LUCIDMEDIA

Woodstock: 40 Years Later – The Cultural Impact

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Tuesday, 11 August 2009 15:07

Woodstock had everything going against it. From its inception the Woodstock Music and Art Fair faced enough roadblocks and logistical hiccups to sink an event half its size. Despite the loss of venue a two moths before the festival, the protests from the people of Bethel, New York, the traffic jams, the rotten weather and the normal technical snafus inherent in running an outdoor concert, Woodstock endured. What’s more, Woodstock endured well past the final encore on August 18th, 1969. To this day, the field once owned by dairy farmer Max B. Yasgur remains for music fans and pop culture historians a site as sacred as any battlefield. Forty years later, people still travel from all over the world to stand on the same ground as acts like Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, The Band, The Who and about 450,000 of their closest friends.

"The baffling history of mankind is full of obvious turning points and significant events: battles won, treaties signed, rulers elected or disposed, and now seemingly, planets conquered. Equally important are the great groundswells of popular movements that affect the minds and values of a generation or more, not all of which can be neatly tied to a time or place. Looking back upon the America of the 60s, future historians may well search for the meaning of one such movement. It drew the public's notice on the days and nights of Aug.15 through 17, 1969, on the 600-acre farm of Max Yasgur in Bethel, N.Y."

That’s how Time Magazine’s four-page, full colour coverage of Woodstock began in their August 29th, 1969 issue and even at the time there was a sense at just how seminal and unique what happened on Yasgur’s farm just a week and a half earlier was. A month later in Saturday Review Ellen Sander wrote that the real impact of Woodstock had nothing to do with the music or the size of the crowds that showed up. “What happened was that the largest number of people ever assembled for any event other than a war lived together, intimately and meaningfully and with such natural good cheer that they turned on not only everyone surrounding them but the mass media, and, by extension, millions of others, young and old, particularly many elements hostile to the manifestations and ignorant of the substance of pop culture."

Woodstock wasn’t the first outdoor musical festival of its kind. Music writer Rusty DeSoto once wrote that while pop culture focuses on the "bigger, higher-profile, more decadent" Woodstock Festival, “Monterey Pop was a seminal event: it was the first real rock festival ever held, featuring debut performances of bands that would shape the history of rock and affect popular culture from that day forward.” The Monterey Pop Festival took place over three days in 1967: June 16th-18th. It helped to establish acts like Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and Steve Miller, and further cemented the rising stardom of bands like The Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel and The Byrds.

Nearly 200,000 people came out to Monterey, located in the town of the same name in Central California. Monterey is considered one of the kick-off events of “The Summer of Love,” epitomizing the themes and beliefs of the 60s counterculture that was carried back up the coast to San Francisco and spread across the US. It also set the standard for not just how Woodstock was organized, but how all concerts and music festivals were produced and promoted. Monterey was the first to gather a diverse set of big bands from across the US, as well as introducing an innovative new sound system designed by audio engineer Abe Jacob, which became the prototype for all large scale PA’s to come. "It's a blueprint for all subsequent music festivals," said Monterey’s promoter and co-creator Lou Adler in 1992. "And it did establish rock as a force to be reckoned with."

But probably due to its size, line-up and legendary struggle trying to get off the ground, Woodstock became part of the cultural lexicon, as mentioned by Elliot Tiber in a series called “How Woodstock Happened…,” which was printed in The Times Herald-Record in 1994. “As Watergate is the codeword for a national crisis of confidence and Waterloo stands for ignominious defeat, Woodstock has become an instant adjective denoting youthful hedonism and 60s excess,” he wrote.

The scale of Woodstock was immense as compared to anything that came before. The New York State Thruway, a freeway built in the 50s to connect all of New York State’s major cities from Manhattan to Western New York, was famously shut down because of traffic jams. The four men who organized it - John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang – were all in their 20s. Roberts and Rosenman were both men of means who got the ball rolling by placing an ad in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal under the name of Challenge International, Ltd.: “Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions.”

At the event, solutions to many of the challenges that arose were improvised on the fly. "It was a hectic scene, and we were all kind of winging it," David Crosby told Rolling Stone, who placed Woodstock as number six on their list of “50 moments that changed the history of rock & roll” back in 2004. But while the stage crew dealt with managing several bands, electrical issues and fighting the elements, the rest of the festival out amongst its probable half a million revellers was surprisingly smooth. Dr. William Abruzzi, Festival Medical Director, reported that he only dealt with 800 cases of people suffering from adverse recreational drug reactions over the three-day period. In all, only about two fatalities can be accounted for, one being from a heroin overdose.

But nobody really remembers how smoothly the festival ran in spite of itself, and much a less a historical event, there’s something mythical about Woodstock, something epic. The fact that the festival has shirked duplication speaks to that; even its own sequels have been marred by rampant consumerism and violence. Woodstock came amidst one of the most dramatic social and political upheavals in modern history. The preceding year had been the most violent since the end of World War II, and 1969 had already been punctuated by several key events, like the arrest of 184 students that seized the Harvard Administrations Building, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Montreal bed-in for peace and the Stonewall Riots in New York City.

"What we had here was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence," said Bethel town historian Bert Feldman. "Dickens said it first: 'It was the best of times. It was the worst of times'. It's an amalgam that will never be reproduced again." Arnold Skolnick, the artist who designed Woodstock's dove-and-guitar symbol, described it this way: "Something was tapped, a nerve, in this country. And everybody just came." Concerts tend to be remembered in the personal: your first concert, your favourite concert, your best concert experience. But Woodstock was a cultural event. In the summer of ’69, there were two types of people: those that went to Woodstock and those who didn’t. Four decades later, millions more still wish they had been there, on the grass and mud at Yasgur's farm.