Peace and music took over the 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York 46 years ago. “The Woodstock Music and Art Fair” was a festival known as an “Aquarian Exposition of three days.” Woodstock was an audience of 400,000 people and 32 acts that performed outdoors. The festival was a main event in music history and changed the world of rock ‘n’ roll ever since. The festival joined together the 1960s counterculture generation through the music performed. Art and new ideas were the main historical force that changed society August 15th through the 17th in 1969, leaving a powerful message among the Western world. Hippies, or the counterculture, were typically known as longhaired people who wore bright colored clothing and liked to hold up peace …show more content…
signs. The counterculture emerged in the early 1960s. They lived mostly in “hippie districts” found in San Francisco, New York City, and also Chicago. Gardens, head shops, and music venues were located throughout these districts providing an inexpensive and different way of living compared to other parts of the country. Within these districts, the economic history force began to change in these parts of the United States. Change occurred because hippies wanted a lower and also simpler cost of living. The generation experimented with psychedelic drugs and folk-rock music for a different view of life. Music by Bob Dylan and also the Beatles were some of the many artists these young people enjoyed. One of the biggest ideas the counterculture expressed was free love. “Free love was a way to fight against the societal problems with gender inequality, racial discrimination, and the Vietnam War.” Personal identities began to change in the 1960s, especially within the counterculture. Gender roles did not have a large distinction anymore, and racial discrimination wasn’t on many minds. “The New Age of Aquarius” was also on the rise. It was common for the people of this culture to conform to Confucianism, Buddhism, and Western spiritualism. Religion and philosophy took a large turn during this time in the rise of the counterculture as Christianity began to decline. Overall, the counterculture was one of the first generations within the United States to completely change part of the American culture, and see many different ways on how to live life. As the 1960’s progressed, problems in American society sprung due to the Vietnam War. The youth of the middle-class made up the majority of the counterculture, so they had down time to focus their attention on political issues. The counterculture didn’t agree with the cultural expectations of the United States and many of those older than them. Problems were specifically focused on the support some people had in the United States for the Vietnam War. The politics and government history force held a high influence during this time of change. The Vietnam War hurt the young adult population and families of those who enlisted. Some Americans found the movement to reflect the American concepts of free speech and equality, while others thought it reflected unneeded rebellious acts and that it was very unpatriotic. In the end, authorities cut off political gatherings and the counterculture started to collapse once civil rights liberties end of the Vietnam War were complete. During the rise of the counterculture, one of the most peaceful and grooviest events in music history took place, Woodstock.
John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfield, and Michael Lang held the rock ‘n’ roll festival to raise money to start the construction of a recording studio near Woodstock, New York. Roberts and Rosenman financed the festival, while Land promoted the concert. Land had organized a smaller festival, Miami Pop, the year before, so he was well qualified. Roberts and Rosenman were entrepreneurs. Before Woodstock they were in the process of building a larger recording studio in Manhattan. Land and Kornfeld were also involved with the recording studio, but were advised by their lawyer to recommend constructing a smaller studio in Woodstock, New York. Roberts and Rosenman were excited about the “Studio-in-the-Woods” proposal and decided to organize a concert featuring the kind of artists that would be recognized in the Woodstock area for the studio’s funding. So, the idea for Woodstock was created in January of …show more content…
1969. There wasn’t a big enough venue in the town of Woodstock for the concert, so the festival was held at Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm. The farm was in Bethel, New York. Kornfeld’s cousin was neighbors with the nephew of Yasgur. Kornfeld asked his cousin to give Yasgur’s nephew his number to get in contact with his uncle about holding the festival at his farm. Yasgur agreed, and his dairy farm became the most important location of rock ‘n’ roll history. Roberts, Rosenman, Kornfield, and Lang wanted the event to be three days full of peace and love, which is a similar idea of how people like Gandhi organized events and protests for change. By the weekend of the event, a total of “186,000 tickets were sold and no more than 200,000 people were expected to show.” Once Friday night had arrived, thousands of