Woodstock Festival 69

The Woodstock Music & Art Festival (Woodstock Music & Art Fair), or Woodstock Festival, was a hippie congregation with rock music performed from Friday the 15th until the early hours of Monday, August 18, 1969. It took place on a farm 240 acres in Bethel, Sullivan County, New York State; although it was programmed to take place in the town of Wallkill, in the same state of New York, where the settlers, however, objected. The organizers also had the same experience with the Saugerties, New York headquarters, which had been selected in the meantime.

Writer Elliot Tiber helped the organizers negotiate with farmer Max Yasgur to host the concert on that family's grounds, 40 miles southwest of Woodstock. It was advertised as "An Aquarius Exhibition: 3 Days of Peace and Music" and is also known as the Woodstock Rock Festival.

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The festival has become a pivotal moment in the history of popular music, as well as a watershed event for the generation of the counterculture.

Thirty-two events took place during the festival, which attracted some 400,000 people (500,000, however, have declared themselves as attendees).

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The event was recorded in the Oscar-winning documentary Woodstock: 3 days of peace & music; as well as the Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More soundtrack. It has been considered one of the key moments in the history of popular music, as well as the nexus for the definitive consolidation of the counterculture of the 1960s.

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If you are a music lover, you have surely heard of the Woodstock festival, the most famous festival in history and which marked a new point in the industry. About 400,000 people gathered at a 240-acre farm located in Bethel, Sullivan, New York (although others estimate that it was actually 500,000 attendees).

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There were 3 days of music where legendary artists such as Santana, The Who, Joe Cocker, Jimmy Hendrix, among others, performed. And it is here where the motto of peace, love and music - characteristic of the hippie era - gained much more force and established itself as one of the fundamental values ​​of the event. A whole party in all its senses.

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We could not imagine such an event taking place in 2020, where the pandemic caused by covid-19 has hit the entertainment industry hard. Due to this virus, many tours, concerts and mass events have been canceled or postponed as a precautionary measure to prevent the spread of this deadly virus.

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However, the time of Woodstock and the present time, have something in common: a highly infectious disease that claimed the lives of thousands around the world. Wait, Woodstock was made in the middle of a pandemic?

In this note we will analyze the social context where the events took place and we will verify if the claims that the festival took place in the midst of a global health emergency are entirely true.

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With 32 performances, Woodstock drew a fabulous 400-500,000 spectators, although 500,000 say they were there because so many slipped in. The organization expected 60,000, while the number of people estimated by the NYPD was 6,000, and an estimated 250,000 failed to make it. The entrance cost 18 dollars for the three rainy days that turned the field into a quagmire.

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Woodstock became the icon of a generation fed up with wars and that proclaimed peace and love as a way of life and showed their rejection of the system, therefore, a large part of the people who attended were hippie (they did not designate themselves that's how the others called them). This festival was the peak of a movement that developed in the United States in the late 1960s, in which those who attended wore hair and charms, the girls in colored skirts; their symbols were the rainbow flag and the symbol of peace.

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The hippies were against the Vietnam War, so Jimi Hendrix played the American anthem alone with an electric guitar as a sign of protest against the warlike behavior of the government. His ideals were pacifism, free love, communal life, environmentalism, and a love for music and the arts. After attracting massive attention during the 1967 Summer of Love, it was believed that after Woodstock they ended up disappearing, although rather they tended to avoid advertising themselves, and they still exist in many countries, with some hippie communes evolving into ecovillages.

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During the festival intense nights of sex and drugs were experienced, highlighting the consumption of LSD and marijuana ; all with a rock music background. Although the concert was organized with the possibility of loss in mind, the success of the documentary about the event made it profitable. However, due to the number of attendees, the sanitary conditions left to be desired since the festival was organized thinking that some 250,000 people would attend, but in the end - according to estimates - the attendance was much higher, in contrast to the claims of this one that pretended to be a celebration in favor of peace and love.

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There were three deaths at the Woodstock festival: one due to a heroin overdose, another following a ruptured appendix, and a final due to an accident with a road machine that stepped on someone who had fallen asleep underneath. Unconfirmed births were also said to have occurred at the festival.

