in Saugerties, New York. But they had misunderstood, as the landowner's attorney made clear, in a brief meeting with Roberts and Rosenman. Growing alarmed at the lack of progress, Roberts and Rosenman took over the search for a venue, and discovered the 300-acre (0.47 sq mi; 1.2 km²) Mills Industrial Park (41.648088°N 74.179751°W) in the town of Wallkill, New York, which Woodstock Ventures leased for $10,000 (equivalent to $68,000 today) in the Spring of 1969. Town officials were assured that no more than 50,000 would attend. Town residents immediately opposed the project. In early July, the Town Board passed a law requiring a permit for any gathering over 5,000 people. On July 15, 1969, the Wallkill Zoning Board of Appeals officially banned the concert on the basis that the planned portable toilets would not meet town code. Reports of the ban, however, turned out to be a publicity bonanza for the festival.

Max Yasgur's dairy farm in 1968

 

In his 2007 book Taking Woodstock, Elliot Tiber relates that he offered to host the event on his 15-acre (650,000 sq ft; 61,000 m²) motel grounds, and had a permit for such an event. He claims to have introduced the promoters to dairy farmer Max Yasgur. Lang, however, disputes Tiber's account and says that Tiber introduced him to a realtor, who drove him to Yasgur's farm without Tiber. Sam Yasgur, Max's son, agrees with Lang's account. Yasgur's land formed a natural bowl sloping down to Filippini Pond on the land's north side. The stage would be set up at the bottom of the hill with Filippini Pond forming a backdrop. The pond would become a popular skinny dipping destination.

The organizers once again told Bethel authorities they expected no more than 50,000 people.

Despite resident opposition and signs proclaiming, "Buy No Milk. Stop Max's Hippy Music Festival", Bethel Town Attorney Frederick W. V. Schadt and building inspector Donald Clark approved the permits, but the Bethel Town Board refused to issue them formally. Clark was ordered to post stop-work orders. 

The late change in venue did not give the festival organizers enough time to prepare. At a meeting three days before the event, organizers felt they had two options: one was to complete the fencing and ticket booths, without which the promoters would lose any profit or go into debt; the other option involved putting their remaining available resources into building the stage, without which the promoters feared they would have a disappointed and disgruntled audience. When the audience began arriving by the tens of thousands the next day, the Wednesday before the weekend, the decision was made for them. Those without tickets simply walked through gaps in the fences, and the organizers were forced to make the event free of charge. Though the festival left its promoters nearly bankrupt, their ownership of the film and recording rights more than compensated for the losses after the release of the hit documentary film Woodstock in March 1970.

Festival

Woodstock festival site with the stage

 

Part of the crowd on the first day of the festival

 

The influx of attendees to the rural concert site in Bethel created a massive traffic jam. Fearing chaos as thousands began descending on the community, Bethel did not enforce its codes. Eventually, announcements on radio stations as far away as WNEW-FM in Manhattan and descriptions of the traffic jams on television news discouraged people from setting off to the festival. Arlo Guthrie made an announcement that was included in the film saying that the New York State Thruway was closed. The director of the Woodstock museum discussed below said this never occurred. To add to the problems and difficulty in dealing with the large crowds, recent rains had caused muddy roads and fields. The facilities were not equipped to provide sanitation or first aid for the number of people attending; hundreds of thousands found themselves in a struggle against bad weather, food shortages, and poor sanitation.

On the morning of Sunday, August 17, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller called festival organizer John Roberts and told him he was thinking of ordering 10,000 New York State National Guard troops to the festival. Roberts was successful in persuading Rockefeller not to do this. Sullivan County declared a state of emergency. During the festival, personnel from nearby Stewart Air Force Base assisted in helping to ensure order and airlifting performers in and out of the concert venue.

Jimi Hendrix was the last act to perform at the festival. Because of the rain delays that Sunday, when Hendrix finally took the stage it was 8:30 Monday morning. The audience, which had peaked at an estimated 400,000 during the festival, was now reduced to about 30,000 by that point; many of them merely waited to catch a glimpse of Hendrix before leaving during his performance.

Hendrix and his new band, Gypsy Sun and Rainbows (introduced as The Experience, but corrected by Hendrix) performed a two-hour set. His psychedelic rendition of the U.S. national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner" occurred about three-quarters into the set (after which he segued into "Purple Haze"). The song would become "part of the sixties Zeitgeist" as it was captured forever in the Woodstock film; Hendrix's image performing this number wearing a blue-beaded white leather jacket with fringe and a red head scarf has since been regarded as a defining moment of the 1960s.

