The Woodstock festival of 1969 remains one of the most iconic events in music history.
But while there were plenty of positives, it wasn't all dancing and holding hands.
Here are some seriously messed-up things that happened at Woodstock.
Everyone remembers Joan Baez, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Keef Hartley Band, and Quill.
Except that you actually probably don't remember those last two.
That could be because those bands, who did indeed play at Woodstock, weren't featured
in the same-named 1970 documentary film.
Thus, they braved the mud and the electrically-charged sound equipment but ended up with very little
name recognition for their troubles.
The Oscar-winning documentary gave a publicity bump to the bands we now think of the big-name
performers of the era, while the bands who were left out of the film have been largely
forgotten.
Some of the artists who gave somewhat patchy performances, like the Grateful Dead and Janis
Joplin, were also excluded from the original cut.
But they were acknowledged in later releases, giving them a belated publicity bump.
It just goes to show you that the memories of 500,000 stoned hippies may fade, but film
is forever.
Today, we think of hippies as gentle souls who believe in peace, love, and taking care
of Mother Earth.
But in the late sixties, they mostly just cared about those first two items, and not
so much the third.
Or at least the hippies at Woodstock didn't act like they were concerned about the environment
at the festival.
According to a 1969 article in The Village Voice, there were "piles of garbage up and
down the hillside" a month after the festival.
There was evidently some effort to keep the site clean during the festival, as trash bags
were passed around the audience at various points.
But it wasn't enough to keep the garbage from inundating the nearby woods and the shoulders
of most roads.
Perhaps organizers should've billed the festival as "three days of peace, music, and sanitation."
Maybe that would've saved them something on the cleanup.
"Hey, don't cry."
"Yeah, we're gonna clean it up.
Okay?"
Woodstock was a generation-defining, epic historical moment that became enshrined in
musical history and America's collective consciousness.
But for organizers, it pretty much sucked.
It's probably safe to say that the four guys who put the festival together really had no
idea what they were getting themselves into.
They were all in their 20s, and the only real qualifications they had were green pieces
of paper with pictures of presidents on them.
When they settled on the idea of putting on a concert, they decided the best way to get
big names was to offer double the money that they usually got.
They were already kind of over their heads before the festival turned into a free-for-all.
But then traffic became such a problem that they had to contract helicopters to fly in
food, supplies, and their very expensive performers.
It got so bad that the festival was nearly canceled.
On the second day, some of the performers were having temper tantrums and demanded upfront
pay in cash.
So organizers convinced a local bank to front them an emergency midnight loan, using a personal
trust fund as collateral.
And the show went on, though it probably was only bittersweet for the organizers, since
the loan wasn't exactly going to help them turn a profit, but instead just prevent 500,000
people from getting really angry.
While Woodstock was billed as "three days of peace and music," it's probably more accurate
to say that it was "three days of mud, rain, and food shortages."
Festival-goers might have been super enthusiastic on the opening Friday.
But by Sunday, a lot of them had pretty much had it.
Thus, by the time headliner Jimi Hendrix got on stage, the crowd had dwindled from a peak
of 500,000 to around 180,000.
The schedule was so badly mucked up by Sunday that performers were taking the stage literally
hours after they were scheduled to appear.
Plus, Hendrix had a clause in his contract that virtually guaranteed most fans would
miss his performance.
No one was allowed to perform after him, and since Sunday's schedule was so hideously delayed,
he didn't get on stage until Monday morning, which incidentally was the fourth day of the
three-day festival.
Although he gave what is widely considered to be a legendary performance, most of the
exhausted, hungry, dirt-covered people who came to see him had already given up and were
on their way home.
According to Snopes, those old stories from the '60s about kids taking stuffand staring
at the sun until they went blind are completely bogus.
However, Mary Sanderson, a nurse who worked at Woodstock, reported that burned eyeballs
were actually a thing at the festival.
She claimed that they appeared to have resulted from kids on stuff who would "lie down on
their backs and just stare."
Now that really sounds like a bad trip!
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