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The audience was the star at Woodstock
and the bands were there because of that.
- Remember, the original prognostication was
that there'd be somewhere between 30 to 50,000 people
for the three days.
Half of whom would spend the three days
and the other half of whom would go home each night.
The half that would stay would be sleeping
in campground up there.
Well, as you know, that did not come to pass.
- It was also a chance for our generation
to prove that we could be a peaceful generation
and live together in peace based upon music
and love for each other.
So it was an experiment.
- It was originally meant as a local concert
that would raise money to build a recording studio
in Upstate New York.
It built way more than anyone could imagine.
Hi, I'm Mark Goodman.
50 years have passed since a live music festival held
from August 15th to 18th, 1969,
became a defining, cultural milestone.
Of course I'm talking about Woodstock.
It was a particular alchemy of inspiration,
on-the-fly thinking, an evolving business plan,
mother nature and of course the power of music.
Those three days in 1969 created a moment,
one that still echoes today.
Half a century on, we have a slightly different perspective
on what was then billed as "An Aquarian Exposition,
"3 Days of Peace and Music".
So let's step back for a moment to explore
how one music festival, among several that year,
came to surpass them all and remains the gold standard
for every big cultural event to this day.
After meeting, Lang and Kornfeld quickly bonded
over their mutual love of music.
They started kicking around ideas for something
that would capture what was bubbling under in the culture.
Lang had been spending a lot of time
in an arts community in the Catskills,
where artists like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon
and Ritchie Havens lived,
and he had a passion for attending live shows
around the country.
- What intrigued me was Monterrey.
I was completely taken by that event and that film.
I realized that was something I wanted to do.
- The Woodstock Festival didn't start out as a festival
to begin with.
Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld had this idea
to build a recording studio
in the town of Woodstock, New York.
Woodstock, New York had been a bohemian community,
an artist community, since the beginning
of the 20th century.
A lot of musicians lived there, Bob Dylan,
Ritchie Havens, Van Morrison.
They were all up in Woodstock,
but there was no recording studio.
"Let's build a recording studio.
"And we can raise money to offset the cost of it
"by inviting all those local musicians
"and we can have a party, have a concert."
Well, they approached their business partners,
Joel Rosenman and John Roberts,
and pitched the idea of this recording studio.
Well, they'd already built a recording studio
in Manhattan, they had no interest at all
in doing another recording studio,
but they did like this idea of the party.
"Bring all those musicians together,
"let's do a rock festival."
- Yeah, well the first concept was
what we said the first night, a music and art fair.
It was supposed to be the shining light
of the war babies moment.
It was supposed to be the moment the war babies exploded
into the world and said, "Here we are,
"here's our music and here's our art.
"Here's how we feel," you know, musically
and politically and in other ways.
But music came first, the music part came first.
We did recognize that if it did happen,
it would have a profound affect
on what was happening in the rest of the world.
Because all of a sudden, the powers that be would say,
"Hey, wait a minute, here's the vote for the future
"and they're showing up in mass and they're peaceful."
- The seeds were taking root for this combination
of an art event, music and people.
But how would it be different?
- The Woodstock Festival was not the first rock festival,
that belongs two years earlier, in 1967,
with the Monterrey Pop Festival, the Magic Mountain Fair
and other festivals in the summer of 1967,
The Summer of Love.
But after those festivals, rock festivals sprouted up
all over the country.
Most of them, however, were held at racetracks,
parks that had band shells and of course,
many of them had trouble with the law.
There were gate crashers, trigger-happy policemen
who wanted to see that these young people were kept down.
Several of the rock festivals that preceded Woodstock
ended up in riots.
So when Woodstock was announced
and on the lead up to the Woodstock Festival,
local law enforcement, in fact law enforcement
all over the State of New York and down into New Jersey,
were quite worried about what was going to happen
in Bethel, New York for that Woodstock Festival.
- We had a different vision, a completely different vision.
Our vision was to create a very positive,
a very sort of comforting environment for the audience.
Not to present confrontation in any way.
To make it something that, if you could imagine the best
of what this could be, that's what you're getting.
Then you make of it what you will from there.