We were ready to rock out and we waited and waited and finally it was our turn ... there were a half million people asleep. These people were out. It was sort of like a painting of a Dante scene, just bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud. And this is the moment I will never forget as long as I live: A quarter mile away in the darkness, on the other edge of this bowl, there was some guy flicking his Bic, and in the night I hear, 'Don't worry about it, John. We're with you.' I played the rest of the show for that guy. —John Fogerty recalling Creedence Clearwater Revival's 3:30 am start time at Woodstock

Although the festival was remarkably peaceful given the number of people and the conditions involved, there were two recorded fatalities: one from insulin usage, and another caused in an accident when a tractor ran over an attendee sleeping in a nearby hayfield. There also were two births recorded at the event (one in a car caught in traffic and another in a hospital after an airlift by helicopter) and four miscarriages. Oral testimony in the film supports the overdose and run-over deaths and at least one birth, along with many logistical headaches.

Yet, in tune with the idealistic hopes of the 1960s, Woodstock satisfied most attendees. There was a sense of social harmony, which, with the quality of music, and the overwhelming mass of people, many sporting bohemian dress, behavior, and attitudes, helped to make it one of the enduring events of the century.

After the concert, Max Yasgur, who owned the site of the event, saw it as a victory of peace and love. He spoke of how nearly half a million people filled with potential for disaster, riot, looting, and catastrophe spent the three days with music and peace on their minds. He stated, "If we join them, we can turn those adversities that are the problems of America today into a hope for a brighter and more peaceful future ... "

Sound

Joe Cocker performs in front of huge lighting- and soundtowers

 

Sound for the concert was engineered by sound engineer Bill Hanley. "It worked very well," he says of the event. "I built special speaker columns on the hills and had 16 loudspeaker arrays in a square platform going up to the hill on 70-foot [21 m] towers. We set it up for 150,000 to 200,000 people. Of course, 500,000 showed up." ALTEC designed marine plywood cabinets that weighed half a ton apiece and stood 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, almost 4 feet (1.2 m) deep, and 3 feet (0.91 m) wide. Each of these enclosures carried four 15-inch (380 mm) JBL D140 loudspeakers. The tweeters consisted of 4×2-Cell & 2×10-Cell Altec Horns. Behind the stage were three transformers providing 2,000 amperes of current to power the amplification setup. For many years this system was collectively referred to as the Woodstock Bins.

Lighting

Lighting for the concert was engineered by lighting designer and technical director E.H. Beresford "Chip" Monck. Monck was hired to plan and build the staging and lighting, ten weeks of work for which he was paid $7,000 (equivalent to $48,000 today). Much of his plan had to be scrapped when the promoters were not allowed to use the original location in Wallkill, New York. The stage roof that was constructed in the shorter time available was not able to support the lighting that had been rented, which wound up sitting unused underneath the stage. The only light on the stage was from spotlights.

Monck used just twelve 1300 Watt Super Trouper-follow spots rigged on four towers around the stage. Each follow spot weighed 600 pounds (270 kg) and were operated by Spotlight operators, who had to climb up on the top of the 60-foot-high (18 m) lighting towers.

Monck also was drafted just before the concert started as the master of ceremonies when Michael Lang noticed that they had forgotten to hire one. He can be heard (and seen) in recordings of Woodstock making the stage announcements, including requests to "stay off the towers" and the warning about the "brown acid".

Performing artists

Thirty-two acts performed over the course of the four days:

Friday, August 15 – Saturday, August 16

Artist	Time	Notes
Richie Havens	5:07 pm – 7:00 pm	Was moved up to the opening performance slot after Sweetwater were stopped by police en route to the festival and other artists were delayed on the freeway.
Swami Satchidananda	7:10 pm – 7:20 pm	Gave the opening speech/invocation for the festival.
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	Played through the rain.
Melanie	10:50 pm – 11:20 pm	Sent onstage for an unscheduled performance after the Incredible String Band declined to perform during the rainstorm.
Arlo Guthrie	11:55 pm – 12:25 am
Joan Baez	12:55 am – 2:00 am	Was six months pregnant at the time.

