Rockfest Retrospective

(Above: Tery Anastasio conducts an orchestra during the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. Photo by Michael Weintraub.)

Ever since the utopian dreams of late-’60s tribal gatherings birthed the Mega Music Festival it’s been a furious rock ’n’ roller coaster—the brilliant peaks like Monterey Pop and Woodstock helping establish a generation’s very identity, and the deep, dark lows of Altamont and Woodstock ’99 holding an unforgivingly brutal mirror up to the pop-culture flaws of each respective era. There’s something powerful and occasionally frightening about the combustibility of packing 100,000 or more souls in front of a concert stage, but if treated properly, every so often there’s a possibility for transcendence—or at least an occasion to revel in life’s muddy bliss.—Steve LaBate

THE GOLDEN AGE of the Giant Outdoor Rock Festival

When Bob Dylan plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, purists were shocked, but two years later and 3,000 miles away, 50,000 hairy youths swarmed the Monterey Pop Festival for a weekend of loud music from the likes of The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding and Janis Joplin—if there’d been a roof, these acts would’ve torn it off and ignited it with lighter fluid. Monterey Pop went off with nary a hitch—it was, after all, the Summer of Love.

In August 1969, hordes of music fans initiated a massive traffic jam in rural New York as they inched toward the Woodstock Music and Art Festival. Unlike earlier fests, Woodstock was a commercial venture concocted by a group of underground entrepreneurs who turned out to be really good promoters—maybe too good. The fences came down, the site was overrun and the organizers had no choice but to declare it a “free festival.” So more than 300,000 people got filthy, witnessed three days of inspired performances from the absolute cream of rock ’n’ roll and staggered away with something to tell their grandkids about.

During the early ’70s, enormous crowds continued to converge on festival sites as remote as Britain’s Isle of Wight, in 1970, and as incongruous as the Raceway at Watkins Glen, N.Y., in 1973, determined to be part of another Woodstock. The Watkins Glen Summer Jam—featuring the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers and The Band—drew an estimated 600,000-plus, the largest mass of people ever to attend a festival before or since.

Perhaps Watkins Glen, with its interminable sets, overflowing porta-johns, requisite thunderstorm and endless traffic jam, proved to everyone that the Woodstock experience couldn’t be duplicated. But the end of the Golden Age probably had more to do with the Boomers becoming adults, and grown-up reality doesn’t lend itself well to tripping for three days in a field of slime.—Bud Scoppa

FLIRTIN’ with Disaster

Since the virtually flawless Monterey Pop, not all festivals have come off so swimmingly. The true bookends of utter concert chaos are categorically Woodstock and Woodstock ’99, the low point being, of course, the deadly Altamont.

It seems no one could’ve prepared for the million people descending on Max Yasgur’s farm for the original Woodstock. In comparison, approximately 150,000 people enjoyed Monterey Pop. Luckily, a little less than half actually made it to Woodstock, otherwise the fest wouldn’t have been remembered so kindly by history.