History of Rock ‘n Roll

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair was an event held at Max Yasgur’s 600 acre (2.4 km²; 240 ha) dairy farm in the rural town of Bethel, New York from August 15 to August 18, 1969. Bethel (Sullivan County) is 43 miles (69 km) southwest of the town of Woodstock, New York, which is in adjoining Ulster County.

The festival exemplified the counterculture of the late 1960s - early 1970s and the “hippie era.” Thirty-two of the best-known musicians of the day appeared during the sometimes rainy weekend. Although attempts have been made over the years to recreate the festival, the original event has proven to be unique and legendary. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest moments in popular music history and was listed on Rolling Stone’s 50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll.

Woodstock was a music festival, billed as An Aquarian Exposition, held at Max Yasgur’s 600 acre (2.4 km²; 240 ha) dairy farm in the rural town of Bethel, New York from August 15 to August 18, 1969. Bethel (Sullivan County) is 43 miles (69 km) southwest of the village of Woodstock, New York, in adjoining Ulster County.
The festival exemplified the counterculture of the late 1960s early 1970s and the “hippie era”. Thirty-two of the best-known musicians of the day appeared during the sometimes rainy weekend in front of nearly half a million concertgoers. Although attempts have been made over the years to emulate the festival, the original event has proven to be unique and legendary. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest moments in popular music history and was listed on Rolling Stone’s 50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll.[2]
The event was captured in a successful 1970 documentary movie, Woodstock; an accompanying soundtrack album; and Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock”, which commemorated the event and became a major hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.Sound for the concert was engineered by Bill Hanley, whose innovations in the sound industry have earned him the prestigious Parnelli Award.[13] “It worked very well,” he says of the event. “I built special speaker columns on the hills and had 16 loudspeaker arrays in a square platform going up to the hill on 70-foot [21 meter] towers. We set it up for 150,000 to 200,000 people. Of course, 500,000 showed up.”[citation needed] ALTEC designed 4 15 marine ply cabinets that weighed in at half a ton a piece, stood 6 feet straight up, almost 4 feet deep & 3 feet wide. Each of these woofers carried four 15-inch JBL LANSING D140 loudspeakers. The tweeters consisted of 4×2-Cell & 2×10-Cell Altec Horns. Behind the stage were three transformers providing 2,000 amps of power.[14] For many years this system was collectively referred to as the Woodstock Bins.Prior to the festival, poet/activist John Sinclair, the leader of the White Panther Party and manager of the Detroit-based group MC5, had been convicted and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment in Michigan for marijuana possession, after giving two joints to an undercover police officer.[3] The sentencing caused considerable controversy, given the trivial amount of marijuana at issue, and it led to various luminaries of the day taking up Sinclair’s cause. Among these were John Lennon, who wrote and performed the song “John Sinclair”, and who, along with his wife Yoko Ono, later headlined the Free John Now Rally rally at the Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor.O Festival de Música e Artes de Woodstock foi o mais importante festival de música de sua época. Foi realizado em uma fazenda em Bethel, Nova Iorque, durante os dias 15, 16 e 17 de agosto de 1969 e, embora tenha sido projetado para 50 000 pessoas, mais de 400 mil compareceram, a maioria das quais não pagaram o ingresso.
Participaram do evento artista ligados a diversos estilos musicais que de alguma forma se relacionavam com as propostas do movimento hippie: o folk, com seu pacifismo e sua contundente crítica social, o rock, com sua contestação ao conservadorismo dos valores tradicionais, o blues, com sua melancolia que havia décadas já mostrava as contradições da sociedade norte-americana, a cítara de Ravi Shankar, representando a presença marcante da influência oriental na contracultura, entre outros.Todo o evento provocou uma grande balbúrdia, com rodovias congestionadas e Bethel sendo ocasionalmente considerada “área de calamidade pública”. O Festival de Woodstock representou um marco no movimento de contracultura dos anos 60, e foi o auge da era hippie. Para alguns, não foi somente o auge, mas também o fim do movimento, ou o início do fim. O que surgiu como contracultura, ou seja, como oposição à cultura de massas, ao estabelecido, ganhou tanta visibilidade que acabou por se tornar a cultura hegemônica entre a juventude ocidental, perdendo a essência contestatória que levava consigo para se incorporar à sociedade de consumo.
Woodstock é também o nome do famoso documentário produzido por Michael Wadleigh lançado em 1970, que ganhou um Óscar de “Melhor Documentário” no ano seguinte.

The Conclusion.