Saturday, August 16 – Sunday, August 17

Artist	Time	Notes
Quill	12:15 pm – 12:45 pm
Country Joe McDonald	1:00 pm – 1:30 pm	Brought in for an unscheduled emergency solo performance when Santana were not yet ready to take the stage. Joe performed again with The Fish the following day.
Santana	2:00 pm – 2:45 pm	Aged 20, Michael Shrieve, the band's drummer, was the youngest musician to play at the festival.
John Sebastian	3:30 pm – 3:55 pm	Sebastian was not on the bill, but rather was attending the festival, and was recruited to perform while the promoters waited for many of the scheduled performers to arrive.
Keef Hartley Band	4:45 pm – 5:30 pm
The Incredible String Band	6:00 pm – 6:30 pm	Originally slated to perform on the first day following Ravi Shankar; declined to perform during the rainstorm and were moved to the second day.
Canned Heat	7:30 pm – 8:30 pm
Mountain	9:00 pm – 10:00 pm	This performance was only their third gig as a band
Grateful Dead	10:30 pm – 12:05 am	Their set was cut short after the stage amps overloaded during "Turn On Your Love Light".
Creedence Clearwater Revival	12:30 am – 1:20 am
Janis Joplin with The Kozmic Blues Band[45]	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	Briefly interrupted by Abbie Hoffman.
Jefferson Airplane	8:00 am – 9:40 am	Joined onstage on piano by Nicky Hopkins.

Sunday, August 17 – Monday, August 18

Artist	Time	Notes
Joe Cocker and The Grease Band	2:00 pm – 3:25 pm	Played "With A Little Help From My Friends." After Joe Cocker's set, a thunderstorm disrupted the events for several hours.
Country Joe and the Fish	6:30 pm – 8:00 pm	Country Joe McDonald's second performance.
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	Winter's brother, Edgar Winter, is featured on three songs.
Blood, Sweat & Tears	1:30 am – 2:30 am
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young	3:00 am – 4:00 am	An acoustic and electric set were played. Neil Young skipped most of the acoustic set.
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	Performed to a considerably smaller crowd of fewer than 200,000 people.

