Remembering Woodstock

Andy Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351218641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Woodstock festival of 1969, which featured such groups and artists as the Who, Country Joe and the Fish, Ten Years After, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, is remembered as much for its 'bringing together' of the counter-cultural generation as for the music performed. The event represented a milestone in the use of music as a medium for political expression while simultaneously acting as a springboard for the more expressly commercial of rock and pop events which were to follow. In the thirty years since the festival took place, Woodstock has become the subject of many books, magazine articles and documentaries which have served to mythologise the event in the public imagination. These different aspects of the Woodstock festival will be discussed in this wide ranging book which brings together a number of established and new writers in the fields of sociology, media studies and popular music studies. Each of the five chapters which will focus on a specific aspect of the Woodstock festival and its continuing significance in relation to the music industry, the rock festival 'tradition', sixties nostalgia and the cultural impact of popular music.

Chapter 1
The three Woodstocks and the live music scene

Dave Laing

Writing in 1980 in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, John Morthland described a failed attempt to stage a commemorative event a decade after the first Woodstock festival and confidently asserted that ‘if any proof was needed that rock festivals were a thing of the past, surely this was it’ (Morthland, 1980, p. 338). Unfortunately for him, rock festivals were to become very much a thing of the present and future to the extent that they remain one of the dynamic aspects of popular music in the early twenty-first century.

For example, Woodstock 1969 was only the first of three successful Woodstock festivals. Both the 25th and the 30th anniversaries of that event were marked by large-scale outdoor music events held in different parts of upstate New York to the Yasgur’s farm site. This chapter will discuss the three Woodstock events in the context of the evolution of live music and its business over the period linking 1969 to 1999 and beyond.

In particular, the chapter examines three aspects of this evolution: the evolution of music festivals and their status as carnivalized spaces; the development of the live music business, especially the move from entrepreneurship to corporatization; and finally the ‘deterritorialization’ of the live event through sound recordings, films and television. These will be discussed after descriptions of the anniversary Woodstock events.

Woodstock anniversaries

The Woodstock 25th anniversary festival (Woodstock II) was held 12–14 August 1994 in Saugerties, New York. Some aspects were similar to the original festival.

First, the weather was unseasonal, with the 840-acre site turning into acres of mud. In 1969 the Rolling Stone magazine’s article about the Woodstock festival was headed ‘The View From The Mud’ (Lombardi, 1974, p. 611) although Robert Draper’s subsequent unauthorized history of the magazine suggested that its reporting team were able to escape the mud and return to their hotel rooms (Draper, 1990, p. 104). In 1994 it was mud in the mosh pit (not a survival from 1969!) that was said to be responsible for many of the 750 casualties taken to local hospitals with minor injuries.

Second, although some 190 000 people paid $135 each for tickets to Woodstock II, a large proportion of the audience (estimated at 100 000) got in without paying. Numerous others with tickets were unable to get into the show because of a lack of parking spaces! Reporting on the event in Billboard magazine, Melinda Newman wrote: ‘though it’s only 10 miles from our hotel to the parking lot, it took an hour to get there. There are 1000s of people walking along the road balancing laundry baskets full of beer on their shoulders. Down the road, people are cutting holes in the fence and sneaking in for free’ (Newman, 1994, p. 17).

The differences between 1969 and 1994 were equally striking. First, unlike the first Woodstock, the 1994 event was heavy with corporate sponsorship – principally from PolyGram Diversified Entertainment, a subsidiary of a major record company, that co-produced the event and from Pepsi which contributed $3 million. The amplification set-up included 500 loudspeakers, 200 microphones and 12 miles of audio cable. The event consumed 9 megawatts of electricity. Production costs were over $30 million, including fees of over $300 000 for leading performers: these included 1969 survivors Crosby, Stills and Nash but also grunge favourites Green Day and hard rockers Aerosmith. Revenues from ticket sales ($25.6 million), sponsorship ($3 million-plus) and concessions ($2 million) covered these costs.

