The Woodstock Festival
The Woodstock Festival (Woodstock Music and Art Fair, or Woodstock) is a festival of music and a collection of iconic hippie culture of the 1960s. It was held in Bethel on the land the farmer Max Yasgur United States, about sixty miles from Woodstock in upstate New York.
Organized to be held from 15 to 17 August 1969 and accommodate 50,000 spectators, he finally received more than 450,000, and continued for one more day, until the morning of August 18, 1969.
The festival hosted concerts by 32 groups and soloists of folk, rock, soul and blues. The artists pay budget reached a total of 200,000 dollars. This is one of the greatest moments in the history of popular music, ranked by Rolling Stone one of the 50 moments that changed the history of Rock and Roll.
The event was immortalized in the film by Michael Wadleigh, photo by Elliot Landy, the album from the film and finally singing Joni Mitchell's Woodstock, which commemorates the day and reflected by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
The songs played at Woodstock become legendary, like the Star Spangled Banner by Jimi Hendrix revisited in a guitar solo where he imitates B-52 bombing during the Vietnam War, Soul Sacrifice Santana with a solo epic battery, Fish Cheer / I-Feel-Like-I 'm-Fixing-To-Die-Rag Country Joe McDonald with the legendary phrase: "Give me a F! Give me a U! Give me a C! Give me a K! "I'm Going Home Ten Years After, where the guitarist Alvin Lee tries to find a guitarist as the fastest, With a Little Help From My Friends Beatles Joe Cocker taken by the interpretation by Tommy Who and the Freedom sung by Richie Havens.
Genesis
The festival is the brainchild trade. Michael Lang, a young hippie who previously held the Miami Pop Festival, which attracted 100,000 people, would get the recipe for a new festival sufficient funds to purchase his own recording studio, Media Sound. The studio is located in Woodstock, where many have lived stars like The Band, Tim Hardin. Assisted by his neighbor, singer and songwriter Artie Kornfeld, as vice president of Capitol Records (now Laurie Records), he convinced two young entrepreneurs from the city of New York, which he founded with Woodstock Ventures, to invest with him . John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, then aged 24, was broadcast in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times the following announcement: "Young men with unlimited capital looking for attractive investment opportunities and business proposals".
The event was originally scheduled to Wallkill, 50 miles south of Woodstock. The population of the village refused the festival at home. The farmer Max Yasgur (born 1919 and died in 1973) they finally rented his domain, White Lake in Bethel, a plot of 243 hectares for 50,000 dollars (following a lawsuit by her neighbors, the latter was sentenced to their donate 35,000 dollars in damages for the damage caused by visitors).
However, the name "Woodstock" is preserved. The full name of the festival is The Woodstock Music and Art Fair. It was officially held in tribute to Bob Dylan, but it was then in Bearsville, his name was removed from the top of the poster.
Festival
"Three days of peace and music. Hundreds of acres to go. Around the block for three days without seeing a skyscraper or a red light. Make flying a kite. Make yourself a tan. Cooking your own meals and your breathing clean air.
The publicity provided neither the number of spectators (estimated at 450,000), or massive traffic jams that came from, nor rain, nor mud. The programming was disrupted: Richie Havens opened the festival instead of group Sweetwater, stuck in traffic, and the artists who could not access the site were eventually brought to U.S. Army helicopter. They were also used to cater to the crowd as water, food and medicines.
At the end of the first day, when the barriers demarcating the site had disappeared, the organizers decided to give free access "From now on, then this is a free concert!"
The biggest names in the rock scene are present. For some artists like Joe Cocker, Woodstock will be a career booster. Jimi Hendrix closes the festival at the dawn of Monday, August 18: there are only 30,000 spectators.
After the festival
The festival was both one of the highlights of the cons-culture of the 1960s and the hippy culture and the end of flower power.
The area was declared a disaster area shortly after but no violence was reported, however.
Three deaths (overdoses, appendicitis untended and a tractor accident) and two births took place during the event, which also caused the largest bottlers in the history of the United States.
Initially, and due to the large number of people who went free, the festival was losing a lot of money to its organizers, but due to sales of recordings of the festival (audio and video), they became beneficiaries. Indeed, if Woodstock is the important point of the cons-culture and the anti-capitalist "peace, organizers had to resell the rights to Warner to settle their debts.
"If Woodstock became a legend, and this was maintained in the collective world, it is because it is not only a musical event, but also a historical event".
See also Qingming Festival
wikipedia