Declined invitations or missed connections

• Bob Dylan, in whose "backyard" the festival was held, was never in serious negotiation. Instead, Dylan signed in mid-July to play the Isle of Wight Festival of Music, on August 31. Dylan set sail for England on Queen Elizabeth 2 on August 15, the day the Woodstock Festival started. His son was injured by a cabin door and the family disembarked. Dylan, with his wife Sara, flew to England the following week. Dylan had been unhappy about the number of hippies piling up outside his house in the nearby town of Woodstock. But, according to Google Maps, Woodstock NY is 58 miles from the festival site.
• Simon & Garfunkel declined the invitation, as they rather wanted to get ahead with their new album.
• The Jeff Beck Group: Jeff Beck disbanded the group prior to Woodstock. "I deliberately broke the group up before Woodstock," Beck said. "I didn't want it to be preserved." It was to have been the first time that Beck would perform with Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice. Also, Beck's piano player Nicky Hopkins performed with Jefferson Airplane.
• Led Zeppelin was asked to perform, their manager Peter Grant stated: "We were asked to do Woodstock and Atlantic were very keen, and so was our U.S. promoter, Frank Barsalona. I said no because at Woodstock we'd have just been another band on the bill." However, the group did play the first Atlanta International Pop Festival on July 5, as one of 22 bands at the two-day event. Woodstock weekend, Zeppelin performed 140 miles south of the festival at the Asbury Park Convention Hall in New Jersey. Their only time out taken was to attend Elvis Presley's show at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, on August 12.
• The Byrds were invited, but chose not to participate, figuring Woodstock to be no different from any of the other music festivals that summer. There were also concerns about money. As bassist John York remembers: "We were flying to a gig and Roger [McGuinn] came up to us and said that a guy was putting on a festival in upstate New York. But at that point they weren't paying all of the bands. He asked us if we wanted to do it and we said, 'No'. We had no idea what it was going to be. We were burned out and tired of the festival scene. [ ... ] So all of us said, 'No, we want a rest' and missed the best festival of all."
• Chicago, at the time still known as the Chicago Transit Authority, had initially been signed on to play at Woodstock. However, they had a contract with concert promoter Bill Graham, which allowed him to move Chicago's concerts at the Fillmore West. He rescheduled some of their dates to August 17, thus forcing the band to back out of the concert. Graham did so to ensure that Santana, which he managed at the time, would take their slot at the festival. According to singer and bassist Peter Cetera, "We were sort of peeved at him for pulling that one."
• Tommy James and the Shondells declined an invitation. Lead singer Tommy James stated later: "We could have just kicked ourselves. 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 realized what we'd missed a couple of days later."
• The Moody Blues were included on the original Wallkill poster as performers, but decided to back out after being booked in Paris the same weekend.
• Frank Zappa, then with The Mothers of Invention, according to the Class of the 20th Century U.S. television special, is quoted as saying "A lot of mud at Woodstock ... We were invited to play there, we turned it down."
• Arthur Lee and Love declined the invitation, but Mojo Magazine later described inner turmoil within the band which caused their absence at the Woodstock festival.
• Free was asked to perform and declined. They did however play at the Isle of Wight Festival, a week later.
• Mind Garage declined because they thought the festival would be no huge deal and they had a higher paying gig elsewhere.
• The Doors were considered as a potential performing band but canceled at the last moment. According to guitarist Robby Krieger, they turned it down because they thought it would be a "second class repeat of Monterey Pop Festival" and later regretted that decision.
• Spirit also declined an invitation to play, as they already had shows planned and wanted to play those instead, not knowing how big Woodstock would be.
• Joni Mitchell was originally slated to perform, but cancelled at the urging of her manager to avoid missing a scheduled appearance on The Dick Cavett Show.
• Lighthouse declined to perform at Woodstock.
• Roy Rogers was asked by Lang to close the festival with "Happy Trails" but he declined.
• Procol Harum was invited but refused because Woodstock fell at the end of a long tour and also coincided with the due date of guitarist Robin Trower's baby.
• Jethro Tull also declined. According to frontman Ian Anderson, he knew it would be a big event but he did not want to go because he did not like hippies and other concerns including inappropriate nudity, heavy drinking and drug use.
• Raven – attorney Miles Laurie, one of Michael Lang's lawyers set up a meeting with Raven manager Marty Angelo and offered his band a spot on the lineup but only if they signed a contract with Lang to be Raven's record producer and 10% of future earnings. Raven turned down his offer based on the fact that the year before the band played at one of the Woodstock Sound-Outs and the gig didn't go well. Lang assured them that his concert was going to be different. The band respectfully turned down.
• Blues Image, according to a 2011 interview with percussionist Joe Lala, agreed to appear at the Woodstock festival. Their manager did not want them to go and said, "There's only one road in and it's going to be raining, you don't want to be there". The band members were disappointed and in response said, "Don't you think it'll be beneficial that we're there?" The band instead took a gig at Binghamton.
• Iron Butterfly was booked to appear, and is listed on the Woodstock poster for a Sunday performance, but could not perform because they were stuck at LaGuardia Airport. According to Production Coordinator John Morris, "They sent me a telegram saying, 'We will arrive at LaGuardia. You will have helicopters pick us up. We will fly straight to the show. We will perform immediately, and then we will be flown out.' And I picked up the phone and called Western Union ... And [my telegram] said: 'For reasons I can't go into / Until you are here / Clarifying your situation / Knowing you are having problems / You will have to find / Other transportation / Unless you plan not to come.'" The first letter of each line in the telegram spelled out an acrostic making clear that Iron Butterfly was not welcome.
• The Rascals were invited to play the festival but declined due to the fact that they were in the middle of recording a new album.
• When feelers were sent out to The Beatles about possibly appearing, it was also suggested that a recent signee to their label Apple Records should also get an invite. That artist was James Taylor. When the group declined their invitation Taylor's invite was withdrawn as well.
• Allegedly, The Rolling Stones were also sent an invitation, but declined because Mick Jagger was in Australia filming Ned Kelly, and Keith Richards' girlfriend Anita Pallenberg had just given birth to their son Marlon.

Media coverage

Magazine advertisement promoting the Woodstock Music & Art Fair's "Aquarian Exposition," to be held in Wallkill, NY.

 

Very few reporters from outside the immediate area were on the scene. During the first few days of the festival, national media coverage emphasized the problems. Front-page headlines in the Daily News read "Traffic Uptight at Hippiefest" and "Hippies Mired in a Sea of Mud". The New York Times ran an editorial titled "Nightmare in the Catskills", which read in part, "The dreams of marijuana and rock music that drew 300,000 fans and hippies to the Catskills had little more sanity than the impulses that drive the lemmings to march to their deaths in the sea. They ended in a nightmare of mud and stagnation ... What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?" Coverage became more positive by the end of the festival, in part because the parents of concertgoers called the media and told them, based on their children's phone calls, that their reporting was misleading.