So I went to Denver
and I saw the 250 cops
with riot gear sitting in the bleachers
right across from people,
waiting for somebody tryin' to break the gate down.
So into our plan went free stage, free kitchens.
People are gonna come without money,
give them a place to go, give them the music,
give them the experience, why not?
So that's kind of how
I developed a lot of the strategies for Woodstock.
- But now they needed a site.
This quiet area of Upstate New York was not enthusiastic
about havin' a bunch of rock stars
and several thousand young people descend
on their community.
Although the Woodstock team initially struck a deal
for a location at Wallkill,
it fell through just weeks before the event was to kickoff.
The pressure was on,
but for Lang, there had always been one essential.
- It was always about going back to nature.
It was always about organic
because I thought if anything could allow people to feel
at ease, that would be it.
- Enter Max Yasgur,
one of the area's most prominent citizens
and his 600 acre dairy farm.
His son, Sam, looks back.
- It started as a straight business deal.
The summer of '69 was a very wet summer,
we couldn't get hay in the barn.
This was a hay field.
When you have that many cattle
and you've gotta put up enough hay
to get 'em through the winter
and you can't make it yourself, the prospect of having
to buy that amount of hay was daunting, to say the least.
Johnny Roberts and Mike Lang came on,
I think it was a Sunday afternoon,
and said they'd like to rent a field for three days
and this field would be appropriate
because it has a bowl-shaped topography.
Then things changed and they changed fairly dramatically
because some of the neighbors had a very negative reaction
to, what were then called hippies,
coming to western Sullivan County.
That bothered Dad.
I can remember him saying to one of them,
"Look, the reason you don't want them here is
"because you don't like what they look like.
"Now I don't particularly like what they look like either,
"but that's not the point.
"They may be protesting the war,
"but thousands of American soldiers have died
"so they can do exactly what they're doing.
"That's what the essence of the country is all about."
From that point on, he became a champion.
- Word of the festival was spreading
and this was way before social media.
Something was in the air.
- When we started this we permitted for 50,000.
50,000 was never really the number,
the number that we worked on,
that all of my projections were made up of were 200,000
and that's where we thought we'd max out.
When we figured toilets,
when we figured whatever we figured,
we figured something that had to work
for a crowd of 200,000 people.
The permit process went on, I think,
until three or four days before the event.
But we knew people were coming from everywhere,
because I get calls from California,
I get calls from all over the country.
Most of that was just from rumor, from word of mouth.
So we knew that is was gonna be immense,
we didn't know it was gonna be as immense,
but we knew it was gonna be immense.
- But there was still something missing,
namely the artists.
Now with their connections in the music business
and a growing number of advance tickets already sold,
Lang and Kornfeld were able
to convince some acts to sign on, some.
- In order to get some credibility,
we overpaid the first couple of acts.
I think we paid $10,000 for Starship
and the Airplane, then, yeah.
First two or three acts that we nailed down gave
us the credibility for it to start to roll.
As long as the advertising kept running
and the site kept being built,
okay, then I could hold people on a string,
believin' this was gonna happen.
And then once Jimi Hendrix said yes,
then the gates opened.
When Jimi said, "Yes, I'll play,"
and he's the only artist that got like big money for then,
everybody else would play for nothing at Woodstock,
it didn't matter.
- In Upstate New York, the summer of '69 was one
of the wettest on record.
After losing their original site in Wallkill,
the festival pulled up stakes, literally,
and set to work reconstructing the stage
and facilities on the Yasgur farm.
But time and the elements were not cooperating.
- So over the weekend that
we found the site, made the deal with Max
and got the trucks rolling the next day,
we were only 23 days out, or 24 days out of the festival.
We started moving the crews up,
dismantling and reassembling stuff in Bethel.
I think of the 23 days that we worked up there,
or the 24 days, whatever it was,
it rained probably 20 days.
It was unbelievable the amount of water in the ground
and it's all clay.
I remember one piece of road across the top of the hill,
I think I put the road in eight times and it sank.
We'd put the road in and it would sink
and we'd put the road in and it would rain
and it would sink.
Every time I'd have to do something like that,
'cause we'd discover, okay, we can't bury pipe,
for example, we couldn't bury the water system,
we'd have to run across another piece of Max's land,
I'd call up and I'd say,
"Max, I need to talk to you about something."
