The Woodstock Music & Art Fair in 1969 remains one of the most iconic events in American history. What began as a vision for a summer music festival quickly became something far greater: a powerful symbol of peace, love, and unity. Against all odds, hundreds of thousands of young people journeyed to a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, creating a temporary city where, despite mud, rain, and scarce resources, a spirit of community blossomed, defining a generation and shaping the future of the counterculture movement.
Far from the urban centers, this historic gathering on Max Yasgur’s farm in the Catskills showcased the incredible power of people coming together. While organizers faced logistical nightmares, it was the attendees themselves, along with surprising local heroes like farmer Max Yasgur, who demonstrated an unwavering spirit of sharing and mutual support. From passing around food to helping strangers through a storm, Woodstock became a profound testament to human resilience and the hopeful belief that, even amidst chaos, a better world is possible when we all work together.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
00:00:42 Speaker 2: Woodstock has absolutely nothing to do with Woodstock, New York—at least the concert. To me, that was the original intention. Woodstock is about two hours north of New York City. He turned it down. Two other communities then turned it down, and then in Bethel, New York, which is about ninety minutes from New York City, it’s in the Catskills. The promoters found this beautiful pasture land that was essentially a giant bowl, you know, a hillside leading down to this bowl at the bottom. It was the perfect setting for a concert. Max Yasgar released his land to the promoters, and that’s where the concert was held. Yasgar is a dairy farmer, a Republican raised in New York City, so he’s anything but the rural farmer. Yet he strongly believed that the people who had been rejected by three other cities to have where they are towns where they wanted to have their concert, had their right to have their concert. Yes, he did take fifty thousand dollars for the lease of the land, but he was also there to support the kids. He essentially almost opened his home to them when he found out that people were selling water. It wasn’t the promoters. There were some kids who had brought some water up and were selling it by the glass. He opened up his taps and let people fill up their canteens and glasses from his property. He was quite dedicated to them, and then, as it turned out later, he died not too long afterward. But it turned out that he worked hard to be an intermediary between disenfranchised kids and the families they had left behind, serving almost as a post office to try to connect kids back with their families. So he really was one of the great unsung heroes of that era.
00:02:31 Speaker 3: I believe that this kind of a phenomenon, as it has been called, the most symptomatic and symbolic of the malaise which affects our young people today.
00:02:43 Speaker 2: If you look at footage of Woodstock and you think about who was really there, it wasn’t four hundred thousand hippies, meaning four hundred thousand dropouts who were living off the land or sponging off other people. They were just mostly middle-class kids. In fact, they were mostly middle-class white kids.
00:02:59 Speaker 4: I went to Woodstock with my daughter, who is nineteen, because I wanted to share it with her, and we were both interested in what was going on in the psychedelic and hippie and rock music scene.
00:03:14 Speaker 2: This was not about drug use. This was not about running naked through the woods of upstate New York. What it was about was people, four hundred thousand people, truly understanding that people can get along together in really, really tough circumstances, ranging from August heat to August thunderstorms, to mud, to lack of food, lack of sanitation. Yet, in spite of all that, many of the four hundred thousand viewed this as the pivotal moment in their lives. They were there to see a great concert, but they came away from Woodstock with a lot more than the music.
00:03:51 Speaker 5: How have you all been getting along with the townspeople last couple of weeks?
00:03:55 Speaker 1: I really dynamite that. Tell me, we were like, we got here.
00:04:00 Speaker 4: I’ve been here for about a few weeks, close to a month.
00:04:03 Speaker 5: And the first night we got here, we didn’t have much money, and—
00:04:06 Speaker 1: The police, when they already took me and the people that went.
00:04:09 Speaker 3: My car out to dinner and offered let us stay in his house.
00:04:15 Speaker 1: I mean, they’re just out of sight, you know.
00:04:16 Speaker 5: Everybody on it.