The New York Times covered the prelude to the festival and the move from Wallkill to Bethel. Barnard Collier, who reported from the event for The New York Times, asserts that he was pressured by on-duty editors at the paper to write a misleadingly negative article about the event. According to Collier, this led to acrimonious discussions and his threat to refuse to write the article until the paper's executive editor, James Reston, agreed to let him write the article as he saw fit. The eventual article dealt with issues of traffic jams and minor lawbreaking, but went on to emphasize cooperation, generosity, and the good nature of the festival goers. When the festival was over, Collier wrote another article about the exodus of fans from the festival site and the lack of violence at the event. The chief medical officer for the event and several local residents were quoted as praising the festival goers.

Middletown, New York's Times Herald-Record, the only local daily newspaper, editorialized against the law that banned the festival from Wallkill. During the festival a rare Saturday edition was published. The paper had the only phone line running out of the site, and it used a motorcyclist to get stories and pictures from the impassable crowd to the newspaper's office 35 miles (56 km) away in Middletown.

Releases

Films

The documentary film Woodstock, directed by Michael Wadleigh and edited by Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese, was released in March 1970. Artie Kornfeld (one of the promoters of the festival) went to Fred Weintraub, an executive at Warner Bros., and asked for money to film the festival. Artie had been turned down everywhere else, but against the express wishes of other Warner Bros. executives, Weintraub put his job on the line and gave Kornfeld $100,000 (equivalent to $680,000 today) to make the film. Woodstock helped to save Warner Bros at a time when the company was on the verge of going out of business. The book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls details the making of the film. 

Wadleigh rounded up a crew of about 100 from the New York film scene. With no money to pay the crew, he agreed to a double-or-nothing scheme, in which the crew would receive double pay if the film succeeded and nothing if it bombed. Wadleigh strove to make the film as much about the hippies as the music, listening to their feelings about compelling events contemporaneous with the festival (such as the Vietnam War), as well as the views of the townspeople.

Woodstock received the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. The film has been deemed culturally significant by the United States Library of Congress. In 1994, Woodstock: The Director's Cut was released and expanded to include Janis Joplin as well as additional performances by Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, and Canned Heat not seen in the original version of the film. In 2009, the expanded 40th Anniversary Edition was released on DVD. This release marks the film's first availability on Blu-ray disc. 

Another film on Woodstock named Taking Woodstock was produced in 2009 by Taiwanese American filmmaker Ang Lee. Lee practically rented out the entire town of New Lebanon, New York, to shoot the film. He was initially concerned with angering the locals, but they ended up being very welcoming and willing to help with the film. The movie is based on Elliot Tiber, played by Demetri Martin, and his role in bringing Woodstock to Bethel, New York. The film also stars Jonathan Groff as Michael Lang and Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton as Jake and Sonia Teichberg.

Albums

Two soundtrack albums were released. The first, Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More, was a 3-LP (later 2-CD) album containing a sampling of one or two songs by most of the acts who performed. A year later, Woodstock 2 was released as a 2-LP album. Both albums included recordings of stage announcements (many by Production Coordinator John Morris, e.g., "[We're told] that the brown acid is not specifically too good", "Hey, if you think really hard, maybe we can stop this rain") and crowd noises (i.e., the rain chant) between songs. In 1994, a third album, Woodstock Diary was released. Tracks from all three albums, as well as numerous additional, previously unreleased performances from the festival but not the stage announcements and crowd noises, were reissued by Atlantic as a 4-CD box set titled Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music. 

An album titled Jimi Hendrix: Woodstock also was released in 1994, featuring only selected recordings of Jimi Hendrix at the festival. A longer double-disc set, Live at Woodstock (1999) features nearly every song of Hendrix's performance, omitting just two pieces that were sung by his rhythm guitarist. 

In 2009, Joe Cocker released Live at Woodstock, a live album of his entire Woodstock set. The album contained eleven tracks, ten of which were previously unreleased. 

In 2009, complete performances from Woodstock by Santana, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, and Johnny Winter were released separately by Legacy/SME Records, and were also collected in a box set titled The Woodstock Experience. Also, in 2009, Rhino/Atlantic Records issued a 6-CD box set titled Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm, which included further musical performances as well as stage announcements and other ancillary material.

