The Woodstock festival

The Woodstock Festival (Woodstock Music and Art Fair, or Woodstock) is a music festival and a gathering of the iconic hippie culture of the 1960s. It took place in Bethel on land the farmer Max Yasgur United States, about sixty miles from Woodstock in upstate New York.

Organized to take place from 15 to 17 August 1969 and accommodate 50 000 spectators, he finally welcomed more than 450,000, and continued one more day, until the morning of August 18, 1969.

The festival hosted concerts by 32 groups and soloists of folk, rock, soul and blues. The budget for the remuneration of artists reached a total of 200 000 dollars. This is one of the greatest moments in the history of popular music, ranked by Rolling Stone magazine among "50 moments that changed the history of Rock and Roll”.

The festival was both one of the highlights of the cons-culture of the 1960s and the hippie culture and the end of flower power.

The area was declared a disaster area shortly after but no violence was reported, however.

Three deaths (overdoses, appendicitis badly treated and a tractor accident) and two births occurred during the event, which also caused the largest traffic jam in the history of the United States.

Initially, and due to the large number of people who went free, the festival did lose a lot of money to its organizers, but due to sales of recordings of the festival (audio and video), they became beneficiaries. Indeed, if Woodstock is the important point of the cons-culture and the "anti-capitalism" pacifist, organizers had to resell the rights to Warner to settle their debts.

The festival gave rise in 1970, a documentary film, directed by Michael Wadleigh assisted by Martin Scorsese, who also took part in the assembly.

A triple album was released in May 1970, Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More, and will be reissued as a double CD in 1994. A double album, Woodstock Two, released a year later, in July 1971 and