00:04:19 Speaker 2: It was really the first time that I think they all believed, even after they, many of them, had been in peace marches against the war in Vietnam. But I think it really was the first time that people realized that they could get together as a society and make change and find food for people who didn’t have it, or find water for people who didn’t have it, or medical care for those who didn’t have it. For those who brought food, they would pass it around. They certainly passed around joints too, that’s true. But there was a great feeling of sharing and caring because when the food stands that were actually selling food ran out of food, the townspeople, who had many of whom had been opposed to it, realized, “Well, we may have been opposed to this.” But they made thousands and thousands of sandwiches and brought in food by helicopter and tried to support the kids who were there as best they could. So there really was that spirit that we can do this, we can change the world, we can become part of a better society if we just all try. And all of the things that could have been a disaster—the clogged roads, “Okay, well, we’ll walk.” The fact we’re in the mud, “Well, we’ll just be wet for a while.” The medical care. When medical care became a problem, and there was clearly a point where it was a serious problem, the Army at that point volunteered. They brought in both; the Army brought in not only its own medical personnel, but there was a team of volunteer doctors from New York City. So anything that could have been a disaster wound up turning into a miracle. Let’s face it. The promoters didn’t exactly, weren’t exactly forthcoming. Once they got their concert venue approved, they said that they were probably out between fifty and one hundred thousand, and it was clear at that point that they had already sold more than one hundred and fifty thousand tickets, but the local community didn’t know that, so it really could have gotten completely out of hand. Woodstock was a city of four hundred thousand people that made it the third largest city in New York State at the time. Yet there was essentially no crime other than drug use if you count that as crime. There were no murders, no rapes, no assaults, no robbery.
00:06:25 Speaker 5: Doctor Martin Keeler, a psychiatrist who has done much research on drug use among young people, most of the marijuana used in this area is so inert that I really doubt if the heavy use of drugs—marijuana in the weak form that it was used—really had much to do with the events.
00:06:45 Speaker 2: That’s not saying it was a perfect world or somehow four hundred thousand kids would create a perfect city, but the point is that they did. In fact, one report at the time said, “Can you imagine putting four hundred thousand business executives together for three days to see how they would respond and act?” It really truly was an eye opener. Most media, even today, but most media then certainly had no idea really how to cover the youth of America in any way that gave a sense of understanding to what their issues were all about.
00:07:18 Speaker 3: Rabbi Jacob J.
00:07:19 Speaker 5: Heck of the Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education.
00:07:24 Speaker 3: I think if we don’t stop this real fast, we’re going to have a generation of Marl Trippled. I believe the time has come for us to look ahead and plan so that we develop a generation of youngsters from whom we will really be able to be proud.
00:07:38 Speaker 2: And Barney Collier, a reporter for The New York Times, was on site; was covering the event, and it was very clear that the people on his editorial desk wanted him to cover this as a disaster story, and Barney Collier did not want to cover the story that way because that was not the story. And that discussion created a great divide. Supposedly some reporters were willing to resign over this. There’s no—that’s only anecdotal—but there’s no question that this went up to the executive editor level on how the story should be covered, to Jim Reston, who was the executive editor at the time, and he finally said, “Look, if Barney sees the story this way, this is the way we’re going to cover it.” And they certainly did cover some of the traffic and the rain and those things. But understanding American youth as a social experience really did in many ways start with the coverage of Woodstock that started later. Look at any newspaper, even a newspaper as good as The New York Times in nineteen sixty-nine, there’s no coverage of young people and their issues, clothes, styles, music, attitudes, other than, of course, the caricature of American youth in the nineteen sixties is either protesting college students occupying college president’s offices or hippies dropping out entirely and living on a commune. And if you don’t want to look at a newspaper, there’s no movies, television, really that covers anything that’s of any relevance or any great accuracy about American youth. I love the movie Beach Blanket Bingo, but it’s no way reflecting what American youth were really like. So this really did start in many ways with Woodstock, where people finally started to realize that not only do American youth need to be covered well as a social part of the American experience, but also, frankly, as a marketing force in the American experience. They’re buying millions of records. They’re buying their own clothes. They have their own styles, makeup, hair, and a lot of other things and life values as well.
00:09:42 Speaker 1: Woodstock: The story of the first American musical festival. Here on Our American Stories.
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