Aftermath

Peace and Music Woodstock monument with plaques by sculptor Wayne C. Saward and erected in 1984 on the festival site. (Note that John Sebastian's surname is misspelled as "Sabastian")

 

Max Yasgur refused to rent out his farm for a 1970 revival of the festival, saying, "As far as I know, I'm going back to running a dairy farm." Yasgur died in 1973.

Bethel voters tossed out their supervisor in an election held in November 1969 because of his role in bringing the festival to the town. New York State and the town of Bethel passed mass gathering laws designed to prevent any more festivals from occurring.

In 1984, at the original festival site, land owners Louis Nicky and June Gelish put up a monument marker with plaques called "Peace and Music" by a local sculptor from nearby Bloomingburg, Wayne C. Saward (1957–2009).

Attempts were made to prevent people from visiting the site. Its owners spread chicken manure, and during one anniversary, tractors and state police cars formed roadblocks. Twenty thousand people gathered at the site in 1989 during an impromptu 20th anniversary celebration. In 1997 a community group put up a welcoming sign for visitors. Unlike Bethel, the town of Woodstock made several efforts to cash in on its notoriety. Bethel's stance changed in recent years, and the town now embraces the festival. Efforts have begun to forge a link between Bethel and Woodstock.

Approximately 80 lawsuits were filed against Woodstock Ventures, primarily by farmers in the area. The movie financed settlements and paid off the $1.4 million of debt (equivalent to $9.6 million today) Woodstock Ventures had incurred from the festival.

Legacy

Woodstock site today

Max Yasgur's farm in 1999

 

In 1984, a plaque was placed at the original site commemorating the festival. The field and the stage area remain preserved in their rural setting and the fields of the Yasgur farm are still visited by people of all generations.

In 1996, the site of the concert and 1,400 acres (2.2 sq mi; 5.7 km²) surrounding was purchased by cable television pioneer Alan Gerry for the purpose of creating the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. The Center opened on July 1, 2006, with a performance by the New York Philharmonic. On August 13, 2006, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performed before 16,000 fans at the new Center—37 years after their historic performance at Woodstock.

The Museum at Bethel Woods opened on June 2, 2008. The Museum contains film and interactive displays, text panels, and artifacts that explore the unique experience of the Woodstock festival, its significance as the culminating event of a decade of radical cultural transformation, and the legacy of the Sixties and Woodstock today.

Richie Havens' ashes were scattered across the site on August 18, 2013.

In late 2016 New York's State Historic Preservation Office applied to the National Park Service to have 600 acres (0.94 sq mi; 2.4 km²) including the site of the festival and adjacent areas used for campgrounds, all of which still appear mostly as they did in 1969 as they were not redeveloped when Bethel Woods was built, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Woodstock 40th anniversary

There was worldwide media interest in the 40th anniversary of Woodstock in 2009. A number of activities to commemorate the festival took place around the world. On August 15, at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts overlooking the original site, the largest assembly of Woodstock performing alumni since the original 1969 festival performed in an eight-hour concert in front of a sold-out crowd. Hosted by Country Joe McDonald, the concert featured Big Brother and the Holding Company performing Janis Joplin's hits (she actually appeared with the Kozmic Blues Band at Woodstock, although that band did feature former Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew), Canned Heat, Ten Years After, Jefferson Starship, Mountain, and the headliners, The Levon Helm Band. At Woodstock, Levon Helm played drums and was one of the lead vocalists with The Band. Paul Kantner was the only member of the 1969 Jefferson Airplane lineup to appear with Jefferson Starship. Tom Constanten, who played keyboard with the Grateful Dead at Woodstock, joined Jefferson Starship on stage for several numbers. Jocko Marcellino from Sha Na Na also appeared, backed up by Canned Heat. Richie Havens, who opened the Woodstock festival in 1969, appeared at a separate event the previous night. Crosby, Stills & Nash and Arlo Guthrie also marked the anniversary with live performances at Bethel earlier in August 2009. 