And Woodstock II had a crucial extra audience beyond the muddy fields of Saugerties. There were to be (as in 1969) the albums of the festival and the movie of the event. But on the two days of the event itself there was syndicated television coverage to 290 000 pay-per-view (PPV) customers watching in real time in the US and in recorded form to 26 foreign networks serving 98 countries. Woodstock II reached Europe on the French network MCM, Premiere, BSkyB and the BBC. The festival was taped and relayed by satellite to 30 African countries on M-Net and other networks. Poly-Gram Diversified Entertainment received a further $12.5 million for these television rights (Financial Times Music and Copyright, 1994). Apart from the weather and the discomfort of the audience – a British journalist commented that it was what the Flanders battlefield must have been like – this was as perfectly managed a media event as the 1990s could effect. The event was synergized and cross-collateralized. The fans in the muddy field were extras for the PPV coverage.

In contrast, the financial structure of the first Woodstock festival was highly unorthodox and shrouded in confusion. Elliott Tiber was a youthful local motel manager who describes in his memoir, Knock On Woodstock, how he helped the long-haired festival organizer Michael Lang run the gauntlet of a queue of hostile farmers to deposit $250 000 in cash at the local bank (Tiber, 1994, p. 138) and Robert Stephen Spitz explains how the organizers’ debts could be paid off only by selling the film rights to Warner Bros which in turn made very large profits from the movie’s $50 million-plus box office takings (Spitz, 1979, p. 488). Marc Eliot, however, challenges this image of hippie idealism mixed with financial incompetence. Using anonymous testimony, Eliot claims that ‘to those more directly involved, those three days in the Catskills symbolised what to them sixties rock had become: the selling of progressive idealism for corporate profit’ (Eliot, 1990, p. 147).

Before any live albums from the 1994 event could be issued, the television coverage and the publicity immediately boosted sales of the current albums by Woodstock II performers Sheryl Crow, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails and others. But the biggest boost was for an act who couldn’t make it to Woodstock II. Four albums by Jimi Hendrix re-entered the US charts in August 1994. In addition, Warner Bros, owners of the audio-visual rights to the 1969 festival and PolyGram’s rival, took advantage of the publicity surrounding the 1994 event to issue a director’s cut of Woodstock: The Movie as well as CD-ROMs and CDs (with previously unreleased tracks) of the first Woodstock.

If Woodstock II retained some of the aura surrounding the 1969 event, despite its entanglement with the corporate rock, the 1999 festival (Wood-stock III) was almost totally free from the idealism of 1969.

Woodstock III took place 23–25 July at Griffiss Park, a former US airforce base near Rome in New York State. Nobody seemed to notice the coincidental link to Joni Mitchell’s song Woodstock whose lyrics (inspired by the original event) referred to a dream in which the singer saw bombers becoming butterflies.

None of the artists from the 1969 event took part, except for Jimi Hendrix, a laser projection of whose 1969 performance was presented as the closing sequence of the festival! Otherwise, only the promoters, Michael Lang and John Scher, provided a link to the previous Woodstocks. Lang was an organizer of the original event and Scher had been the PolyGram executive in charge of the 1994 festival. With tickets costing $135, Woodstock III drew a similar number of paying customers to the 1994 event 190 000 people paid a total of $28.9 million, making it the biggest concert event of 1999 – but this time the freeloaders were fewer – only 25 000. However, this was still only about half of the 400 000-plus who attended the first Woodstock festival.

