Who are the couple on the Woodstock album cover?
When considering 1969’s Woodstock Music and Art Fair’s defining image, you’ll likely revert to the iconic image that adorns its official LP soundtrack.
Released the following year, Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More’s cover couldn’t capture the festival’s romantic mythos any better, and surrounded by a vast plain of strung-out revellers and hippy happening across the Bethel dairy farm, a couple embrace with immaculate compositional form, a woman with sunglasses staring back at you while her male partner gazes across the landscape keeping his lover warm with a blanket.
It’s all there. Peace and love, togetherness, and human connection radiate from the snap, illustrating exactly what Woodstock symbolises in the cultural memory. Never mind the reality on the ground. Beset with technical mishaps, bad weather, inept management, ‘bad acid‘, and a ‘free festival’ only becoming so once organisers knew the lacklustre security couldn’t resist the some 400,000 attendees descending to Max Yasgur’s farm.
Yet, despite a less rosy reality and grumbles from the acts on the bill, everybody playing or attending knew something special was taking place. Rising early one morning as dawn approached, photographer Burk Uzzle took a stroll around the site, armed with a Leica camera, and spotted the hugging couple, eagerly taking several snaps in both black and white and colour.
“I think maybe they were one of the very few couples standing,” Uzzle recalled to Longreads in 2019, reflecting on the festival’s 50th anniversary. “Most people were still asleep. It was just so beautiful, the way they were holding themselves up and wrapped in a blanket. It all composed very nicely with the hillside in the background and the foreground objects on the left and the side. It lent itself to a very beautiful composition.”
So, who are the couple?
The two reportedly had only been dating for about three months when they first heard details of a supposed festival taking place in upstate New York. Heading to the dairy farm in a 1965 Impala station wagon with pals Cathy Wells, Jim ‘Corky’ Corcoran, and Mike Duco, Nick Ercoline and his girlfriend Bobbi Kelly were just one of the many hundreds of thousands of intrepid music fans swept up in the far-out times and intrigued by the three-day programme of “Peace & Music”.
Legend has it that the couple unwittingly formed an enduring piece of Woodstock lore when standing up as Jefferson Airplane took to the stage around seven in the morning. Barely noticing Uzzle’s camera clicks, the couple only realised their intimate moment had become a defining image of the decade when listening to the soundtrack record the next year.
Dubbed the “Woodstock couple” from then on, Ercoline and Kelly eventually wed in 1971 and raised a family in the Pine Bush area. Together for 54 years, Kelly sadly died of cancer in 2023, confirmed by Ercoline on Facebook.
“I look at it every day,” Kelly revealed once, remarking on the poster-sized blow-up of Uzzle’s famous photo, the couple reportedly set above the breakfast table. “I met Nick, we fell in love, and it was the beginning of my best life.”