I'd always get his wife on the phone
and she'd say, "Okay, come over in half an hour."
And Max, he had a heart condition,
he'd immediately go into the oxygen tent
to get ready for my visit.
- As tickets sales increased,
it was clear that security would be crucial
to manage the crowds on the way to Bethel, New York.
But cops in riot gear could easily escalate a situation.
- The concept, I think,
in all our minds from the beginning was
to make it just a very safe, but very embracing environment.
You needed cops.
We had a security force that was going to be made up
of off-duty New York City cops.
So we hired a guy named Wes Pomeroy
to do our head of security.
He was head of the Crime Commission
in Washington under Nixon.
He handled the '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
He had great experience in dealing with crowds
and the right attitude.
You don't want someone
who's gonna be a macho guy just creating
those irritations
and Wes understood it all.
Somewhere there is a questionnaire form
that he used to interview the off-duty cops with
which is just riotous,
but was designed to find out what do you do
when somebody blows pot smoke in your face.
- The Hog Farm was originally tasked
with setting up services like a kitchen, medical tents
and trip tents to help anybody under the influence.
But after the police were pulled,
the Farm had one more thing added to their list.
Hugh Romney, better known as Wavy Gravy,
and Lisa Law were commune members.
- The Hog Farm commune were a bunch of misfits all living
together helping each other out.
The Hog Farm is known for their caring for people
that are loaded and that's why, actually, they were hired.
They were hired in order to help take care
of any drug problems that were going to arise.
Which did because almost everybody
at Woodstock was loaded.
- We spilled off that aircraft
and there was the world press,
standin' around, klieg lights blazin',
cameras at the hip and ready.
This reporter looks at me, he says,
"Oh, The Hog Farm, huh, you guys are the security."
I said, "My God, they made us the cops!
I said, "Well,
"do ya feel secure?"
The guy said, "Well, sure."
I said, "See,
"it's working."
- Feeding people would be another factor.
The Hog Farm was setting up kitchens on the site.
Lisa Law went to see the investors,
Joel Rosenman and John Roberts.
- So I went to the office there
and Joel and John were there and I said,
"I need another $3,000."
And they said, "Well, what for?"
I said, "Well, so far, I've got have of what I need
"and I need some more money to get the rest of it
"because we're going to be feeding a lot of people."
So I bought 1,500 pounds of bulgur wheat
and 1,500 pounds of rolled oats, too,
and currants and things for muesli.
We got trash cans to mix our vegetables in.
Cleavers, Chinese cleavers, onion cutters
and everything to mix the food in.
That's what we ended up mixing the muesli in was
these big trash cans.
We had to think big.
- The Woodstock planners had originally thought
they might get 50,000 people,
but a few days out with things nowhere near being done,
people were continuing to arrive
and those numbers well exceeded the promoters estimate.
That summer, John Conway was a teenager working
at a local gas station.
- We had these people coming in in these Volkswagen vans
and a lot of them didn't have any money.
They had come from pretty far away
and they were desperate for gas.
They literally were begging,
"Could we drain the hoses into the Volkswagen
"so that we can get a little bit further on?"
At first, I was not aware of what was going on.
In fact, I remember people coming in
and asking for directions to Woodstock.
Not knowing anything about this Woodstock concert
at this early point in the summer,
we were literally directing people
to Woodstock in Ulster County.
At some point in time we realized
that there was this music festival
that was supposed to be happening.
These people came very early for the festival
and they didn't have tickets.
That's another thing that I think a lot of people forget is
that there were really two groups of people
who came to the concert.
There were a group that had tickets
who arrived late for the most part,
found this amazing group of people already there
who had come early because they didn't have tickets
and had created this site around the festival.
So it was pretty interesting in that regard
to see this influx into the county.
It was different kind of person than we were used to seeing.
- I walk out and it's like the day before the festival
and nobody's even tried to put up fences
and there's 75,000 people on the field.
I said, "What are we gonna do, ask 'em to leave?"
- But on either Wednesday or Thursday morning,
there were already a few thousand kids sitting on this site.