people wanted to enter the Woodstock festival groups. Since the audience was twice than what was expected, the concert became free to the massive crowd. After Woodstock, Yasgur was sued by his neighbors for damages to their properties caused by the festival. Less than a year after the festival, he received a 50,000-dollar settlement and sold his farm two years later. Max Yasgur had a heart attack at age 53 and past away. “His specific role in Woodstock earned him a full-page obituary in Rolling Stone Magazine, which was very uncommon and an honor for a non-musician.” It was a rainy weekend that August, but the rain didn’t stop the Woodstock music and love for peace. The crowd was filled with people from the counterculture generation who appreciated the rock music. Janis Joplin, Santana, Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix were some of the many who played for the massive Woodstock crowd. Muddy fields and roads caused facilities to not be accessible or provide first aid to the large amount of concertgoers. On August 17th, New York Governor, Nelson Rockefeller, called Roberts and told him he wanted “10,000 New York State National Guard troops to come over to the Woodstock music festival.” Roberts convince Rockefeller not to order in the troops, but the Sullivan County entered a state of emergency and had the nearby Air Force help airlift the performers out of the grounds. Jimi Hendrix was the last performer and didn’t go on stage until Monday morning. The audience was only 30,000 people who wanted to see Hendrix’s perform before leaving Woodstock. Billy Hanley put the sound of the concert together. He engineered speakers to be placed along the hills of the farmland. There were also 16 loudspeaker towers going up the 70-foot main hill. The speakers were engineered to provide sound to an audience of 150,000 to 200,00 people, but double the expected amount showed up to the festival. “Systems used for concerts similar to the Woodstock’s set up are referred to as the Woodstock Bins.” Few reporters from outside the New York area were able to attend the Woodstock Festival, although it made national news. The media that covered the first day of the festival focused on the issues of the concert. One headline reads “Hippies Mired in a Sea of Mud.” Toward the end of the weekend, more positive media was produced because parents of the young adults at the concert told the media their reporting was very misleading based on their children’s telephone calls. Kornfeld went to a Warner Bros executive by the name of Fred Weintraub to ask for funding to create a documentary about the weekend. Weintraub put his job on the line and gave Kornfeld 100,000 dollars to make the film. “The Woodstock documentary helped save the Warner Bros Company who at the time was about to go out of business.” A crew of about 100 artists from the New York film scene gathered to help make the film a success. The focus of the film was about the hippies and music performed at Woodstock. The hippie’s feelings about the festival and their thoughts on the Vietnam War was what mainly the crew explored. The documentary “Woodstock” was released in 1970, and received an Academy Award for Documentary Feature. The Academy Award was the success the crew had hoped for. Overall, the festival was very peaceful given the large amount of people who attended.
Woodstock met the expectations of its audience, which was a sense of social peace, quality music, and bohemian like fashion. There could have been potential for disaster, but the crowd spent three days with only music and peace on their minds. The counterculture generation wanted to turn the problems in America into hope for a more peaceful future. Around 80 lawsuits were filed against Woodstock at the end. Luckily, the documentary “Woodstock” helped financed the settlements and paid off the 1.4 million-dollars of debt. Today, the festival field and stage area remain intact, and a concert hall was built within the grounds. The fields of Max Yasgur’s farm are still visited by people everyday. For many, the Woodstock music festival was seen as an achievement of peace and
love.
Four young partners Michael Lang, the manager of a rock band, Artie Kornfeld, and executive of Capital Records, and two venture capitalists, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, created Woodstock. Their original plan had been to build a recording studio in Woodstock, a small town in the Catskill Mountains, which had become a rock center. To promote the idea of the studio, the four partners decided to stage a concert, which they called Woodstock. Naming it after the town in which it was originally going to take place in.
Woodstock started out as the brainstorm of a pig farmer name Max Yasgur. He owned a 600 acre farm in Bethel (White Lake) New York, and offered it free of charge to promote a rock/folk concert dedicated to three days of peace and music. He did this after learning that the town of Woodstock, New York turned down the offer because they didn’t want 60,000 hippies and acid heads converging on their town. Why the festival kept the name “Woodstock” is still a mystery to this day. Woodstock does have a better ring to it than the “Bethel Music Festival”.
