“3 Days of Peace and Music” and Woodstock

Woodstock began on August 15, 1969 in Bethel, New York after officials in the town of Wallkill got concerned with the festival and backed out. Half a million people were waiting for the festival to start often known as “3 days of peace and music” which is now known as Woodstock. Woodstock itself was a successful music festival but the millions of people came with lots of disasters. There was a last minute venue change along with bad weather and the amount of people attending brought along “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” along with lots of rain.

Woodstock was a great celebration and is known and experienced to this day.

Woodstock became a free concert once the venue and the performers were securely scheduled. There was a lot that was still needed to be done with just a month away from the concert after finally finding the new venue in Bethel. Once people started arriving for the festival a couple days before the concert, things were not done on the list of things to do. The fences and gates along with the ticket booths were not set up. With theses events occuring, the team of four who were in charge of the event decided to make Woodstock free admission. It was expected to have 50,000 people attending but by August 13th there were almost that amount of people camped out in location and over 100,000 tickets already sold. With the thousands of people on the land where the event Woodstock was being held the people in charge started to realize they needed to add more facilities for the event. The tons of people caused backup of traffic, traffic jams on the roads, and the highways leading people to get out of their cars and leave them on the roads to walk the rest of the way to the venue on their own.

The audience of Woodstock was very diverse which showed greatly the rapidly changing times during the 60s. A lot of people when they hear Woodstock they think directly to the word hippies who were people who often felt as if they were alone in society due to the events of materialism states the history channel. During 1969, the country was in the Vietnam War, where the conflict of young people arouse because they did not agree to this war. During this time was the era of the civil rights movement which addresses the struggle of African Americans to gain equal rights to those of whites, equal opportunity in employment, education, the right to vote and the right to equal access to public facilities along with the right to be free. The front page of the New York Times paper from August 1969 shows an article of U.S. officials who see pupil integration doubling in the south, and under this headline it states: “Expected Rise This Fall to 40% Applies to Negroes Entering White Schools” which demonstrates the civil rights movement with southern compliance with law could be greater than in other areas. There were many cases that dealt with this idea such as Brown vs Board of Education, which included five cases to this movement. The Brown Vs Board cases were decided by the Supreme Court to end racial segregation in public schools. People all throughout the 60s were fighting for the civil rights movement. Through these hard times and protests, people found music as a way to escape, as some people do to this day. Woodstock was a way for people to listen to music and only be thinking and engaging with the music instead of the problems in the world and to have a sense of unity and peace among people.

The crowd at Woodstock experienced lots of bad weather which then caused mud and the problem of lack of food, water, sanitation, leaving the environment of Woodstock to be awful and harmful for humans. Drugs were very apparent and used at this festival which some people believed to be the reason why there was a lack of violence due to the psychedelic drugs being taken. Hippies had the stereotype to be advocating for “love and peace, not war”. Safety and security issues had doctors, EMTS, and nurses all had a tent at the festival. It was reported that most injuries were very minor and if anything else there was food poisoning and wounds due to not wearing shoes to the festival. It was reported that eight women experienced miscarriages during this festival and one teenager was run over by a tractor, killing her on impact and another person died due to drugs. Off- duty police officers were banned from the festival which lead to the security to be scarce. With 500,000 people they needed lots of police to be there but did not have enough with the amount of people on the farm. Luckily, they contacted a Hog Farm to help them which set up a playground and a free food kitchen and a tent to assist people who were not well from being on drugs.

There were thirty-two musicians who performed at Woodstock, starting on Friday, August 15th. The legacy of Woodstock: Woodstock ended on Monday, August 18th after Hendrix performed and left. It was noted that the problems that occured arriving to Woodstock also occured when trying to leave the festival. The roads and highways became jammed and stuck as they tried to travel back home. Not to mention cleaning up the festival was a huge task that required working on it for a while that costs thousands of dollars. Later, in 2006 there was a hill that was used for the Woodstock festival and it is today usually in pavilions outside. The farmer who gave his land for the festival in 1969 made a comment that in summary said he loved how they proved to the world that tons of people can come together and experience and escape three days of music and fun.

On the front page of the New York Times newspaper from August in 1969 states: “Woodstock: Like It Was” which is the beginning article of the topic I have picked. In the minds of people who did not attend the event saw the event as starting out as a disaster which would cause the government to call out the national guard (hurricane camille). News reports showed the awful traffic jams and the shortages of food, limited sanitary facilities, and “bad trips” on drugs. Lots of adults saw this as inevitable with the rootlessness of “today’s youth”, but then their opinions changed when they learned about Woodstock due to the fact it was the best rock music festival ever held. The newspaper stated the young people were oblivious to the discomfort of the conditions but that they were well behaved for such a huge crowd and that they seemed to be at peace with themselves. American culture seemed to have produced a new kind of mass phenomenon. This newspaper article is an interview with questions and answers of the people who were there and to ask questions that adults had. They interviewed five young men and one young woman all from comfortable middle class backgrounds and all agreed they would not have missed this event for anything.

On page 30 of the newspaper it continues the article of Woodstock: Like It Was In Words Of Participants at Musical Fair.They said the weekend was not just significant because Jimi Hendrix, The Whom or the Jefferson Airplane all performed but that it was for their generations future and the country’s. The first set of questions were asking them about why they went and if they were prepared at all and they answered all they cared about was being there and hearing the music and they did not really think or prepare for their needs. They commented on the atmosphere of the people and how excited everyone was. The society was described as the proportion being more whites than black, the age group was young teens. Participants stated they experiences a sense of community which they most likely had not felt in a long time during the hard times of war, segregations, and disagreements with protests. One guy said everyone came there to be able to express their own life style and to be together. The girl said everything was shared, tents and food. The kids were all asked to pick up trash and help other people with their bad trips and everyone stepped up to help each other in this sense of community.

They said it wouldn’t have been as peaceful without the drugs and that the drugs were a part of society now. Main picture on the page was a picture of a small portion of the mass of people looking calm and at peace with themselves and the environment. There was a doodle made by one of the participants in the interview that said “together people” with an abstract doodle. Some of the people had taken part in the political fervor in last year’s democratic convention in Chicago and some had been in peace marches and campus protests. One guy said he spent his summer rebuilding a poor black families home. The environment was said to be apolitical, Chicago was said to be very political and Woodstock was almost as if government, politics, and laws didn’t exist said Jimmy. Bill said politics were aware because you’d see the police and think of the Vietnam war and the helicopters flying in. The search for new experiences were shown through the spread of drugs and shows their mind being open and the people in their generation felt a lot more free. The industry was booming and things were starting to get bigger and better with inventions during this time of the 60s, shown throughout the paper in different articles.

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