The way it was related to me is that,
particularly Johnny Roberts became concerned.
The thing that he did not want was a crush against the fence
and anybody getting hurt.
So he ordered the fence taken down
and Woodstock then became a freebie.
When Woodstock became a freebie,
one of the most popular DJs of the day
who happened to have a house up here in the county,
a fella by the name of Bruce Morrow, Cousin Brucie,
announced on the radio that Woodstock was a freebie
and New York City emptied out.
- I mean, I was a little nervous.
They just came rolling in the morning, Friday morning,
and the sky didn't look too friendly,
but as soon as the music finally started,
as soon as we got the music goin',
you could feel where the people were coming from
and what the crowd was feeling.
You could actually feel it, it was palpable.
I knew we were okay.
- By the first official day of the festival,
about 400,000 people gathered in Max Yasgur's field.
More were coming.
There were rumors
that some of the biggest groups might appear.
They didn't show.
John Lennon, stuck in Canada.
Dylan didn't like crowds.
Jim Morrison hated playing outdoor festivals.
Mick Jagger was filming the movie, "Ned Kelly".
But in the meantime, 32 other acts were making
their way to Woodstock, or at least trying to.
Weather, time and other issues had slowed preparations
and the delays would affect performances
throughout the entire weekend.
Around five o'clock,
an anxious Woodstock team enlisted Ritchie Havens
to start the show.
- So here we are at the two hotels they told us to come to,
seven miles away from the grounds,
and I'm sitting there and I'm sitting there
and I'm looking at television, I was sitting there,
I'm looking at television and saying hi to somebody,
it's now 3:30 in the afternoon.
I'm going, "Uh-oh, somethin's wrong,"
because no one's come to say anything.
"What is happening?"
The next thing I know, I hear this really loud noise,
turns out that they found a farmer down the road
with a helicopter.
So we crammed into this helicopter,
two conga drums in-between me and the guy on this side
and the other guy sittin' a little below us.
We made it to the back of that stage
and got off the helicopter
and started to walk around backstage.
The only person I saw was Tim Hardin, the only person.
I went, "Oh, hey, Tim is here.
"Tim, did you go on?"
"No," "I'm not goin' on first."
I said, "Wow, I know I'm supposed to be fifth,"
so that's what I expected.
Of course, an hour later they started chasing me,
'cause I was running,
every time they'd say, "Ritchie, would you go on,
"somethin's gotta happen."
I said, "Yeah, you want it to happen to me, right?"
- During the course of the day Friday,
waiting for Ritchie Havens
and the delay and the delay and the delay, or whatever,
and then looking at what was happening around you.
Then when he finally started to play
and hearing just the roar that came out of the area,
at that point you kinda knew
that it was somethin' different.
- Logistics were making it tough for other performers
to make it to the site.
- I was supposed to do maybe 40 minutes, 35-40 minutes,
and when I walked off the first time,
they said, "Ritchie, you gotta do four more songs."
So I said, "Okay."
I went back and I did four more songs
and I walked off again.
They said, "Ritchie, three more?"
On the sixth time that I walked back,
for real, they said, "Just one more, somebody's on the way."
They couldn't get anybody there.
So I went out on the stage and you see me kind of stalling
because that's exactly what I was doing.
That long intro to what is "Freedom", the song,
was me trying to figure out what to sing,
I've sang every song I knew.
- Yeah, I was 22 years old.
I mean, I look back at other people who are 22 years old
and they look like little kids or something
and it basically scared the hell out of me.
On the other hand, once I got off the stage,
I also knew that there was no gig
that could ever frighten me
because I had just done this one.
Because there was people, like I said,
not just the people in the field,
when we were up in that helicopter,
there was people as far as the eye could see
in every direction, 360 degrees.
It was only a small portion of them
that was actually in the field itself.
It was just sort of like a convergence
of stuff that was goin' on.
- Credeence Clearwater Revival had been
among the first to sign a deal to perform,
but the delays pushed their start time
to three in the morning on Saturday the 16th.
By Saturday, the only way for artists to get in
and out of the festival was by helicopter.
Some didn't make it, others did.
- One of the bands that didn't show up
at Woodstock was Iron Butterfly.
