How Woodstock accidentally became a free festival
In collective cultural memory, Woodstock exists as the ultimate hippie event. On one weekend in August 1969, the best musical talent of the time, along with an audience of over 400,000 people, came together for a gathering billed as “an Aquarian Exposition: Three Days of Peace & Music”. Part of what has allowed it to maintain this rosetinted legacy despite the organisational carnage is the fact that the festival was free. However, that was never supposed to be the case.
The world remembers the festival as a kind of magical happening as hippies and countercultural fans descended on the field in masses like pilgrims heading to Mecca. Immediately, the event was mythologised. “I’m gonna camp out on the land / I’m gonna try an’ get my soul free,” Joni Mitchell sings in her song ‘Woodstock’, written after seeing the scenes of the festival on TV and believing it to be one of the most beautiful sights of togetherness she’d ever seen, writing, “By the time we got to Woodstock / We were half a million strong / And everywhere, there was song and celebration.”
Footage and photos from the day are still in circulation today as modern music lovers look back in envy that they didn’t get to attend. Especially as conversations around the ever-rising cost of festivals and concerts today keep cropping back up, Woodstock is often brought up as an example of a time when music was accessible to all.
For the majority of the festival attendees, it was totally free. In fact, so many people got in for free that it’s broadly remembered as an unticketed event where people merely had to show up and wander through the gates.
But that wasn’t supposed to be the case. In actuality, the cost of a Woodstock ticket was $18 in advance, which would be around $32 today. Eager fans could pay for and pick up their tickets at record stores in New York or order them by mail. However, way more people than the 180,000 advance ticket buyers turned up.
The organisers, Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, Joel Rosenman, and John P Roberts, were not expecting that. In a world before social media events where fans could hit the ‘going’ button, they had no idea how many people might show up at the gates. But even in their wildest dreams, they certainly were not expecting a swarm of around 400,000 to 500,000 fans to descend, causing absolute chaos on the surrounding roads as people ditched their cars in huge traffic queues to not miss their favourite act.
Initially, all of those people would have had to pay $24 at the gate, making it an incredibly lucrative weekend for the team. However, amidst the organisational and logistical chaos of setting up the site, planning the event, booking and planning bands’ appearances and trying to estimate how many audience members they might end up with and then trying to figure out how to care for them all, they simply ran out of time to build and set up ticket booths.
By the time the festival opened at exactly 5:07pm on Friday, August 15th, 1969, the team hadn’t been able to instal the booths or even a fence around the site, meaning they had no way to enforce a ticket price, keep the mass crowds out or police the inflow of people at all.
So, while Woodstock is remembered as a beacon of accessibility and openness, that was merely an accident, an accident that cost the team a lot of money.