Faced with the fragmentation of American pop, the 1999 organizers decided to introduce extra stages and to acknowledge the fragments. The bill included a smattering of black acts (James Brown, Ice Cube, Kid Rock), singer-songwriters (Alanis Morrissette, Elvis Costello), and ‘traditional’ metal (Metallica, Megadeth). But the dominant musical element was contemporary rock and rap metal, personified by such acts as Korn, Rage Against the Machine, Limp Bizkit and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The conditions at the site were characterized by high temperatures (26–34°C), even higher prices (hamburgers cost up to $20) and by riots, assaults and arson. On the final day, fires were started on the site and rapes occurred during violent scenes in the mosh pit while Limp Bizkit was performing (Rothman, 1999). When John Scher appealed for calm, the band’s frontman Fred Durst gave the crowd an ambiguous message: ‘They want us to ask you to mellow out. They said too many people are getting hurt. Don’t let nobody get hurt, but I don’t think you should mellow out’ (Smith, 2000, 2).

The event was covered live by MTV and was available throughout on pay-per-view television for $89.95. In October, the double album, Woodstock 99, was issued by Sony. One disc consisted of rock material; the other included examples of all the other music styles. The album was not a hit.

Woodstock and the outdoor music festival

The Woodstock festival was part of a distinct history of (non-classical) outdoor music festivals in the US stretching back to the early twentieth century.

The earliest festivals were rural events, often celebrating local styles and skills in music and folk dance. The first such event was probably the Georgia Old Time Fiddlers Convention held in Atlanta in 1913. According to Atlanta music historian Wayne W. Daniel: ‘From forty to a hundred picturesque musicians flocked to the city auditorium to clown and fiddle – each hoping to win the title of state fiddling champion, a gold medal and a monetary prize of about fifty dollars’ (Daniel, 1990, p. 23). A three-time winner of the convention was Fiddlin’ John Carson, generally held to be the first hillbilly or white rural musician to make a commercial recording, in 1923.

The final Atlanta convention was held in 1935, its demise being blamed on the corrosive influence of radio and the phonograph on traditional rural fiddling styles. But similar events survived into the 1960s. In that decade, the New York Times critic Robert Shelton attended an Old Time Fiddlers Convention at Union Grove North Carolina. The event had been first held in the 1920s and, almost half a century later, was still characterized by ‘the scrape of the fiddle, the ring of the banjo and the cry of the human voice’ (Shelton, 1975, p. 26).

Another antecedent of the modern outdoor festival was the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival of Asheville, Carolina. This was founded in 1928 by Bascom Lamar Lunsford, ‘a local lawyer, collector, balladeer, banjo picker and square dancer’ as an adjunct to the city’s annual Rhododendron Festival (Cantwell, 1994, p. 32). Although Lunsford was ‘conservative in politics and manner’ and, in selecting performers for his festivals, ‘would not book a hellraiser or a rogue, types not unknown either in folk music or in mountain society, and certainly not a convict or a tramp’, he inspired the foundation of a National Folk Festival first held in St Louis in 1934 (ibid, p. 33).

The folk revival of the 1960s gave rise to hundreds more festivals at campuses and elsewhere. In an associated genre, the first of hundreds of bluegrass music festivals was held at Roanoke, Virginia in 1965 (Rosenberg, 1974, p. 19). Although the types of music featured may have changed, the character and atmosphere of such events continues to imbue hundreds of annual festivals in North America and Europe in the early twenty-first century. The following description of a typical weekend bluegrass festival in Georgia in the 1970s could apply equally to numerous folk music, blues or cajun music events in the present day:

Amateur and professional bands took turns performing on stage in sets that varied in length from fifteen minutes to an hour, depending on the number of bands engaged to perform. Friday night and Saturday night shows frequently lasted until after midnight. Fans began arriving Friday and most did not leave until the last note was sounded on Sunday. Festivals were touted as family affairs and all ages attended, while the adjacent campgrounds – a must at any festival – were filled with all styles and sizes of tents, pickup campers, vans and motor homes. Before, during and after the stage entertainment, amateur musicians gathered in small groups around the parking lots and campgrounds for impromptu jam sessions. (Daniel, 1990, p. 223.)

The informality and democratic tenor of such events was common to the plethora of ‘free festivals’, ‘human be-ins’ and other gatherings that drew fans of the new rock music from 1965 onwards in California (Rycroft, 1998), but also in England and elsewhere. Such events were the prelude to the pivotal years of 1967–69 when Woodstock was preceded by the small-scale and idyllic Monterey Pop and followed by the nightmarish Altamont.

