• The Jeff Beck Group was scheduled to perform at Woodstock, but failed to make an appearance due to the band's break-up the week before.
• Iron Butterfly was stuck at an airport, and their manager demanded helicopters and special arrangements just for them. They were wired back and told, as impolitely as Western Union would allow, "to get lost", but in other 'words'.
• Neil Young joined Crosby, Stills & Nash, but refused to be filmed; by his own report, Young felt the filming was distracting both performers and audience from the music. Young's "Sea of Madness," heard on the album, was actually recorded a month after the festival at the Fillmore East dance hall.
• Joni Mitchell was slated to perform but her agent informed her that it was more important that she appear on "The Dick Cavett Show" on Monday, with its national audience, rather than "sit around in a field with 500 people." Ironically, David Crosby & Stephen Stills as well as Jefferson Airplane (who all performed at the festival) also made it to the show. She wrote and recorded the song "Woodstock" that was also a major hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
• Canadian band Lighthouse was originally scheduled to play at Woodstock, but in the end they decided not to, fearing that it would be a bad scene. Later, several members of the group would say that they regretted the decision.

Refused invitations

• The promoters contacted John Lennon, requesting The Beatles to perform. Lennon said that he couldn't get the Beatles, but offered to play with his Plastic Ono Band. The promoters turned him down.
• The Doors were considered as a potential performing band, but cancelled at the last moment. Contrary to popular belief, this occurrence was not related in some fashion to lead singer Jim Morrison's arrest for indecent exposure while performing earlier that year; the cancellation was most likely due to Morrison's known and vocal distaste for performing in large outdoor venues.^[3] There also was a widely spread legend that Morrison, in a fit of paranoia, was fearful that someone would take a shot at him while he was onstage.^{[citation needed]} Drummer John Densmore attended and can be seen on the side of the stage during Joe Cocker's set.
• Led Zeppelin were asked to perform, their manager Peter Grant stating, "We were asked to do Woodstock and Atlantic were very keen, and so was our US promoter, Frank Barcelona. I said no because at Woodstock we'd have just been another band on the bill." "Led Zeppelin: The Concert Files", Lewis & Pallett, 1997, Omnibus Press, ISBN 0.7119.5307.4
• Jethro Tull refused to perform, claiming that it wouldn't be a big deal.
• The Moody Blues declined to perform, because they were booked for another event in Paris at the same time and decided to play there instead of Woodstock, a decision they later regretted. They were promoted as being a performer on the third day on early posters that listed the site as Wallkill.
• Tommy James and the Shondells declined an invitation. Lead singer Tommy James stated later, "We could have just kicked ourselves. We were in Hawaii, and my secretary called and said, 'Yeah, listen, there's this pig farmer in upstate New York that wants you to play in his field.' That's how it was put to me. So we passed, and we realized what we'd missed a couple of days later."
• The Clarence White-era Byrds were given an opportunity to play, but refused to do so after a melee during their performance at the Atlanta Pop Festival earlier that summer^[when?].
• Paul Revere & The Raiders declined to perform.
• Bob Dylan was in negotiations to play, but pulled out when his son became ill. He also was unhappy about the number of hippies piling up outside his house near the originally planned site.^[4] He would go on to perform at the Isle of Wight Festival two weeks later. At the June 30, 2007 concert at Bethel Woods, the original site of the Woodstock festival, Dylan joked (just before he performed 'All Along the Watchtower' - a song associated with Jimi Hendrix): "It's nice to be back here. Last time we played here, it was six in the morning. And it was a-raining. And there was mud in the field."^[5]
• Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention Quote: "A lot of mud at Woodstock. We were invited to play there, we turned it down" - FZ. Citation: "Class of the 20th Century," U.S. network television special in serial format, circa 1995.
• Free were asked to perform and declined.
• Spirit were asked to perform but declined and went on a promotional tour.

Media coverage and The New York Times

As the only reporter at Woodstock for the first 36 hours or so, Barnard Law Collier of the New York Times was almost continually pressed by his editors in New York to make the story about the immense traffic jams, the less-than-sanitary conditions, the rampant drug use, the lack of "proper policing," and the presumed dangerousness of so many young people congregating. Collier recalls: "Every major Times editor up to and including executive editor James Reston insisted that the tenor of the story must be a social catastrophe in the making. It was difficult to persuade them that the relative lack of serious mischief and the fascinating cooperation, caring and politeness among so many people was the significant point. I had to resort to refusing to write the story unless it reflected to a great extent my on-the-scene conviction that 'peace' and 'love' was the actual emphasis, not the preconceived opinions of Manhattan-bound editors. After many acrimonious telephone exchanges, the editors agreed to publish the story as I saw it, and although the nuts-and-bolts matters of gridlock and minor lawbreaking were put close to the lead of the stories, the real flavor of the gathering was permitted to get across. After the first day's Times story appeared on Page 1, the event was widely recognized for the amazing and beautiful accident it was."

