MovieChat Forums > Woodstock (1970) Discussion > Performance times

Performance times

posted 12 years ago by shatnerhamster
2 replies | jump to latest

The performance times are pretty bizarre.

The Friday set is fairly conventional - Music performances start at 5pm, and finish at 2am.

On Saturday, though, the music starts at 12.15pm, goes all through the night and finishes at 9.40am the next morning.

Sunday, it starts at 2pm, has a break due to rain, then continues all through the night again, finishing at 11.10am Monday morning (so by the time Hendrix played, only about 10% of the audience was left).

I wonder why they did it like that, instead of playing the music during the day?
When did anyone sleep?

[–] benntura 12 years ago

I don't know.

[–] deesfeest 11 years ago

There was an article in the Times Herald that is amazing to read if anybody is interested in how it all came to be and if anybody wants to read all these anecdotes of things happening. In that article is a paragraph that explains it:

Promoters decided early on that it was crucial to crowd control for the music to be endless, especially after dark. The music was supposed to start at 7pm on Saturday and continue until midnight. But after the crowd swarmed the site on Friday, the promoters' strategy changed. They needed more music and deemed that acts should start later and play until dawn. Saturday's bill included loud, tough rock'n'roll: The Who, the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat, Mountain and Santana. The promoters worried that as the music got louder, the crowd could get wilder. But if they weren't entertained well, several hundred thousand bored fans could do some damage. Lang and the other organizers pleaded with Saturday's acts to play twice as long. Most were willing. It was the biggest audience in history; the attendance was estimated at 250,000 that morning.

I found the article by going through wikipedia's sources for woodstock. It's an archived page and I can't be bothered with trying to figure out the exact URL, but it's a great read for anybody who wants to know more.