For the hundreds of thousands of people who descended on Bethel, N.Y., over a rainy weekend in August 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was a defining cultural moment — a peaceful demonstration of the glories of rock music. But in business terms, Woodstock was a disaster.
In almost all the ways that concert promoters measure the success and smooth operation of their events, Woodstock was a failure. Crowd control was impossible, as fans arrived in droves — estimates went as high as 450,000 — whether they had tickets or not. Sanitation was minimal. Bumper-to-bumper jams snarled roads for miles. ("Traffic Uptight at Hippiefest," The Daily News declared on its front page.) And the festival's producers said they ended up $1.3 million in debt — the equivalent of about $9 million today.
Those drawbacks wound up feeding the mythology of Woodstock as a temporary utopia that defied the norms of a materialist society; traffic jams and mud, after all, may have been a small price to pay for uniting a generation through the communal powers of "peace and music."
