N 1996, CABLEVISION FOUNDER Alan Gerry
purchased the Woodstock site and launched
a plan to create a museum and arts center
dedicated to the festival. Opened a decade
later as the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts,
the $100 million complex includes a 15,000-
seat pavilion stage, where top musical acts have
performed over the years—including some who took
the stage at Woodstock, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash &
Young; Santana; Arlo Guthrie; and Joe Cocker.
The Museum at Bethel Woods, meanwhile, has a
10,000-square-foot exhibition space devoted to the
’60s and the legacy of Woodstock.
And what exactly is that legacy? Fifty years on, we’re
still talking about Woodstock, celebrating it, analyzing
it, both as a cultural phenomenon and a musical one.
Certainly, the festival’s impact was bolstered
immeasurably by Michael Wadleigh’s three-hour
Academy Award–winning 1970 documentary,
Woodstock, and a longer director’s cut released in 1994.
With decades of hindsight, the festival is often referred
to as simultaneously the apex of idealistic 1960s
counterculture and its final gasp, one last party beforethe flower power dream devolved into post-Vietnam,
post-Watergate cynicism and Me Generation
materialism. Not four months after Jimi Hendrix
played his final chord at Bethel, America witnessed the
disastrous Altamont Speedway free festival in
December 1969. Billed as “Woodstock West,” the
concert drew 300,000 people and some of the same
bands—plus the Rolling Stones. Far from the muddy
Eden of Yasgur’s farm, Altamont was marred by fights
and deadly violence. Instead of the Hog Farm “Please
Force,” the Hells Angels were contracted to provide
security for the musicians. Rather than Wavy Gravy’s
“pies and seltzer,” they used beer cans, weighted pool
cues, and motorcycle chains to harass and intimidate
concertgoers. After one altercation, a member of the
biker gang wound up stabbing and beating to death
Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old African American
student who had drawn a gun on him.
Altamont is often said to have rung a dark curtain
down on the psychedelic ’60s. But it certainly didn’t
herald the end of mass music and arts festivals.
Succeeding decades would see the Glastonbury
Festival in England, Chicago’s annual Lollapalooza,90 LIFE WOODSTOCK