By Turns Shambolic, Historic, Hallucinatory And Majestic, The Woodstock Festival Of August 1969 Marked Both The Pinnacle Of A Revolution In Music – And The Beginning Of Its Fall. It Also Gave Us Some Of The Greatest Moments Of Wild, Unfiltered Guitar Genius The World Has Ever Witnessed. Join Us As We Celebrate Its 50Th Anniversary And Uncover The Six-String Stories Behind The Festival’S Greatest Performances, From Hendrix To Ten Years After…
The rock festival that crowned a decade-long musical revolution took just six months to organise. And like many 60s happenings, Woodstock was launched on a flood tide of peace and love – with a fishy glint of money-spinning ambition not far beneath the surface.
The festival was originally intended as a profit-making venture – and only became a free festival when it became apparent the gig was attracting hundreds of thousands more people than the organisers had readied themselves for. The final straw was when the fence was torn down by desperate swarms of ticketless fans.
But, for the four men who put the festival together, that was all in the future. They were John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang – and the oldest was just 26. Together, they paid an estimated $50,000 to rent around 600 acres of Max Yasgur’s farm in an out-ofthe-way corner of the Catskill Mountains in New York State. 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. It was typical of the era’s naive optimism that John had only ever seen one rock concert (The Beach Boys) before he set his sights on staging the musical event of the decade.
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