Added: 12/21/2005 |
Woodstock Festival As The Most Prominent Festival Of Its EraThe Woodstock Music and Art Festival is a child of the cultural revolution, which aimed at rejecting existing norms and templates and finding effective, expressive means for music and ideas of the new generation. It was the time when millions of young people came together to realize that they were not alone in their views.
Being planned for approximately 50,000 spectators, the Woodstock Festival had an audience of 500,000. This resulted in very heavy traffic on the highways leading to the site of the concert.
Despite the fact that the festival didn't initially bring income to the promoters, it became highly profitable due to the record sales. Among the promoters of the Woodstock were Artie Kornfield, Michael Lang, Joel Rosenman, and John Roberts.
Artists performing at the festival included Joe Cocker, Santana, Johnny Winter, Jefferson Airplane, Melanie, Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar, John Sebastian, Keef Hartley, Canned Heat, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, and others. Many of the artists were scheduled to perform, but failed for various reasons, like The Jeff Beck Group, Iron Butterfly, Neil Young and Led Zeppelin.
For many years the Woodstock Festival has been idealized as the culmination in the hippie movement, a holiday of love and peace, which brought nearly 500,000 people together. However, some amount of crime was still confirmed at the Woodstock festival, including three deaths, one from a drug overdose.
One of the likely reasons for crime is the small size of Woodstock, which wasn't intended for such a great number of spectators and thus, the majority of needed facilities weren't present. Designed as a profit-making event, whose profits were intended for charity, the Woodstock Festival turned into a free festival after it appeared to draw more people than the organizers had expected.
The Woodstock Festival has resulted in the release of two albums - Woodstock: Music From the Original Soundtrack and More, and Woodstock 2, released a year later.
In 1970 appeared the documentary film about Woodstock, owing to the joint efforts of Michael Wadleigh and Martin Scorsese. The film was nominated in the Best Sound and the Best Film Editing categories, and has been granted the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. In 1996 the U.S. Library of Congress has regarded the film as culturally significant, choosing it for preservation in National Registry.
Madison Square Gardens in New York City was the site for another concert, which took place in 1979 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 1969 Woodstock Festival. Among the celebrities attending the concert were Taj Mahal, Richie Havens, Country Joe and the Fish, Elliot Randal, and Canned Heat.
The celebration of the 20th anniversary of the event occurred in August 1989 in Bethel, New York. It has 30,000 people in attendance.
"Three more days of peace, love and music" - that was the name of the rock concert held in 1994 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original Woodstock. The show ran from August 12 to August 14, featuring such bands as Green Day and Red Hot Chili Peppers.
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