Woodstock was created by four young men for the purpose to raise money for a recording studio, but because of the time, politically, it turned into something so much bigger.1 Woodstock was originally supposed to host only fifty-thousand patrons at a small industrial park in Wallkill, New York. However, this quaint fifty-thousand turned into an astonishing five-hundred-thousand people in Bethel, New York.2 The four men, Mike Lang, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld, and John Roberts, had printed out tickets for this event and anticipated selling them for seven dollars for one night, thirteen dollars for two days, and eigtheen dollars for all three nights.3 They decided, when word had gotten out there was a sudden increase in pros...
Acting as a catalytic reaction, the Beatnik Riot put in motion for a new modernized America. Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park in Manhattan, New York was previously occupied by young protestors driven by anti-war and racial aspects. “In the spring of 1961, the Washington Square Association, a community group of homeowners around the square, appealed to New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation to do something about the hundreds of ‘roving troubadours and their followers’ playing music around the square’s turned off fountain on Sunday afternoons “ (Straughsbaugh 1). “The parks commission began issuing permits to limit the number of musicians, allowing them to ‘sing and play from two until five as long as they had no drums,’ Van Ronk writes” ( Straughsbaugh 1). Permitting the number of musicians provoked the traditionalist to become active protestors. The community around the square complained about the ruckus caused by these hippies, racial mixture, cultured young folks. In Greenwich Village an old historical dilemma was of the racial ideas having this heritage people were not in favor of t...
Along with the peak of several movements music began to reach a point of climax. Rock specifically began to flourish in the 1960’s, while expressing the voice of the liberated generation. It is the power of such trends that overall lead to what is known as the greatest music festival of all time: Woodstock Music and Art Fair. The festival started on August 15, 1969 on Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York. Appealing to the time period, Woodstock was designed to be Three Days of Peace and Music. However, many argue that it was more than just a musical art fair of peace, but a historically significant event that shifted American culture. While some regard Woodstock as the beginning of a cultural advancement and the end of a naïve era, others view it as ridiculous hippy festival infested with illegal drug usage. Woodstock cost over $2.4 million and attracted over 450,000 people (Tiber, 1). Despite the debate of whether Woodstock produced a positive or negative effect, it is clear that a note worthy impact was made. When discussing the overall impact of Woodstock it is important to look at the influences and creative plan and the positive and negative effects produced from the festival.
Zeinab Atwa Senior English/ Pd. 3 Ms. Ruiz Dec. 5/ 2017. History of the hippie movement The movement that began during the counterculture era in the 1960s, also known as the youth movement, rebelled against the conformity of American life. The main goal the hippie movement was trying to accomplish was being able to change views and ideas politically, socially, and culturally. However, they mainly aimed at changing cultural and everyday values.
More than any other countercultural group, hippies reflected a deep discontent with technocracy- society’s reliance on scientific experts who ruled coldly and dispassionately and who wielded enormous power. Hippies said good-bye to that and hello to the mystical spirit, oneness with the universe- life as passion, passion as life, harmony, and understanding. The...
Four men named Michael Lang, Artie Kornfield, John Roberts, and Joel Rosenman originally established Woodstock. The men’s initial idea for the festival was to promote the idea of a new recording studio in Bethel, New York, which is where the event actually took place. (Jacksonville.net) Because of the extensive amount of rain that fell before and during Woodstock, the site was changed twice and ended up on Max Yasgur’s farm. (Bethelwoodstockmuseum.com) This resulted in the loss of preparation time. The stage had not been entirely put up and the sound system was dangerously assembled. There were many other problems that occurred as a result of the mud produced during the rain. Most of the gates and fences were not put up which allowed many people to enter the festival for free.(Jacksonville.net) The mud also created a major cleanup project after the festival ended.
During the sixties Americans saw the rise of the counterculture. The counterculture, which was a group of movements focused on achieving personal and cultural liberation, was embraced by the decade’s young Americans. Because many Americans were members of the different movements in the counterculture, the counterculture influenced American society. As a result of the achievements the counterculture movements made, the United States in the 1960s became a more open, more tolerant, and freer country.