While much of the Woodstock audience came with a ‘free festival’ attitude, the direct precursors of Monterey and Woodstock as music shows were the jazz and folk festivals held at Newport, Rhode Island from the 1950s (see Hentoff, 1962, pp. 82–95). These differed from the more free-form folk events in their precise programming of numerous well-known musicians performing in series over several days.

In the 1950s this was a novel method of presenting music to audiences used to the single evening performance at a concert or jazz club featuring at most a few acts. In his account of the foundation of the jazz festival in 1954, John Hammond emphasizes this unknown and untried element: ‘a jazz festival implied a number of concerts performed over several days to essentially the same audience, something no one had tried before’ (Hammond, 1981, p. 336).

Like Woodstock was to be, the Newport festivals had been regarded with suspicion by local dignitaries and authorities because of the way in which they imported an aura of oppositional lifestyle and even the occasional riot to the conservative East Coast State of New Hampshire. These festivals also continued well into the 1960s, overlapping with the emergent rock scene. The 1965 Newport Folk Festival was the site of one of rock music’s formative moments when Bob Dylan’s electric music was almost silenced by an irate Pete Seeger who had to be restrained from unplugging the amplification system. The folk festivals also epitomized an anti-commercial ethic by paying a common fee of $50 to all performers from ‘Bob Dylan to prisoners from a Texas chain gang’ (Cantwell, 1994, pp. 308–309).

Such economic egalitarianism in the festival business did not survive the commercial boom that Monterey unleashed. According to Rolling Stone, between June 1967 and July 1970 ‘approximately 2.5 million young people attended about 30 festivals in the US and a further 30 were planned after Woodstock which didn’t happen’ (Lombardi, 1974, p. 611). Rock festivals also spread to other countries. Some Woodstock organizers helped put together the Mount Fuji event in Japan in 1971, several events of the early 1970s were hailed as ‘the Italian Woodstock’, Woodstock inspired the Roskilde festival in Denmark, first held in 1971 and still running, while in England there were the second and third Isle of Wight Festivals of 1969 and 1970 which drew audiences of 80 000 and 200 000 respectively (Hinton, 1995). The 1969 Isle of Wight event was widely regarded as sharing the ‘love and peace’ vibe of Woodstock itself:

A 2,000 watt amplification system ensured that not only the audience but the prisoners in Parkhurst and the monks at Quarr monastery heard the music. All leave for the island’s 150 police was cancelled, but as a senior officer commented ‘everything has been very good tempered. The kids have been well behaved and there has been no serious trouble’. (Clarke, 1982, p. 37.)

Some authors have regarded Woodstock as unequivocally negative in terms of the supposed community of interest between performers and audiences. Simon Frith wrote that the event ‘dramatised the total separation between rock’s performers and consumers’ (Frith, 1981, p. 222) while the arch miserabilist Martha Bayles fulminated against the ‘hugely powerful ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and table
• Notes on contributors
• General Editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 The three Woodstocks and the live music scene
• 2 ‘1, 2, 3 What are we fighting 4?’ Music, meaning and ‘The Star Spangled Banner’
• 3 ‘This is your Woodstock’: Popular memories and political myths
• 4 ‘Everybody’s happy, everybody’s free’: Representation and nostalgia in the Woodstock film
• 5 Reporting Woodstock: Some contemporary press reflections on the festival
• 6 The Contradictory aesthetics of Woodstock
• 7 ‘Unsafe things like youth and jazz’: Beaulieu Jazz Festivals (1956–61), and the origins of pop festival culture in Britain
• 8 A public transition: Acoustic and electric performances at the Woodstock festival
• 9 Still picking children from the trees? Reimagining Woodstock in twenty-first-century Australia
• Afterword Country Joe McDonald Remembering Woodstock
• Index