Carnival of Soul

For the hundreds of thousands of people who descended on Bethel, N.Y., over a rainy weekend in August 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was a defining cultural moment — a peaceful demonstration of the glories of rock music, with a starry lineup including Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Santana, the Grateful Dead and a new band called Crosby, Stills and Nash.

But in business terms, Woodstock was a disaster.

In almost all the ways that concert promoters measure the success and smooth operation of their events, Woodstock was a failure. Crowd control was impossible, as fans arrived in droves — estimates went as high as 450,000 — whether they had tickets or not. Sanitation was minimal. Bumper-to-bumper jams snarled roads for miles. (“Traffic Uptight at Hippiefest,” The Daily News declared on its front page.) And the festival’s producers said they ended up $1.3 million in debt — the equivalent of about $9 million today.

Those drawbacks wound up feeding the mythology of Woodstock as a temporary utopia that defied the norms of a materialist society; traffic jams and mud, after all, may have been a small price to pay for uniting a generation through the communal powers of “peace and music.”

Yet the problems of Woodstock — and of Altamont, in California four months later, where a man was killed by a Hells Angels security squad — stunted the growth of American rock festivals for decades. What young fans saw as groovy gatherings, with clothing optional, were viewed by local governments around the country as dangerous and disruptive events that they did not want in their backyards, and they passed laws accordingly.

“The reputation of Woodstock and Altamont so frightened the towns and villages where festivals were planned that they basically outlawed them,” said Robert Santelli, the founding executive director of the Grammy Museum. “Even though there was a desire for a festival culture to mature, the actual physical space was impossible to get in terms of permits. That, more than anything else, killed the festival era before it truly got going.”

The boomlet in rock festivals began with Monterey Pop in 1967, with an attendance estimated at a more manageable 100,000 over three days. Crucially, it was captured on film, so rock fans everywhere could watch Janis Joplin wail and Hendrix light his Stratocaster on fire. (Woodstock, too, gained much of its cultural aura — and its eventual profits — from the 1970 film directed by Michael Wadleigh.)

Soon festivals began to sprout everywhere. Arrivals in 1968 included San Francisco Pop, Miami Pop and the Northern California Folk-Rock Festival; 1969 brought Denver Pop, Atlanta Pop and Atlantic City Pop, held two weeks before Woodstock, with Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane, the Mothers of Invention and Santana.

Festivals spread around the world, too: Glastonbury in England, the paragon of muddy concertgoing, began in 1970; Roskilde, in Denmark, started the next year.

But in the United States, the growth sputtered after Woodstock and Altamont. Festivals did not die entirely; among the major ones over the next decade were the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, N.Y., in 1973, and two California Jams in Ontario, Calif., in 1974 and 1978. Yet the momentum was lost, and it was not until 1999, with the arrival of Coachella, that the American rock festival truly began to take root again.

What happened? According to historians, musicians and concert promoters, a combination of factors were at work, including the failure of most festivals to turn a profit; the professionalization of the rock business in the 1970s, which groomed superstars to pursue their own large-scale tours; and the development of a network of summer touring venues.

But the biggest factor, they said, was simply the bad publicity around large, poorly organized festivals, which led many state and local governments to tighten their rules on permits for public gatherings.

Exhibit A is an amendment to the New York public health law, signed by Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller in May 1970, which said that events attracting more than 5,000 people had to comply with regulations over sewage and medical facilities, food service, fire and other protections to guarantee that they could go on “without hazard to health and safety.” The bill was sponsored by H. Clark Bell, an assemblyman from the town of Woodstock, and news coverage at the time linked the bill to the local outcry over the festival.

Tom Ross, then a young talent agent who would go on to run the music division at the Creative Artists Agency, said that such laws were drafted out of fear.

“Nobody wanted to contract with a big group of hippies — they were afraid,” Ross said. “The physical property damage at Woodstock made every small town in America say, ‘No way.’”

Woodstock and Altamont are the best known examples of disasters. But there were others, like the Celebration of Life Festival in tiny McCrea, La., in June 1971. The event had promised Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys, Miles Davis and B.B. King. None of them appeared, and attendees scrambled for food and water and clashed with police; there were at least three deaths, including two from drowning and one from a drug overdose, and dozens of arrests.

