With our Woodstock line coming soon we thought we'd share 5 bits of classic Woodstock trivia.
The Woodstock festival didn’t actually take place in Woodstock.
The festival organizers had originally wanted to hold the event in the village of Woodstock in New York, but a suitable (and available) location couldn't be found. They turned their attention to an industrial site near Middletown, New York (Town of Wallkill), but their permits were revoked a month before the festival was to take place. That's where Sullivan County dairy farmer Max Yasgur came in. Max agreed to allow them to have their festival on his property in the Town of Bethel, New York.
Woodstock Ventures commissioned David Edward Byrd, then the house artist at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East, to design the poster for the Woodstock Festival.
His floral and highly intricate poster featured a fully nude woman surrounded by cherubs, hearts, and arrows and left no room for the bands! Local shop owners took one look at the poster and refused to put it up. The promoters commissioned a new design from Madison Avenue ad guy Arnold Skolnick. Skolnick’s poster, a simplified design featuring a white dove perched on a guitar neck, against a bright red background. Skolnick’s tag line, “Three Days of Peace and Music,” caught on and the rest is history!
Richie Havens opened the Woodstock festival, even though he was scheduled to go later in the evening.
Traffic caused the opening acts from arriving at the festival on time and the organizers convinced him to take the stage around 5:15 p.m. on Friday afternoon. After he finished, the other acts were still stuck so Havens performed several encores, playing "every song he knew." Searching for another song to sing, he began strumming, getting into a groove, when the word "Freedom" came to mind. He sang his now-famous song "Freedom" for the first time, on stage at Woodstock, making the words up as he played. He later did an interview and told the story of having to see the movie "Woodstock," so that he could hear how the song went so he could perform it again.
There was no official Woodstock merchandise at the Woodstock festival.
Perhaps the most surprising fact, especially today! The only official souvenir of the festival was the 8-1/2 x 11 festival program, which went largely undistributed, many of them being thrown away still in their boxes after the festival. Security, stagehands, and other crew members were issued t-shirts and windbreakers with the Woodstock logo on them, and they have become the lasting, iconic souvenirs of the festival, as well as numerous bootleg items sold by enterprising festival attendees from their trunks or from booths in the woods.
During Woodstock, there were no reported incidents of violence among the half-million people in the audience.
Another surprise but talk about positive vibes! Perhaps the only recorded incident happened on-stage, as Abbie Hoffman rushed the stage during a break in The Who’s set. Hoffman took the mike and began a semi-coherent rant about freeing John Sinclair from jail, when Pete Townshend turned, yelled at Hoffman to get off “my stage,” and hit the activist in the head with the neck of his guitar. Hoffman left the stage, and The Who proceeded with their set. Other than that, it was all peace!