Unlike the society before this movement, the hippie did not try to change America through violence, the hippie tried to change things through peace and love. The Hippie Movement was a moment during the mid 1960s through the early 1070s where sex, drugs and Rock-n-Roll, was at the forefront of mainstream society. No one really knows the true definition of a Hippie, but a formal definition describes the hippie as one who does not conform to social standards, advocating a liberal attitude and lifestyle. Phoebe Thompson wrote, “Being a hippie is a choice of philosophy. Hippies are generally antithetical to structured hierarchies, such as church, government, and social castes. The ultimate goal of the hippie movement is peace, attainable only through love and toleration of the earth and each other. Finally, a hippie needs freedom, both physical freedom to experience life and mental freeness to remain open-minded” (Thompson12-13). Many questions are asked when trying to figure out how this movement reached so many of America’s youth, and what qualities defined a hippie as a hippie?
The government and the older generations could not understand their way of life. Hippies were often portrayed as criminals, subversive to the morals and best interest of the public. Although misunderstood, the hippie had a great impact throughout the country, still surviving today in American culture. The term “hippie” itself became a universal term in the late sixties. It originated in a 1967 article in Ramparts, entitled “The Social History of the Hippies.” Afterward, the name was captured by the mass media as a label for the people of the new movement. (Yablonsky 28) Even before this, the word “hip” described someone who was “in” and “down”, wise to what was going on around him. By the 1960s, some of America’s youth created a gap between themselves and their parents. They grew their hair long because it was natural and therefore considered beautiful.
When people hear the term hippie, they think of men and woman in loose clothing with flowers weaved in their hair. Although these men and women did in fact wear these things, they left a significant impact on society. Hippies were a part of the Counterculture movement, which basic ideals were to reject the ideas of mainstream society. The movement itself began with the protesting of the Vietnam War. Eventually, the movement was more than just protesting the war. Hippies promoted the use of recreational drugs, religious tolerance; they also changed society’s views and attitudes about lifestyle and social behavior. The Counterculture movement was the most influential era in the 20th century because the people of this time changed society’s outlook, and broached the topics of drugs, fashion, and sexual freedom.
The sixties was a decade of liberation and revolution, a time of great change and exciting exploration for the generations to come. It was a time of anti-war protests, free love, sit-ins, naked hippie chicks and mind-altering drugs. In big cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Paris, there was a passionate exchange of ideas, fiery protests against the Vietnam War, and a time for love, peace and equality. The coming together of like-minded people from around the world was spontaneous and unstoppable. This group of people, which included writers, musicians, thinkers and tokers, came to be known as the popular counterculture, better known as hippies. The dawning of the Age of Aquarius in the late sixties was more than just a musical orgy. It was a time of spiritual missions to fight for change and everything they believed in. Freedom, love, justice, equality and peace were at the very forefront of this movement (West, 2008). Some wore beads. Some had long hair. Some wore tie-dye and others wore turtle-neck sweaters. The Hippie generation was a wild bunch, to say the least, that opened the cookie jar of possibilities politically, sexually, spiritually and socially to forever be known as one of the most memorable social movements of all time (Hippie Generation, 2003).
Believe it or not The Coachella Music and Arts Festival started out as a protest in 1993. The band Pearl Jam protested against Ticketmaster and all the auditoriums they controlled in Southern California in November of 1993. They chose to host in their concert at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. It wouldn't be until six years later that the festival would be founded by Paul Tollett with help from Goldenvoice, a promoting company and brings thousands of fans out to the Colorado Desert of the very first Coachella Music Festival in 1999. The debut of Coachella was headlined by acts like Beck, The Chemical Brothers, and Rage Against the Machine and was amazing and went quite well for being first run. The first festival as it was could not compare to the ones that followed with even more attractions. In fact the first Coachella Music Festival was held in October and only at the two day event and there was no on site camping due to the madness at Woodstock'99. Many other things happen during and after the first festival including 1999 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival taking $800,000 hit on the inaugural event. That Paul Tollet mentioned in his interview with Billborads Mitchell Peters. They also It was not...