Woodstock

Pop festivals became into existence during the flower power movement in San Francisco. These people, also called hippies, are most of the time idealistic students. Terms of this movement like: back to the nature, love-ins, drugs, lightshows, underground radio etc. manifest into (free) pop festivals. The San Francisco movement had changed the traditional music festivals. Music festivals became multimedia festivals, also writers and artists perform.

The Woodstock Music and Art Festival was a rock festival during the weekend of 15, 16 and 17 August in 1969. It takes place in a meadow of the farmer Max Yasgur in Bethel, New York about 65 km of Woodstock. Woodstock, with the slogan: ‘Three days of peace and music’, is one of the most important music festival ever.

They first expected 200.000 people by Woodstock, but the official number of visitors was more than 400.000. Most of the visitors hadn’t pay for admission. Owing to this the festival itself wasn’t lucrative for the organizers. But thanks to selling albums and the earnings of the movie it became after all lucrative.

In spite of the use of alcohol and the use of drugs there was relative little crime and violence on Woodstock. However there were too little facilities for this unexpected great number of festival visitors.  

During this festival three people die: one died by an overdose of heroin, one man died because was sleeping while he was driving over by a tractor, and another festival visitor died because he had an appendicitis. There were also born two babies during the festival and four women had a miscarriage.