& Music,” the event quickly came to be known as
Woodstock. It sounds like a quaint country fair, but
in fact the festival was designed to be dazzling and
monumental. More than 30 acts were slated to per-
form, representing everything from folk to blues to
soul, from hard rock to psychedelia and even ’50s
doo-wop. Some artists were already famous—the
Who, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix;
for others, like Richie Havens, Santana, and Joe
Cocker, the festival would catapult them to super-
stardom—with a little help from Woodstock, an
Oscar-winning documentary film by Michael
Wadleigh, which hit theaters the following year.
Woodstock, however, was about more than
music. Many consider it a supreme expression of
the counterculture, the apotheosis of the flower
power generation’s ideals of peace, love, harmony,
and communalism. It might have been a disaster, of
course. The concert promoters expected about 50,
attendees and planned to charge $6 to $18 for one- to
three-day tickets ($41 to $124 today). But word spread,
Roman Polanski (who was out of the country) and
butchered his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate,
and four others.
Still, there were glimmers of light that summer, one
shining from 240,000 miles away: On July 20, 1969,
astronaut Neil Armstrong took his “one small step,”
planting his left boot on the lunar surface to become
the first human being to walk on the moon. Half a
billion people around the world were transfixed,
united, if only for a moment, by sheer wonder.
NOTHER UNIFYING EVENT that wild
summer was far more down-to-earth—
literally in the mud. And it would
become a transcendent cultural touch-
stone, a defining moment for an entire generation.
From August 15 to 18, on Max Yasgur’s 600-acre
dairy farm in the town of Bethel, New York, an
unlikely group of investors called Woodstock
Ventures bankrolled a music festival. Originally
billed as “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace
THE BACK ROADS OF RURAL
New York were no match for the
auto onslaught of nearly half
a million music fans arriving
at the same place at roughly
the same time. Most simply
abandoned their vehicles on the
roadside and started walking.
8 LIFE WOODSTOCK