They were stuck at LaGuardia Airport.
They asked for a helicopter to get them to the festival
and by that time, with all the traffic problems
and all the other headaches,
the Woodstock promoters just didn't have the inclination
or the time to honor their request.
The Woodstock promoters sent a telegram
to Iron Butterfly's manager.
The first letter of each line of that telegram spelled out
their response to the request for a helicopter.
I'll let you fill in the blanks,
but it started with f and ended with u.
One of the glaring omissions
at the Woodstock Festival was Joni Mitchell.
She wasn't even asked to perform at the festival.
She had wanted to attend to support her fellow musicians
like Crosby, Stills, Nash, John Sebastian, others,
but her agent said, "Nope, you can't go to the festival.
"You're scheduled to be on the "Dick Cavett Show",
"it's an important show.
"We can't afford to have you miss that
"if you're stuck in traffic,
"or if you can't get out of the festival in time."
Joni Mitchell wasn't at Woodstock,
but she did get the last laugh.
She wrote that famous song "Woodstock"
and even though she wasn't at the festival,
even though she wrote that song from a hotel room
in New York City watching the festival on television,
more than anyone, she captured the spirit
of the Woodstock Festival in that song.
- The weather reeked havoc with the schedule.
Michael Lang had to rethink the entire lineup.
- It was determined, organically,
we needed acoustic.
It was wet, it was rain, we didn't want anybody to fry
so it was a question of who's here, who's ready to go on
and who's acoustic?
And during the dry segments, it was also, who's gotten in
because the roads were a mess.
It was as the bands would arrive
and as we'd have their equipment assembled,
it was kind of who's gonna be ready to go,
and it really happened that way.
I mean Ritchie played for probably almost two hours
'cause I wouldn't let him off the stage.
We had nobody to follow him,
just skip shipping him back out and he kept making up songs.
That's really how I ran the stage.
It was of necessity, it who have we got
and when can we get 'em on?
- I wasn't on the poster, nobody intended for me to play.
I was there strictly because
this was the most happening thing that had gone on
and I wanted to be there and see it.
I wanted to be a spectator.
But because all my friends were backstage,
I practically walked from the helicopter to the backstage,
so people began to go, "Oh, great, when are you playing?"
And I go, "I'm not playing, I don't even have a guitar."
Well, it just so happened that my old pal, Timmy Hardin,
did have a guitar and was there.
So it was somewhere in the second day,
somebody hadn't showed up yet and it had started to rain.
So I get summoned into the sort of war room,
there in the center of the backstage area.
Chip Monck, the voice of Woodstock that we all remember
describing how the purple acid is not particularly good,
asked me,
"Look,
"it's raining, we're having trouble with the sound system,
"we're afraid to put an amplifier on the stage.
"We're figuring we could keep this audience's attention
"if we had a guy with one guitar who could hold 'em.
"You're elected."
So I go to Timmy and I say, "Timmy, I need a guitar."
He lends me a Harmony Sovereign.
This is the great workhorse guitar
for people buying instruments for under $60.
So with that instrument and a slight buzz,
I went on
in the rain and
as it happened,
the rain had stopped by the time I finished.
- Generally when you get on a stage,
well, you never know nowadays,
but before that if you get on a stage,
even in Monterrey, you look down and
your peripheral vision took in the entire audience.
That was impossible at Woodstock.
You had to turn your head to see the whole audience.
It was literally an ocean of people.
I had never seen anything and the stage was huge, humongous.
- Some of the more incendiary performances on day two came
from Janis Joplin, The Who, Santana and Sly Stone.
- So when he sang, "I Wanna Take You Higher"
and then I think Chip Monck through the lights up and down
and everybody's singin' back,
we got caught in the middle of the vibe
of half a million people and Sly.
Just to be in the middle, I mean,
I believed in these things, there is energy and it travels.
To be in the middle of that energy was mind blowing.
I would say that was the highest point, you know, to me
of the festival as far as really enjoying it.
Grace Slick, the most vivid spark that comes out
of a lot of hazy, you know, events
that occurred during the course of that weekend,
waking up to Grace Slick screaming out,
"Time for morning maniac music,"
then going into "Volunteers".