A front-page story in The New York Times took stock of the devastation and proclaimed: “Rock Fiasco in Louisiana May Signal End of an Era.”

New laws made festivals more difficult and expensive to produce, but not impossible. One of the biggest was the Summer Jam in July 1973, in Watkins Glen, about 25 miles west of Ithaca. An estimated 600,000 people came to see the Allman Brothers Band, the Grateful Dead and the Band, leading once again to widespread traffic problems.

Shelly Finkel, one of the promoters of the event, recalls that, to meet state regulations, they had to supply 1,000 portable toilets.

“Four or five days before, the state came in and counted 950,” Finkel said in an interview. “They said, ‘We’re not letting you open unless there are 1,000.’”

[See all of our coverage of Woodstock at 50.]

The festival’s toilet vendor scoured the Northeast — none were left in New York, Finkel said — and found 50 in Pennsylvania, which were quickly trucked to the festival grounds.

“As they got closer to the gates, we hear these noises in the johns,” Finkel recalled. “We start opening them, and kids are hiding in the johns, to get in early to the festival.”

According to Finkel, the Summer Jam actually turned a profit. “It was under $1 million, but it was great,” he said.

The scale of festivals like Woodstock and the Summer Jam offered a kind of confirmation to the developing business of rock ’n’ roll. The new rock stars, and their managers, realized that if huge audiences would go to see them in muddy fields, they would also be likely to pay to see them in more controllable venues like stadiums.

“Woodstock showed the power the bands had to attract huge audiences,” said Michael Lang, Woodstock’s promoter, “and shortly after the festival, the music business morphed into the music industry.”

Lang, who was involved in the 1994 and 1999 Woodstock anniversary concerts, unsuccessfully spent the better of part of 2019 battling with partners and municipal governments to put on a 50th-anniversary show, and to some extent was ensnared by the same permit regulations that were passed after his original event 50 years ago.

Graham Nash, of Crosby, Stills and Nash, sees the glory days of the American rock festival as the beginning of corporate interest in such events.

“When 300,000 or 400,000 kids are assembled in one particular place,” Nash said, “that’s when all the corporations started to think: ‘My God, a captive audience. I can sell them another pair of sneakers and another cola here.’”

Nash’s band was one of those that got a glimpse of its commercial power at Woodstock. The group had released its debut album just two months before the festival and was making its second major appearance there. By 1974, the band — then joined by Neil Young, as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young — was rock royalty, and went on a major stadium tour that became a blueprint for the industry.

The American rock festival was dying out, even as it blossomed in Europe. With top acts pursuing their own large-scale tours, where they controlled the environment and stood to earn the most, there was little reason for rockers to play festivals well through the 1980s and ’90s.

“Until acts got paid a premium for doing a festival,” said Mitch Rose, a top agent at C.A.A., “there was probably no incentive for them to do a festival.”

That began to change with Coachella, which was partly conceived as a California-mellow version of big European festivals like Glastonbury (minus the mud, plus heat and dust). Coachella lost money in its early days, but now the festival, and offshoots like Desert Trip — the 2016 classic-rock Valhalla that featured the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, the Who, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Roger Waters — have become some of the industry’s most coveted cash cows, with gross ticket sales in excess of $100 million.

The economics of festivals today have become their own barrier. With any large festival costing tens of millions of dollars to produce, few promoters outside of the major corporations like Live Nation and AEG can afford to properly mount and market a large-scale event.

The festivals that did survive over the long haul, like the Newport jazz and folk events in Rhode Island and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, often had strong connections to a local community and steadily built their brand power over decades. One of the principal founders of those events is George Wein, who bemoans the big money that now drives festivals but still sees hope for a strong artistic and cultural vision.

“The question is, are you in a festival because of the music or are you in it to make money?” Wein said in an interview. “If you are in a festival for music, you’re going to last forever. If you are in a festival to make money, it will only last as long as it’s making money.”

For Nash, the lasting lessons of Woodstock are not about ticket grosses or security perimeters or booking guarantees, but about peace and love.

“I think what the hippies stood for is still true today,” Nash said. “That love is better than hatred, that peace is better than war.”