Never before had peace and music been so gigantic or so messy or so wonderful. Almost half-a-million people showed up for the three day concert – enough to fill every seat in ten different major league baseball stadiums. Imagine them all needing to eat and sleep and go to the bathroom for three days out in a farmer’s field. A peace worker who was also a clown named Wavy Gravy and the hippies who lived with him ran a “Please force” to keep order and set up a free kitchen. “What we have in mind,” Wavy Gravy told the crowd, “is breakfast in bed for 400,000.”

These kids not only lived together in a big outdoor community for three days but heard some of the best rock and roll music of all time. Many of the most famous rock stars of the time performed there including the great Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, The Who, Richie Havens, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, The Grateful Dead, The Band, Joe Cocker, Santana, Sha Na Na.

The festival was also famous for the idea that these kids could create a new world filled with love not hate, peace not war. Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded a song about Woodstock after the festival, which included the lyrics: “I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm/ I’m going to join in a rock ‘n roll band/I’m going to get back to the land/And get my soul free.”

Max Yasgur, a plain-spoken dairy farmer, entered rock and roll history by supporting the festival and allowing it to take place on his land when many local citizens and officials in upstate New York fought against it. He spoke from the stage to the hundreds of thousands of kids: “I’m a farmer . . . I don’t know how to speak to twenty people at a time, let alone a crowd like this. But I think you people have proven something to the world . . . . a half a million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and God bless you for it.”