And crawling out of the tent and sliding my way down
through the mud or whatever to get a better view
of what was happening,
when I think about it, that was one of the focal points.
- One band that probably owes its career
to Woodstock is Santana.
Santana was a young band of really talented musicians
in the San Francisco Bay area that were very well known
on the West Coast but had not released
their first album yet.
It was in the can, ready to be released
when they appeared on the stage at Woodstock
and Santana exploded on the stage.
Drummer, Michael Shrieve, banged on those drums
and created an impression.
That's widely recognized
as probably one of the best drum solos in rock history.
Santana's shining moment
at Woodstock was "Soul Sacrifice",
it was towards the end of their set.
Carlos Santana was very high on mescaline,
or LSD, at the time
and he was havin' a hard time keeping it together.
He's been on record as saying
that the guitar neck was turning into a serpent
and he was struggling to keep it in his hand
and play all the right notes.
Everybody was playing at their best.
"Soul Sacrifice" became an anthem for Woodstock.
The Who was at the top of their game
when they hit Woodstock.
"Tommy" had been released earlier in the year,
a month before they had started performing it publicly.
So when they hit the stage at Woodstock,
they played a couple of their old songs
and then launched right into "Tommy".
They did the entire rock opera for an audience
that was probably very familiar with the material.
Just as Roger Daltrey is singing, "See me, feel me,"
at the end of the rock opera, the sun is coming up.
- Performers on day three included Joe Cocker,
Blood, Sweat and Tears, Crosby, Stills and Nash
and Country Joe and the Fish.
It hadn't been planned,
but the need to constantly shift the lineup was a bonus.
- That was a surprise.
No, just the way the first day was basically folk music,
the second day was acts that were really good
and the third day was like one after the other
of killer acts, so it built up.
I think if the killer acts had opened the first day,
it could have been bedlam,
'cause the mosh pit might have been invented
40 years earlier, you know.
- While Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had recently formed,
Neil Young hadn't planned on appearing.
- I don't remember at what point he actually walked onstage,
but I remember he walked on.
But he wasn't supposed to be there, he just showed up.
It's a secret, guys, I'm letting a secret out
and it's been let out, the fact that they were only act,
'cause they were on Warner Brothers,
that overdubbed in the Woodstock movie.
They actually went in the studio,
that's not them live at Woodstock on the record,
although the song, "Suite Judy Blue Eyes" is one
of the classics of all time.
They were blown away, 'cause I know David, too.
So they were just blown away, they were shocked.
David even said, he says, "I'm scared shitless."
He says, "This is our second gig, man."
That's just what he said, you know, and they were scared.
- Because of the delays,
what began as a three-day festival,
spilled over into part of a fourth day.
One of the quirkier moments, Sha Na Na.
- You gotta ask yourself,
how in the world did Sha Na Na end up at Woodstock,
especially sandwiched right in front of Jimi Hendrix,
the opening act for Jimi Hendrix if you will.
Sha Na Na, for those of you who don't know
who Sha Na Na was,
they had a very popular syndicated TV show
in the '70s and '80s, but they were caricatures.
They were doing '50s music and it was a shtick for them.
And they knew it, these guys were intelligent guys,
they were all Columbia students.
How in the world did they get booked at Woodstock,
I don't have a clue?
Except maybe,
Michael Lang was down in the village some night
and somebody said, "You gotta see this group,"
and he saw 'em and said,
"Sure, you wanna come to Woodstock?"
But to put them in the bill,
the second to last act of the entire festival,
right before Jimi Hendrix,
I would think that the brown acid would have been doin'
its work right about then.
- And then one of the most iconic moments of Woodstock,
Jimi Hendrix.
- Quite honestly, I was disappointed,
you know, when he first came.
He came with his manager, Michael Jeffery,
and he came on Sunday morning.
I had a house in the back of the stage,
up on a hill across the road for him,
and I said, "Look,"
and part of the deal was he closes the show,
and again made my way back,
said, "That's not gonna be the best spot for you.
"You really oughta think
"about doing something at midnight, it'll be the high point
"of the night," and blah, blah, blah.
"No, we're closing the show."