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The famous Woodstock documentary was made. 3 Days of Peace & Music on this concert, directed by Michael Wadleigh, edited and mounted among others by Martin Scorsese. It was released in 1970 and won the Oscar for best documentary. The film has been awarded the title "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

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In 2009, the film Taking Woodstock, directed by Ang Lee, was released, in which the organization of the concert is recreated from the figure of Elliot Tiber.

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The beginning of the controversy and the 1968 bird flu pandemic.

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On May 1, 2020, the Facebook page "The Rabbit Hole" published an image - similar to a meme - where it states the following:

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“This is not the worst or the last virus outbreak that we will have in this country (United States). What we didn't do in the past was panic like a bunch of scared kids and allow the government to ruin people's lives. Please read this article, it shows you the stupidity of what our governments are doing right now. In fact, in 1969 the country had 138 million fewer people in it and the Hong Kong virus killed more than 100,000 Americans.

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The article in mention that the post asks us to read is one written by Jeffrey A. Tucker, editorial director of the American Institute for Economic Research. In it, he argues that in 1968 the influenza A H3N2 pandemic broke out, better known as “bird flu” —also called “Hong Kong flu” because the outbreak started there.

The text tells us that the economy was not paralyzed, and that in the midst of so many infected and dead, the Woodstock festival that brought together almost half a million people was held.

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Nothing was closed by force. Most of the schools remained open. The companies did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants ”, reads part of the article.

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“If we used government shutdowns, as we use them now, Woodstock (which changed music forever and still resonates today) would never have happened. How much prosperity, culture, technology, etc. are being lost in this calamity?

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How true is this? We turned to some external sources to soak up the subject, reading various articles about the context of that time and, based on that, we can give our verdict.

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Debunking myths

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If we enter the famous article we can see that it has many errors. Its original version, published on May 1, 2020, currently has updates and "errata" that the author has had to clarify.

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The first is about this statement: «Nothing was closed by force. Most of the schools remained open. ' This is totally false, since 23 states had to close their schools and universities. This can be seen corrected by the same author in the original article. But that's not all, there are still more observations to analyze about the historical and social context in which Woodstock developed.

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Something that the article does not mention is that the influenza A H3N2 pandemic had two outbreaks. According to a report in the American Journal of Public Health, the first outbreak was in 1968, where the highest peak in the United States occurred between December 1968 and January 1969, definitively ending the contagion season in March 1969. While the second wave was in November 1969, time after the Woodstock festival took place.

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In addition, a New York Times article on August 17, 1969 reported that one of Woodstock's producers, Michael Lang, said that a dozen doctors came to the festival not because of "widespread disease," but because of "the potential threat of a disease. cold virus or an epidemic of pneumonia among them. '

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Elsewhere you can read this: "No governor acted to impose social distancing, flattening curves (despite hundreds of thousands of people being hospitalized) or banning crowds."

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Regarding social distancing, at that time it was not an accepted practice by the different health experts, so it was not taken into account to prevent the spread of the influenza A H3N2 virus. "That concept was developed in the 2000s when there was concern about another outbreak of avian influenza," Arnold Monto, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan, told USA TODAY.

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Elsewhere in the article the following is mentioned: 'In fact, people do not remember or know that the famous August 1969 Woodstock concert, planned in January during the worst period of death, actually occurred during a deadly pandemic of American flu that only peaked globally six months later. There was no thought of the virus which, like ours today, was dangerous mainly for a demographic without concerts.

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Conclusions

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Did the Woodstock festival unfold in the midst of a pandemic? Partially true.

While it is true that the festival took place in the midst of a health crisis because the disease (or at least the pandemic) had not yet been eradicated, it did not take place in the midst of the peak of infections or in the most critical situation of the pandemic. . In addition, social distancing was not used as a precautionary measure because health experts did not yet agree that this method is effective in counteracting the spread of the virus.

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Undoubtedly, we live in times of crisis, but you should never lower your guard against the content you see on the internet, it cannot always be true.

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Sources: Wikipedia & Garage del Rock 2021

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