The
Fences at Woodstock: Music’s Allure
Woodstock, a name immortalised in music
history. A simple search for the name ‘Woodstock’ will bring back phrases along
the lines of ‘art and musical festival’, which would be true. However, to see
Woodstock as your normal music festival would be incredibly naïve. In this blog
post, I’ll try to, hopefully, show how Woodstock was so much more than your
modern rock festival, but was instead a component of ‘60s counterculture and
the start of, what Steve Waksman called, ‘a sense of collective purpose’ within
the youth of America.[i]
A short History of Woodstock
Originally
called ‘the Woodstock Music & Art Fair’, Woodstock took place in August of
1969 over the space of four days, from the fifteenth of August to the
nineteenth in Bethel, New York. Woodstock was planned to be a ‘profit-making
venture’, meaning that it was designed to produce a profit for the organisers.
Initially, Woodstock was aimed to be a large festival, with over 100,000
tickets being sold to general public in advance of the festivals date. This was
a vast underestimation of the amount of attention that Woodstock itself would
gain, with the numbers of attendee’s being between 400,000 and 500,000 people.
Woodstock would attract individuals such as Abbie Hoffman in attendance; Abbit
Hoffman is a founding member of the Youth International Party, the Yippies, and
one of the “Chicago Eight”. There were also performances by the son of Woodie
Guthrie, Arlo Guthrie, as well as Jimi Hendrix (Woodstock would be the location
of his famous rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’) and The Who.
As
I mentioned earlier, Woodstock was initially a profit-making venture, this,
however, changed due to the large popularity. The popularity meant that the
fences surrounding Woodstock, separating the festival from the outside world,
began to be cut open or climbed, effectively making Woodstock itself a free festival.
Mass Freedom
Joni Mitchell said, “Woodstock
was a spark of beauty where half-a-million kids saw that they were part of a
greater organism.”[ii].
The ability of the festival to draw vast amounts of young people to a location in
unification no matter race or gender showed music’s power in 1960s culture. The
power of Woodstock itself was symbolic; it showed how the youth believed that
they could only achieve freedom to the fullest extent by coming together as a
group, not separating each other as individuals in isolation.
Woodstock happened during the Vietnam, were people
of similar ages were being sent to fight in a war in which many youth did not
want to participate in. Woodstock would be tied entirely to the Hippy counterculture;
it presented particular an image of youth. The youth became seen as the
population who would transform the existing culture and disturb the political
order within the United States. This would be a population who valued peace and
pleasure over war and productivity. Woodstock created, even if for a limited
time, a society in which the rules, conventions, and their corruptions did not
apply.
Utopia?
However, I’m not going to sell you the idea that
Woodstock created a utopia within society; Woodstock showed the possibility for
capitalists to take advantage of the culture of the youth to their benefit,
with Ellen Willis criticizing Woodstock, calling it ‘bourgeois at its core’[iii].
If looking at the festival cynically, it was just
a group of youths consuming drugs and listening to rock music… but if breaking
away from the morals and standards set by the generation before them isn’t
counterculture at its best, I’m unsure what is. Woodstock would become
immortalised in music and history, with Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Woodstock’, which
would become famous after being covered by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young,
becoming intrinsically associated with the counterculture movement of the ‘60s.
- Connor Smith
[i]
Smith College, Expert: Forty Years Later,
the Significance of Woodstock, https://www.smith.edu/newsoffice/releases/NewsOffice09-025.html (April 10, 2009)
[ii]
Mazza, Jerry, When we were Woodstock,
http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/10394.html, (August 2, 2013)
[iii] Greenhouse, Emily, The
Radical Ellen Willis, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-radical-ellen-willis, (Summer, 2014)
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