Because in those days and I guess it's still true today,
whoever closes is the king, that's the big act.
It's changed somewhat.
People are starting to realize that there are spots
in the show which are better.
In any case, but they insisted so he went up onto the hill,
and I was disappointed about the size of the crowd.
He also had put together a band, "Band of Gypsys",
which was kind of a pickup band, guys from Woodstock.
Good players, you know, Juma, a congo player, good players,
but not a great moment in his musical career.
So the set I thought was kind of mediocre
and there are maybe 30-40,000 people left
and I felt it was a little sad to see that.
The lights were gone
and it was sort of the starkness of the day.
And then he did the "Star Spangled Banner",
it just changed everything.
That was it, it was just one of those moments
that said it all for us.
- Woodstock was now over, leaving behind a major imprint
on Max Yasgur's farmland, not to mention the culture.
After those three-plus days,
we had crossed into something else.
Things would never be the same, ever.
- What also made Woodstock successful was its legacy.
The promoters brought in a film crew
that documented every bit of the Woodstock Festival
and that documentary won the 1970 Best Documentary Award
at the Academy Awards that year.
The soundtrack album, a triple album,
made the music of Woodstock famous worldwide.
And the musicians that played on that album
became the soundtrack of our youth.
It really was three days of peace and music.
One of the lasting impacts of Woodstock is
on the music industry, itself.
The music industry at Woodstock realized
that there is a large, large audience for this music
and that there's a large audience,
not just for the recorded music,
but also for the performances.
Of course, the Beatles had played Shea Stadium,
Candlestick Park, a lot of other large venues,
but they had the house PA,
they didn't have great sound systems.
At Woodstock there was a custom-made sound system
for this venue.
There was attention paid to having great sound
over a large area for a large crowd.
- That was the moment that made all of their careers,
all of their careers.
That was Crosby, Stills and Nash's first gig.
Could you imagine?
They made the record, it was on the radio,
and they got to sing more than a quarter of,
or half a million people, more.
In three days, Woodstock, the Isle of Wight in England
and Blind Faith as a band in the park over there was
over a million and three-quarters of people in three events.
Can't change that.
We're now looking to have that event over and over and over,
and we have it.
It's here, it's in every venue, you know, around
that's open to hear what people wanna do.
So to me, that's the good part.
- But what really sent a ripple out
into the ether was something less tangible.
- It certainly was mythological in its impact
on the people that were there.
I don't think you can exaggerate that.
You could feel that the unity
and the togetherness of that crowd,
you can cut it with a knife.
I mean, you could feel it,
people who were passing through it could feel it,
people on the thruway could feel it.
It wasn't like some mysterious space,
I say it was a real vibe that couldn't be denied.
- I don't know.
I don't know is the honest answer there.
I certainly felt part of the event.
A kind of a humanism that was part of the hippie-ethos
that had a power
and I guess it did give you the illusion
of infinite possibilities.
You know, hippie's never gonna be a bad word to me.
I don't care how out of fashion the various lifestyle.
I may not have my tie-dyed Levi jacket on,
but it's on
inside.
But this rock and roll thing, man, this is like,
and I don't know, it's still goin' on.
It's still goin' on and music, global music,
is never gonna be the same.
We did it,
we did it as a generation, as collection of people.
From the audience, to the sound mixers,
to the camera people, to those goofball promoters
who got this crazy idea, to the venture capitalists,
to the great guy who's cleanin' the toilet,
who's got a kid in the audience and a kid in Vietnam,
we just kicked their fuckin' ass!
- What made Woodstock I think was just
a right time, just a blending of a lot of different things
that all came together, very much by accident, I think.
It was just, boy, a very hard one to word.
Enough people angry about what was happening in the world.
Enough people thinking that the potential was there
to change the world.
There was a lot of hope that went on
at that stage of the game.
It wasn't just a matter of, "Let's go over and get wasted,"
or whatever, it was a matter of,
"Let's try to do something."
- Perhaps the most immediate legacy of Woodstock was felt
just a few months later.
On November 15, 1969, half a million people gathered
in Washington D.C. to protest the Vietnam War.
I was one of them.
