Fiat 124 Spider
from the Sixties
Woodstock
from the Sixties
In the very early years of our 124 Spider a unique music
spectacle took place that was unparalelled in history: WOODSTOCK.
Although LIVE 8 was the largest television event held at different locations in the world that
mankind ever observed before, at the largest visited location Hyde Park in London there
were no more than 200.000 visitors gathered and cannot be compared at all with the Woodstock crowd
where almost 500.000 people shared three days and nights with each other, even in heavy storm and rain !
HIPPIES
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969 drew almost half a million people to a pasture in Sullivan
County. For four days, the site became a countercultural mini-nation in which minds were open, drugs
were all but legal and love was 'free'.
The music began Friday afternoon at 5:07 pm August 15 and continued until mid-morning Monday August
18. The festival closed the New York State Thruway and created one of the nation's worst traffic jams.
It also inspired a slew of local and state laws to ensure that nothing like it would ever happen again.
Gathered that weekend in 1969 were liars and lovers, prophets and profiteers. They made love,
they made money and they made a little history. 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.'
WHO WERE BEHIND IT
The counterculture's biggest bash - it ultimately cost more than $2.4 million - was sponsored by
four very different, and very young, men: John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang.
The oldest of the four was 26. John Roberts supplied the money. He was heir to a drugstore and
toothpaste manufacturing fortune. He had a multimillion-dollar trust fund, a University of
Pennsylvania degree and a lieutenant's commission in the Army. He had seen exactly one rock concert,
by the Beach Boys.
The four men founded Woodstock Ventures in the spring of 1969 and planned a large-scale
rockfestival at an industrial park in Walkill, about 60 miles from New-York.
By early April, the promoters were carefully cultivating the Woodstock image in the
underground press, in publications like the Village Voice and Rolling Stone magazine. Ads began to run
in The New York Times and The Times Herald-Record in May. For Artie Kornfeld, Woodstock wasn't a matter of
building stages, signing acts or even selling tickets. For him, the festival was always a state of
mind, a happening that would exemplify the generation.
The group settled on the concrete slogan of 'Three Days of Peace and Music' and downplayed
the highly conceptual theme of Aquarius. The promoters figured 'peace' would link the anti-war
sentiment to the rock concert. They also wanted to avoid any violence and figured that a slogan with
'peace' in it would help keep order.
They attracted the most popular artists from the psychedelic music scene: Jimi Hendrix
and Jefferson Airplane. These musicians got paid double the amount what they used to get.
Jimi Hendrix would just receive for the finale 32.0000 dollars, whereas The Who got 12.500 dollars.
Bands such as Jefferson Airplane and Creedence Clearwater Revival also received more than 10.000
dollars, amounts that were unprecedented in those days.
The residents of Wallkill had heard of hippies, drugs and rock concerts, and after the Woodstock
advertising hit The New York Times, The Times Herald-Record and the radio stations, local residents
knew that a three-day rock show, maybe the biggest ever, was coming. Besides, Woodstock Venture's
employees sure looked like hippies. In the minds of many people, long hair and shabby clothes were
associated with left-wing politics and drug use. So, the few thousand inhabitants of Walkill became
anxious and succeeded in banning the festival on July 15.
Up to that moment a lot of ads were
published and quite a number of bands were booked. After a feverish search the organising Ventures
stumbled across the land of the largest dairy farmer and the biggest milk producer of Sullivan County:
Max Yasgur.
Yasgur was an enterprising and dynamic farmer who had gone to New York University and
studied real estate law. He rented the fields near Bethel, at about 60 miles from the real Woodstock
on July 20. The lay of the land was perfect. The sloping bowl, a little rise for the stage. A lake in
the background. The deal was sealed with the organisers right there in the fields of Yagur's farm for
75.000 dollars.
 Click on this image for an overview of 175 photos of the huge Woodstock spectacle.
TRAFFIC JAM
The organisation got down immediately but the Bethel residents had read about the worries in Wallkill:
drugs, traffic, sewage and water. Public fury mounted once more. They did not like at all the
perspective having tenthousands of hippies in their backyard. A variety of attempts to stop the
festival, failed.
The opposition plotted a last-minute strategy to stop the show: a human barricade across Route
17B on the day before the concert. As soon as this news was on national radio the consequences
were disastrous: from Tuesday on the roads to Bethel were crowded with people on their way to the
concert. The traffic jam just grew spectacular in the course of the week. Spectators just left their
cars everywhere and camped in gardens and on the festival grounds. Woodstock's momentum was
accelerating like a runaway train. At that time, it had progressed so far, any kind of order to stop
it would have just resulted in chaos.
