 Woodstock
For three days from August 15th 1969, a crowd of 400,000 lived
happily together on farmland close to the village of Woodstock, New
York, USA, despite thick mud and bursts of torrential rain.
They gathered for a rock festival featuring
Jimi Hendrix,
The Who,
Janis Joplin,
The Band,
Canned Heat and
Jefferson Airplane, and as they shared
drugs, cheered and exchanged peace signs, they felt a tide of positivity flow around them. Travelling home on August 17th, they were
convinced that a new era of peace and love had finally arrived.
The Who almost didn't make it on to the stage on
August 17th. Backstage facilities were only a slight improvement on
those that serviced the nearly half a million-strong crowd and the
band had to hang around for 24 sleepless hours, fuelled by nothing
more than a constant stream of LSD-spiked booze. Perhaps not the best
time then, to tell a bunch of nutters from White City that they might
not be getting paid! In the end the organizers threatened to blackmail
the band into going onstage by announcing over the PA that "those breadheads The Who want more money". Thankfully a cheque for $11,200
arrived just minutes before they were due on stage.
Had he known any of this, hippy icon Abbie
Hoffman might have thought twice about gate-crashing The Who's set to
deliver a political speech. Townsend hit Hoffman so hard with his
guitar that he ended up in the photographer's pit. And half a million
people cheered.
Woodstock was the biggest of a wave of outdoor rock festivals that
northern summer. Over 100,000 fans had attended the Atlanta pop
festival in July, and the Newport Jazz Festival pulled in 80,000
people with a bill that included Led
Zeppelin, BB King and
Jethro Tull.
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