The collective power felt
at Woodstock no doubt had an impact on the moratorium.
After those three days in 1969,
that same spirit would find its way into other festivals.
One of the biggest, "Live Aid" in 1985.
I was there, too.
Two major concerts, one held in Philadelphia
at JFK Stadium, the other at London's Wembley Arena,
raised $127 million to fight the severe famine in Ethiopia.
Like Woodstock, Live Aid featured some
of the biggest music acts in the world,
U2, Queen, Madonna, Paul McCartney.
16 years after playing Woodstock,
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunited for the show,
so did The Who.
There would other big music events like Coachella,
Bonnaroo, Glastonbury, Lollapalooza
and there were two more runs at Woodstock, '94 and '99.
- '94 was great.
'94 had a real warm feeling, it was kind of a nice bridge
between the older generation
and we had a lot of parents came with their kids.
We had a lot of the acts from the '69 era
as well as newer acts.
'99 was much edgier.
Much too edgy, actually, as it turned out.
You wind up having to make compromises
because of corporate involvement.
I'm never one who had a problem with art and commerce.
I always thought there was a way,
but you pay a price for it.
So I think that the purity
of what we did in 1969 was unique.
- One of the more recent echoes of Woodstock occurred
when the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
in Parkland, Florida, mobilized
after a mass shooting at their school in February of 2018.
Just a month later, these high school students organized
the global "March For Our Lives" protests,
advocating for stricter gun control laws.
On a single day, 800 simultaneous protests took place
around the world.
1.2 million people joined in, making it one
of the biggest youth protest events since Vietnam.
Arlo Guthrie recalls the same kind of determined thinking
from Woodstock-era kids.
- Most people I knew just wanted to hang out.
Go to school, meet your girlfriend, eat a pizza,
drive around somewhere, look at a sunset or whatever,
play some music, have a good time.
Well that was true for everybody.
We thought we were normal!
And they were tellin' us that we were nuts.
That we were criminals.
That we were acting in a way
that was contributing
to the demise
of civilization
and we knew that they were nuts.
That their way of doin' things had got us to this point.
We thought, you know, we gotta do somethin' different.
So everybody started doin' things a little different.
So there was a whole lot of young people all over the world
who said, "Enough of that, we can always get back to it,
"but we gotta try somethin' different here."
Maybe a little love and peace.
Maybe a little gettin' along.
Maybe a little get away from the fear
and all that kind of stuff would help.
So we actually started doin' it.
These were brave kids who would stand out there
with flowers in their hands,
givin' them to soldiers with loaded guns.
So these were not just some wimpy kids
with nothin' else to do, these were people
who were willin' to face even death at some point.
Because they knew that what they were thinkin' about,
what was in their heart was at least a better alternative
to the way things had been goin',
at a time when people begin to realize
that they do have the wherewithal,
they do have the inner strength to do those kinds of things.
And so that will be the next revolution
that I predict we'll see is that
there'll be hundreds of thousands
and then millions of people, young people,
who decide on their own not to wait to see
what the President says, or who he or she is,
not to wait to see what the Congress has to say,
just in your own heart, you know somethin' right,
you go ahead and you do it.
- I think the lasting legacy is people being heard
and either that's through the music that they express,
the causes that they support,
or what they speak to power to communicate.
And the lasting legacy has to be standing up for right.
Woodstock isn't just about those three days in 1969,
Woodstock is a feeling that lives today
and it lives in a lot of people's hearts.
We hope that young people will look
at the legacy of the 1960s,
the legacy of the Woodstock Festival, and ask themselves,
what do I want from the world today
and how will I get that?
- It's been 50 years since four young entrepreneurs took
their idea for a local festival
at an obscure New York art colony
and turned it into a defining moment of the 20th century.
Clothes may have changed, the music, too,
wars have stopped and sadly started again,
but for those that were there, and for those who weren't,
Woodstock's impact has not dimmed.
It's felt in every impulse to create change,
to disrupt the status quo,
to evolve both culturally and personally.
To paraphrase Joni Mitchell in her famous anthem
about the event, "Life is for learning."
A half a century later,
the lessons of Woodstock are still being revealed.
I'm Mark Goodman, thanks for watching.