Woodstock: An American Icon

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Recommended: Essays on the history of Woodstock

Many times, people have very different ideas about what makes an icon. Our icons may be singers, dancers, athletes, actors or politicians. We may not even know what the criteria would be for an icon, but we know one when we see it. One of the greatest American icons in history is the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival. To say that Woodstock isn’t an icon would be like saying that the music wasn’t a dynamic character in the movie “Star Wars” or “The Phantom of the Opera”. An Icon must encompass a distinct ideology, and nothing ushered in our generation’s journey to the end of the innocence like Woodstock.

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”.

Once August 15 finally arrived, all the pieces were in place for this monumental undertaking. It was to go on for four days instead of the three that it was advertised. It was to start on Friday, August 15th and end on Monday, August 18. The promoters had printed up 60,000 tickets to be sold making it the biggest concert event of it’s time. There was very little promotion of it

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and the event promoters could only afford to pay $1500.00 to each of the 25 bands that performed. That didn’t seem to matter to David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. He was quoted as s...

... middle of paper ...

...g force. One thing that I am certain of is that Woodstock, like any icon, should have never been duplicated. They attempted this in 1994 and again in 1999. Sequels never measure up to the original. People even try to imitate icons with no success. Madonna and Anna Nicole Smith both tried to be Marilyn Monroe, but there is only one Marilyn. To be able to recreate Woodstock, you would also have to be able to recreate Vietnam, The Civil Rights Movement, and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The fact that Woodstock can’t be copied is what makes it an Icon. I only wish that I could have been there.

Works Cited
Young, Jean and Michael Lang. Woodstock Festival Remembered. Ballantine Books: 1979

Landy, Elliott. Woodstock 1969-The First Festival. Square Books: 1994

Tiber, Elliott. Knock on Woodstock. Festival Books: 1994

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