 An event that was to take 3 days, ended up taking actually 4 days. 3 days of peace and music was the music festival that had 32 acts perform on the sometimes rainy weekend on a 600 acre farm that attracted 400 thousand people. The first musical act to sign the attendance contract was the “Creedence Clearwater Revival”, agreeing to play for $10,000.
As more bands finally agreed to play at the event, the building of the stage and speaker systems were being set up. Speaker columns were set up on the hills on 70 foot towers, the set up was for 150,000 to 200,000 people, but of course, 500,000 showed up. Problems arose at the festival as some opening acts were late getting to the stage due to being caught in heavy traffic. It is hard to understand that for such an event of this size, that no merchandise of any kind was available, no t-shirts or any official souvenirs of the festival were sold. There were posters of the festival program that went largely undistributed, many of them were thrown away in their boxes after the festival. Still during the 3 days at Woodstock there were no reported incidents of violence among the half million people,and still despite the fact that stage announcements and newspapers reported at least two births at Woodstock, to date, no one has stepped forward as a Woodstock baby. And in like many money making deals sometimes a few lies usually help out, permits for the event were hard to get, so the organizers told authorities that they expected 50,000 people while selling 186,000 tickets in advance and planning for 200,000,in the end 500,000 attended and another million had to turn back because of the traffic. People get hungry, and then there was the food problem. Hearing there was a food shortage, a Jewish community center made sandwiches for some of the crowd, the food was distributed by nuns. Still not enough food to go around another way of catering food came about. At the Hog Farm Free Kitchen some 160,000-190,000 people were fed. There is so much information on Woodstock that it is impossible to tell everything about the festival, not to mention stories about all of the bands that performed there, which I didn’t even mention anything about. 1969, what better year to have started an event that has never to be duplicated again. Although there have been 4 attempts to recreate the festival on different sites; In 1979, 1989, 1994 and the disastrous 1999 festival, which was shut down because of riots and violence,commemorative events are taking place across America and Europe. Learn more about the Woodstock Festival of 1969 as KWMC 1490AM the Classic Hits Station presents the “Woodstock Festival”as the classic event of the month,on the “Little Red Rooster Show”. All information and new facts about Woodstock 1969 are by Wendy Johnson and produced by Javier Martinez. |
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