 Rock Festivals: Woodstock, Live Aid and More...
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Woodstock Festival 1969
The sixties' largest festival took place at Woodstock in upstate New York on 15-17 August 1969, with an estimated attendance of 450,000.
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For a few years, the large, outdoor rock festival an idea borrowed from the tradition of folk and jazz festivals begun in the 1950s and from San Francisco's "human be-in" gatherings or "happenings" - became a symbolic expression of the counter-culture.
The Monterey Festival of June 1967, usually seen as the first, set both the musical and the idealistic tane. The effect of so much good music, from Jefferson Airplane to Jimi Hendrix, was confinnation of rock's stature: fees were kept law and profits were donated to charity, thus giving musicians, audiences and organizers a sense of common cause.
But from the start the festivals were asked to carry the ideals of fraternal community while in part their actual effect worked against that concept. The very ad of exposing San Francisco's most idealistic musicians to wider audiences planted the seeds for the break-up of that musical community. And each succeeding festival witnessed to same degree the uneasy coexistence of distant visions, anticipated political upheaval and immediate marketing hard-sell.
In the mind of the general public the festivals provided clear evidence of the threat posed by a radical youth movement. It was not just their political rhetoric, nor the widespread use of drugs; it was the sheer weight of numbers.
The sixties' largest festival took place at Woodstock in upstate New York on 15-17 August 1969, with an estimated attendance of 450,000. Despite all predictions of catastrophe the occasion provided an overwhelming display of camaraderie, and in doing so gave its name to a generation.
It was also an enormous financial undertaking, with substantial payments to the performers setting them apart from their "brothers and sisters" in the audience. The organizers claimed Woodstock made them bankrupt, but after all the assets were counted, including film and record rights, it seems likely to have yielded a handsome profit.
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Woodstock Festival raised hopes of a new beginning.
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Woodstock raised hopes of a new beginning. But by the end of the year, the "dream" seemed over. Widespread violence occurred at the Altamont Festival in December, and a youth was knifed to death during a Rolling Stones performance. This was taken as an assault on the very spirit of the counter-culture itself. But in the course of time idealism re-surfaced.
Wedded to political causes with wider popular support it shaped a festival where, with the benefit of global communicatiorts hook-ups, frustration with the prevailing ideology of self-interest could find positive expression. In this sense Live Aid, the 1985 trans-world concert to raise money to combat famine in Ethiopia, seemed to many the true inheritor of the spirit of Woodstock.
To others it seemed to have inherited the paradoxes of the festivals, and added new ones. In this view the implausibility of rock stars and the music business displaying genuine altruism was compounded by the belief that rock and pop's very existence as a capitalist phenomenon made it part of the reason for the famine in the first place.
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