Woodstock, 1969

For us guitar players, when we hear the word Woodstock, we are immediately taken back in time to the first time we heard Jimi Hendrix’s four-minute symphony titled “Woodstock Improvisation” or Santana on Soul Sacrifice. But for some time, my knowledge of the infamous three-day festival in upstate New York stopped there. My understanding of its influence on 60s counterculture, rock and roll, and future music performances amounted to a bare minimum. But after being exposed to the madness of the festival through images and videos, I decided to forget about Jimi and Carlos for a second and simply dig in.

One of the biggest aspects of the festival I noticed almost immediately was its shortcomings. From its planning all the way to its end, the festival was riddled with failures, delays, and unexpected events. For instance, the founders of Woodstock, Michael Lang, Artie Kornfield, Joel Rosenman, and John P Roberts’ choices for the venue were rejected by local law enforcement, attorneys, and residents a total of three times. Although the original plan for its venue was a site in the town of Woodstock, local residents rejected the idea. The creators found a second candidate in that of a farm in Saugerties, New York, but it was once again rejected by the local attorney. The men tried for a third time, in a 300-acre venue in Wallkill, but were rejected when residents heard that 50,000 people would be attending the festival. In the end, Lang settled on a dairy farm owned by Max Yasgur. It was a beautiful location; Yasgur’s farm was a natural bowl sloping down to a nearby pond, offering visitors spectacular views of the surrounding hills. Lang, Kornfield, and Rosenman were still under the impression that a maximum of 50,000 people would be attending.

On the day of the performance, a peak of 450,000, 9 times what the officials had expected, showed up at Yasgur’s farm. The small highway and the narrow roads of Upstate New York only delayed their arrival with a giant traffic jam. According to local law enforcement, the traffic jam stretched up to 20 miles along Route 17B, the small two-lane highway in Bethel, New York. Among these drivers were performers in the festival themselves. To control the influx of vehicles, the NYPD shut off the New York State Thruway, blocking cars unassociated with Woodstock from passing. When the jam did not seem to clear up, helicopters were employed to make sure performers arrived on time. The attendees, meanwhile, started walking, leaving their cars behind on the road. 

This initial delay resulted in even more setbacks. When the arrival of the first performers, the band Sweetwater, was delayed, Ritchie Havens and Indian guru Swami Satchidananda were moved up to the opening acts. Havens was forced to pull off a 47-minute segment to stall time. While doing this, he came up with a five-minute improvisation based on the word “freedom”, which became one of his biggest anthems. 

When Sweetwater arrived and performed as the third act, everything seemed to be going smoothly. Then, Mother Nature turned its back on Woodstock. A terrible rainstorm hurtled its way through the farm. 

Ravi Shankar, the Indian classical musician, was the first act to play through the rainstorm. The large open field encompassing the bowl turned into a giant, sloshing pit of mud. Almost all of the gear brought on to support Woodstock was damaged and suffered technical difficulties. Many attendees were forced to sleep in their sleeping bags, lathered in mud and rain, while others opted to stay up and play in the mud, intoxicated. Because of the extemporaneous changes in the setlist, many highly anticipated acts, such as famed folk-singer Joan Baez, were delayed to slots early in the morning, when nobody was awake. Although there were constant difficulties due to the rain, there were many highlight performances, including the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, and, of course, Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsys. 

But looking back, these failures, setbacks, and difficulties played a major role in shaping how we view Woodstock today. If it wasn’t for Sweetwater’s delay, we probably would not have ever experienced Ritchie Havens’ “Freedom” or the image of bored attendees dancing in the mud and swimming in the pond.

At the same time, Woodstock’s shortcomings do not act as the entire explanation for its infamous reputation. Drugs, such as marijuana and LSD, were a big part of the entire festival. Despite the sale of drugs being illegal, the law enforcement and security present at the festival amounted to only 346 off-duty officers from the NYPD. The scarcity of officers made it so that Woodstock became a bubble separate from the rest of the world. Attendees traded substances with each other, and two even died of overdoses. Carlos Santana recalls the time he performed at Woodstock while completely intoxicated with LSD given to him by Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia. As he recounts, “As soon as I took it, it was like poof, everything became another dimension…and then I see this face coming and saying if you don’t play now, you’re not going to play at all.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of Woodstock, however, is its resounding message of peace and love. In 1969, the United States was in the midst of the Vietnam War, and most of the attendees at Woodstock consisted of “hippies”, who stood for non-violence and peace. Woodstock, in essence, strove to be a countercultural utopia, where the audience would forget about the outside world and be united under Mother Nature, great music, and fellow music enthusiasts. Woodstock wasn’t just there for the music, but rather treated music as a catalyst, as a means of expression, bringing everything: peace, love, solace, unity, and freedom, all into a singular venue. For people who were there at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm, it isn’t Hendrix that springs to their mind the first time, but it is peace, love, and the irreplicable spirit of freedom.