Another event occurred in Hawkhurst, Kent (UK), at a Summer of Love party, with acts including two of the participants at the original Woodstock, Barry Melton of Country Joe and the Fish and Robin Williamson of The Incredible String Band, plus Santana and Grateful Dead cover bands. On August 14 and 15, 2009, a 40th anniversary tribute concert was held in Woodstock, Illinois, and was the only festival to receive the official blessing of the "Father of Woodstock", Artie Kornfeld. Kornfeld later made an appearance in Woodstock^{[clarification needed]} with the event's promoters. 

Also in 2009, Michael Lang and Holly George-Warren published The Road to Woodstock, which describes Lang's involvement in the creation of the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival, and includes personal stories and quotes from central figures involved in the event.

Woodstock 50th anniversary

In May 2014, Michael Lang, one of the producers and organizers of the original Woodstock event, revealed plans for a possible 50th anniversary concert in 2019 and that he was exploring various locations. Reports in late 2018 confirmed the plans for a concurrent 50th Anniversary event on the original site to be operated by the Bethel Woods Centre for the Arts. The scheduled date for the "Bethel Woods Music and Culture Festival: Celebrating the golden anniversary at the historic site of the 1969 Woodstock festival" was August 16-18 2019. Partners in the event are Live Nation and INVNT. Bethel Woods described the festival as a "pan-generational music, culture and community event" (including some live performances and talks by) "leading futurists and retro-tech experts".

Michael Lang told a reporter that he also had "definite plans" for a 50th anniversary concert that would "hopefully encourage people to get involved with our lives on the planet" with a goal of re-capturing the "history and essence of what Woodstock was".

On January 9, 2019, Lang announced that the official Woodstock 50th Anniversary Festival would take place on August 16–18, 2019 in Watkins Glen, NY.

On 19 March 2019, it was revealed the line-up for Woodstock 50. It includes some artists who performed at the original Woodstock festival in 1969: John Fogerty (from Creedence Clearwater Revival), Carlos Santana (as Santana), David Crosby (from Crosby, Stills & Nash), Melanie, John Sebastian, Country Joe McDonald, three Grateful Dead members (as Dead & Company), Canned Heat, and Hot Tuna (containing members of Jefferson Airplane).

On April 29, 2019, it was announced that Woodstock 50 has been cancelled by investors (Dentsu Aegis Network), who had lost faith in its preparations. The producers "vehemently" denied any cancellation, with Michael Lang telling The New York Times that investors have no such prerogative. After a lawsuit with original financiers, the Woodstock 50 team then announced that it has received help from Oppenheimer & Co. for financing so that the three-day event can continue to take place in August despite the original financiers pulling out.

In popular culture

As one of the biggest rock festivals of all time and a cultural touchstone for the late 1960s, Woodstock has been referenced in many different ways in popular culture. The phrase "the Woodstock generation" became part of the common lexicon. Tributes and parodies of the festival began almost as soon as the final chords sounded. Cartoonist Charles Schulz named his recurring Peanuts bird character – which began appearing in 1966 but was still unnamed – Woodstock in tribute to the festival. In April 1970, Mad magazine published a poem by Frank Jacobs and illustrated by Sergio Aragonés titled "I Remember, I Remember The Wondrous Woodstock Music Fair" that parodies the traffic jams and the challenges of getting close enough to actually hear the music. Keith Robertson's 1970 children's book Henry Reed's Big Show has the title character attempting to emulate the success of the festival by mounting his own concert at his uncle's farm. 

Melanie Safka's 1970 song, "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)", recalls the experience of both her Woodstock performance and her participation in the 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. 

Joni Mitchell's 1970 song, "Woodstock", was written while she viewed news coverage of the festival and, lamenting her decision not to perform there, described it instead.

In 1973, the stage show National Lampoon's Lemmings portrayed the "Woodchuck" festival, featuring parodies of many Woodstock performers.

More recent culture continues to remember Woodstock, with Time magazine naming "The Who at Woodstock – 1969" to the magazine's "Top 10 Music-Festival Moments" list on March 18, 2010.

A Walk on the Moon is a 1999 film set partially at the Woodstock festival. 

In 2005, Argentine writer Edgar Brau published Woodstock, a long poem commemorating the festival. An English translation of the poem was published in January 2007 by Words Without Borders.

Taking Woodstock is a 2009 film by director Ang Lee that dramatizes how the festival came together.

In 2017, the singer Lana Del Rey released a song, "Coachella - Woodstock in My Mind," in order to show her worries about the tensions between North Korea and the United States, while she was at Coachella, expressing nostalgia by reminding the Woodstock festival as a symbol of peace.