The Abbie Hoffman incident

Abbie Hoffman interrupted The Who's performance during Woodstock 1969 to attempt a protest speech against the jailing of John Sinclair of the White Panther Party. He grabbed a microphone and yelled, "I think this is a pile of shit! While John Sinclair rots in prison..." The Who's guitarist, Pete Townshend, cut Hoffman off in mid-sentence, saying, "Back off! Back off my fucking stage!" He then struck Hoffman with his guitar, sending the interloper tumbling offstage, to the roaring approval of the crowd. Townshend later said he actually agreed with Hoffman on Sinclair's imprisonment, though he made the point that he would have knocked him offstage regardless of his message.

According to Hoffman, in his autobiography, the incident played out like this: "If you ever heard about me in connection with the festival it was not for playing Florence Nightingale to the flower children. What you heard was the following: 'Oh, him, yeah, didn't he grab the microphone, try to make a speech when Peter Townshend cracked him over the head with his guitar?' I've seen countless references to the incident, even a mammoth mural of the scene. What I've failed to find was a single photo of the incident. Why? Because it didn't really happen."

I grabbed the microphone all right and made a little speech about John Sinclair, who had just been sentenced to ten years in the Michigan State Penitentiary for giving two joints of grass to two undercover cops, and how we should take the strength we had at Woodstock home to free our brothers and sisters in jail. Something like that. Townshend, who had been tuning up, turned around and bumped into me. A non-incident really. Hundreds of photos and miles of film exist depicting the events on that stage, but none of this much-talked about scene.

A fifteen-second sound bite of the incident can be heard on The Who compilation set entitled Thirty Years of Maximum R&B (Disc 2).

The film

A documentary film, Woodstock, directed by Michael Wadleigh and edited by Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese, was released in 1970. It received the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. The film has been deemed culturally significant by the United States Library of Congress. In 1994, the "director's cut" was released; it included performances by Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin, who were not in the original version of the film.

Woodstock today

In 1997, the site of the concert and 1,400 surrounding acres was purchased by Alan Gerry for the purpose of creating the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. It opened on July 1, 2006 with a performance of the New York Philharmonic. On August 13, 2006, Crosby Stills Nash & Young performed to 16,000 fans at the new Center — exactly 37 years after their historic performance at Woodstock. A new interpretive center dedicated to the Woodstock Festival and its meaning is scheduled to open in the summer of 2007.^[when?]

In August 2007, the 103-acre parcel that contains Max Yasgur's former homestead was placed on the market for $8 million by its current owners, Roy Howard and Jeryl Abramson. [1] The home, barn, fieldhouse, and acreage, which are listed by Joshpe Real Estate of New York City, have been the site of frequent Woodstock reunions.[2]

A plaque has been placed commemorating the festival. The field and the stage area remain preserved and well kept in their rural upstate New York setting. On the field are the remnants of a neon flower and bass from the original concert. In the middle of the field, there is a totem pole with wood carvings of Jimi Hendrix on the bottom, Janis Joplin in the middle, and Jerry Garcia on top. A concert hall has been erected up the hill, and the fields of the old Yasgur farm are still visited by people of all generations.

There are currently groups of people on the social networking websites like "Myspace" and "Facebook," that support the idea of planning a "Woodstock 2009." This future festival, if carried out, would celebrate the 40th anniversary of the original event. The main problem is that another festival would only be possible if permission was given by Woodstock Ventures Ltd. to use the name "Woodstock," which is copyrighted.^{[citation needed]}

Trivia

• Jimi Hendrix's high E-string broke when he was playing Red House and he played the rest of the song with five strings.
• John Sebastian wasn't originally scheduled to perform. He was enlisted to perform when several of the acts were late in arriving due to the traffic going to the festival.
• Richie Havens's song "Freedom" was totally improvised. He was called back for so many encores that he ran out of songs to sing, so he just picked up his guitar and started singing "Freedom." The song includes lyrics from the Negro spiritual, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."
• Country Joe McDonald wasn't scheduled to perform the first day. He was forced into it because many of the acts that were scheduled to perform that day hadn't arrived yet. He also performed on Day Three with the rest of The Fish.
• Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young almost didn't perform at the festival. The helicopter that Graham Nash and the group's drummer Dallas Taylor were on was less than 25 feet off the ground when the tail rotor failed and it began to spin. The helicopter almost crashed and Nash and Taylor were almost killed.
• Michael Lang once said that his original idea was to have Roy Rogers close the festival by singing "Happy Trails."
• The character named "Woodstock" from Peanuts was named after the festival (Woodstock's appearance was also modeled after the bird in the Festival logo).
• Warren Buffet refers to his annual shareholder's meeting for Berkshire Hathaway as "Woodstock for Capitalists."
• An anarchist group called Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers cut the fences at Woodstock, allowing hundreds to enter for free.

References

See also

• Woodstock '79 (1979)
• Woodstock '89 (1989)
• Woodstock '94 (1994)
• Woodstock '99 (1999)
• Przystanek Woodstock

External links

• 1969 Woodstock Festival & Concert
• "Woodstock: A New Nation", Book excerpt from "Aquarius Rising" by Robert Santelli
• Woodstock at Curlie
• Woodstock Museum

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