50th Anniversary of the Woodstock Music Art Fair

Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, New York — "3 Days of Peace and Music" every bit the poster said.

It's being celebrated with any number of commemorative commodities repackaging versions of the sights and sounds of Woodstock, including a PBS documentary, a 38-CD box prepare and shorter best-of, a Life magazine special edition, streaming packages, T-shirts. And even a box of "vintage" 1969 birthday sweets being marketed as "Woodstock Candy."

The concluding stake was put through the however faintly chirapsia heart of the mass audience free rock festival five months later Woodstock.

The commodification is fitting, since one of Woodstock'south near lasting legacies is the transformation of the live concert experience from free-form expression past music fans with an entrepreneurial aptitude to corporatized theme park.

Big concerts could mean large money but they often meant chaos. With Woodstock every bit a cautionary tale, concert promoters determined that they'd never lose control of the hot revenue-generating mess of the mass live music feel again.

Spotter the PBS documentary and you can encounter why the "dream" of Woodstock has taken on mythic proportions. The euphoria of those iii days equally captured on film is undeniable. In the midst of the Vietnam War-era, this was a coming together of people "looking for answers and other people who felt the aforementioned style we did," as 1 attendee says. Abbie Hoffman (famously thrown off the Woodstock stage by The Who's Pete Townshend) was inspired to write his Yippie paean "Woodstock Nation." Joni Mitchell wrote "Woodstock," describing the "garden" with "bombers . . . turning into collywobbles above our nation."

But it was too a calamity – rain, mud, food shortages, medical emergencies. "Everything that could become wrong was happening," one of the organizers recalled. And however, the fact that it didn't become a major humanitarian disaster only added to the myth. Other festivals had gone incorrect, even experiencing violence. Woodstock, with 400,000 attendees making it several times the size of other events of its kind, had gone right -- even though the crowd far exceeded the expected maximum of 200,000.

The event came to represent the triumph of the anarchy of self-rule. The vibe was all-time summed upwardly by Arlo Guthrie's giddy announcement from the stage most what the throngs of attendees had wrought with their cars: "The New York State Thruway is Closed, man!"

Overwhelmed organizers declared it a free concert. Giving up control was the just way to maintain control. If they had tried to collect tickets, it would accept been a actually unmanageable disaster, dividing a mellowed-out crowd. Instead, they capitalized on the vibe: This is free, but you lot take to piece of work with us on this and wait out for each other. Woodstock was supposed to be about freedom (signified in the improvised Richie Havens performance of that name); it was never intended to be well-nigh free entry.

The final pale was put through the still faintly beating heart of the mass audition complimentary rock festival five months subsequently Woodstock, when the "Altamont Speedway Free Festival" saw a concertgoer'southward murder captured on motion-picture show in front of the stage where the Rolling Stones were performing.

Since then, the concert business has evolved into giant bundle bout "festivals": traveling extravaganzas similar Lollapalooza, Lilith Fair and the Warped bout, and site-specific multiday events such as Coachella, Bonnaroo, the DJ-centric Last Lands festival and a gazillion other corporate-controlled-and-run summer amphitheaters. Traffic and oversupply control, while not perfect, are handled with corporate efficiency. Every bit are the ticket gates.

These days, as critic Ben Ratliff described Coachella in Esquire, the "event-y" musical experience brings "the unmistakable communal surge of We came all this manner, and here, now, in the sweet spot — something's happening!" or, as he added, "the YOLO capitalism of this year's young people with greenbacks."

That'southward a long manner from the "garden" Joni Mitchell sang virtually. But the euphoric anarchy of Woodstock was an impossible business concern model – chaos e'er is. If Woodstock taught us annihilation, it was the meaning of oversupply control, peculiarly when there'south a potential condom hazard at every turn and millions of dollars in the balance.

I remember attending a mid-'90s Lollapalooza festival at the Great Woods amphitheater in Mansfield, Mass., at present run by concert behemoth Live Nation (and long ago renamed to the Xfinity Heart, natch). Sometime after sunset, with the Reddish Hot Chili Peppers going berserk onstage, fans on the general admission lawn began ripping apart the wooden contend that marked the property'due south purlieus in club to fuel a bonfire. Looking back from my primo reviewer seats, I saw what looked like a pagan rite: silhouettes of dancing youths circling the enormous glowing bonfire in the night. Dark projectiles flew through the air. I later learned they were clumps of turf from the lawn.

The side by side fourth dimension I went to Lollapalooza, it was on an abased naval air base in Quonset Point, Rhode Isle. A huge apartment, barren field, with scrubs of grass and segments of tarmac, it was every bit inhospitable equally the flush-toilet Neat Forest was posh. Capacity seemed limitless. And the message from the promoters seemed articulate: You desire to wreck something? Become ahead, it'due south already wrecked. (And we'll still get our coin, thank y'all very much.)

So yes, we're a long way from the garden, underscored in this era of soft-target mass shootings by the countless security lines that snake toward the gate of even the coziest of music festivals, similar the granddad of them all, the Newport Jazz Festival (b. 1954, capacity ten,000). All the same, given the numbers and the risks, even security checks under corporate rule, for the nearly part, create an efficient hum of people moving in and out of venues.

But what corporate music giveth, it also taketh away. Plans for a 50th ceremony Woodstock were scuttled this year.

But what corporate music giveth, information technology as well taketh abroad. Plans for a 50th anniversary Woodstock were scuttled this year after the venue was forced to move and one headliner after some other canceled due to conflicts caused past a noncompete exception that's go standard in operation contracts: the "radius clause," which limits both the mileage radius and the agenda appointment every bit related to said contract. Aside from Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, the Killers and the Raconteurs, the event had been scheduled to include Woodstock veterans such as Santana, Country Joe McDonald and David Crosby.

Even so, whatever the quality of the line-upward at these events or less obvious mod-24-hour interval echoes of the Babe Boomers' footing zero, in that location's notwithstanding the promise of a Woodstock-similar fizz at music festivals, the liberating thrill of finding yourself amongst a mass of like-minded people on the crest of a movement in pop culture from underground to mainstream. As others take pointed out, pre-internet the experience of going to concerts was a mode to find out who else you shared a musical "like" with. Sometimes the feeling was revelatory and liberating. As a style to fill up a 20,000-chapters amphitheater by hiring a multitude of bands who couldn't do it on their ain, it was also marketing genius.

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Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/woodstock-s-50th-anniversary-marks-birth-corporate-concert-era-ncna1042516

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