On Thursday the organisation found out, that it was absolutely impossible to move the two
dozen ticket booths into position because there were already more than 100.000 people walking around,
too many cars and abandoned (vacant) tents blocking the way.
'My most vivid memory was that there was this chain-link, Cyclone fence that went all the way
around,' said Bert Feldman, who was working security on the hill near the Hog Farm base.
'I had the uncanny feeling that there were 500 million people there. Suddenly, the fence was no more.
Trampled into the mud. It disappeared like magic.'
Organizer and promoter Michael Lang said he never exactly decided Woodstock would become a free
show. But he did decide to make the announcement. 'It was kind of like stating the obvious,' he said.
And because of the complete inaccessibility to the grounds in a normal way, all the artists had to
be flown in by helicopter.
RED CLAY
The festival should have started on Friday late in the afternoon, but around four o'clock the
completely stoned Tim Hardin en folksinger Richie Havens were the only artists present.
The organizers decided that Havens just should start and continue to play till another singer or
band would arrive. Finally he played more than two hours, before Coutry Joe was pushed on stage.
In turn he also improvised through his repertoire as long as he was able to and was relieved hastily
by John Sebastien (of Lovin' Spoonful) who happened to be around as a spectator.
Later on bands like Sly & The Family Stone, the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar, Joan Baez and
Melanie followed. This last singer made her appearance during a kind of mini-hurricane that turned the
grounds and the entire area at 3 a.m. in the morning into an inconceivable puddle of red mud and clay.
The shock and bewilderment about the gigantic rain flood was total and a lot of spectators
were living in the days that followed in a nightmare. The scenes made one think of a
refugee camp rather than of a summer festival. Army units provided on a voluntary basis the declared
disaster area of food and medication.
Couples lost their children, many did not find again the car of their parents and others lost
consciousness because of drinking acid-water unsuspectingly. The medical care tents were
flooded by people who stepped on pieces of broken glass and above all by drug victims.
Click on the small photograph below to get a picture
of the immense pool of mud inwhich in spite of that, almost half a million people on a few pasture grounds
walked around cheerfully and had the time of their life.......
In case you don't succeed in playing the video, click
HERE for a more appropriate video player.
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BIG NAMES
Saturday was the day of the big names as The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and The Who. The first
played their worst concert ever. It was raining and the members of the band got electrical shocks
continuously because of the enormous water trouble with all the electrical instruments on stage.
Janis Joplin had one of the highlights of her career that resulted in a definitive confirmation
as a rock-icon. For The Who it meant the salvation of the band. Their recently released rock opera Tommy
was after all a major financial diaster and only after the triumph at Woodstock their double album was
sold like a hot dog.
Joe Cocker, The Band, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Ten Years After and others played on
Sunday. As the smashing conclusion there was the breathtaking show of Jimi Hendrix.
He started his repertoire at nine in the morning on Monday and made an unforgettable grand finale.
The massive exodus started after his last chords. It was only after days that the traffic in Bethel
was back to normal again.
For the organizers the festival stood for a financial disaster of at least two and a half
million dollars. This sum was forked out without blinking the eyes by the Roberts family, that earned
back a multiplication of this amount for film rights and many released collection albums in the years
after.
Woodstock also became a magical aura owing to the movie made by Michael Wadleigh. He rounded
up a crew of about 100 from the New York Film scene, including the unknown Martin Scorsese.
Wadleigh couldn't pay them until much later, but he could get them inside the event of the summer.
The crew signed on a double-or-nothing basis. If the film made it, they'd get twice regular pay. If
the film bombed, they'd lose.
Wadleigh's plot ran like this: Woodstock would be a modern-day
Canterbury Tale, a pilgrimage back to the land. He wanted the film to be as much about the hippies
who trekked to Woodstock as about the music on stage. He wanted the stories of the young people,
their feelings about the Vietnam War, about the times. The stories of the townspeople and the chaos.
These would make the film, not just the music.
The movie meant - together with the triple album - free publicity for the artists for many years.
When seeing the movie pictures now one realises that the Summer of Love mainly was a spiritual event,
because for the human body this Woodstock weekend was just in one word: exhausting.
Despite the rain and the excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs there was no violence at
the festival whatsoever. The Woodstock festival was the subculture highlight of the Sixties and of the hippie era.
Click on this image for an overview
of the performers song list and listen to a few original Woodstock performances from 1969.
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