The moment David Crosby called the “big bang” of the counterculture: “Generation of hippies”
As a music fan, in 2025, I almost get festival fatigue.
In my adolescence, it felt as though I would have one festival per year to set my sights on. Now, and it’s largely due to the financial demands placed on burgeoning musicians and their desperate need to play live wherever they can, I look through the summer schedule with a subtle sense of anxiety.
Almost every weekend in the summer, will play host to a festival that will have at least three names on the bill that I like. Failing that, they might be located conveniently or have a premier food stall selection which at 30 is of growing importance. And on that matter, my choice paralysis can’t be solved by simply going to more than one, for at this growing age, my knees have only got one festival in them per year.
So, as I look through the heavily populated summer calendar, I try to pick wisely and go to a festival that epitomises the true meaning of the event. One that encapsulates that liberated spirit we all crave from a weekend spent in a stuffy tent, because in the increasingly dire modern world, that feels like the only place devoid of any societal bleakness.
But, where did we conjure up this idea? At what point did festivals become this beacon of liberated counterculture? Sure, in the UK, you could safely say Glastonbury had a big role to play. Beginning in 1970, as fertile a year for creative thinking as any, it’s been a counterculture mainstay in this country. But it was one year earlier, across the pond, that this brave new idea of festival celebration was launched.
The simple utterance of the name Woodstock conjures up images of long-haired troubadours of the free love moment dancing blissfully to the sounds of the era’s greatest music. Taking place in the iconic summer of 1969, with even more iconic artists playing, it was the moment culture and music collided. Or as David Crosby calls it, “the big bang” of counterculture.
“I think that’s a great way to describe it” he said. “Because the important thing about it wasn’t how many people were there or that it was a lot of truly wonderful music that got played. The important thing was it’s the moment when all of that generation of hippies looked at each other and said, ‘Wait a minute, we’re not a fringe element. There’s millions of us! We’re what’s happening here!’ It was that self-awareness, you know, that, up to that point, it really hadn’t happened.”
Crosby stood on stage that day, alongside Graham Nash and Stephen Stills, to provide a set at an event that will forever live in history. Largely because of what it represented, but also because of how novelty the entire weekend was.
Unlike other festivals, Woodstock was never really repeated (let’s not talk about 1999), and so the mythology of the entire concept swirls around one fateful weekend in 1969. It might not be as big as the rest, but it started a chain of events that has resulted in a vibrant modern festival culture.
