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Gimme an F! Gimme a U! Gimme a C! Gimme K! What’s that spell? What’s that spell? Readers of my work are overly familiar with f bombs and their colorful variations, but in 1969 its use was not nearly so commonplace. “Fuck” became routine vernacular in the counterculture of the age, where almost half a million hippies got down in the mud to yell the word over and over and rock out to some righteous tunes at Woodstock.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 15, 1969--
Beginning on August 15, 1969, and held on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, Woodstock was billed as “3 days of peace & music” featuring 32 acts, often performing in the rain. And it wasn’t even fucking held in Woodstock. It was supposedto be there, because Woodstock was an artist colony, but the town was all we don’t want those fucking hippies invading, and they blocked the event only a month before. So one of the organizers went driving and ended up about 50 miles away and saw a field of alfalfa and said to farmer Max Yasgur, hey you mind if 400,000 or so people come here next month and get naked and smoke the devil’s lettuce and have hairy sex and rock out to some righteous tunes? And Max said yeah sure if you fuckin’ pay me. And that’s what happened.
The guy who got people to spell out “fuck” on opening day was “Country Joe” McDonald, right before singing his popular “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” a Vietnam War protest song. Traffic was a fucking nightmare, and one baby was born in the traffic jam, while another pregnant woman was airlifted by helicopter to give birth a short time later in hospital.
Acts included Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Santana, Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker, The Band, Jimi Hendrix, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Many more bands were invited but declined. Lead singer for Jethro Tull Ian Anderson turned organizers down because he said he didn’t like hippies.
It wasn’t all peace & love either, what with food being in short supply and people being baked out of their fucking skulls. Activist Abbie Hoffmann was wrecked on LSD and jumped on stage during The Who’s performance, grabbing the microphone to go on a social justice tirade. Pete Townsend was fucking pissed and hit Abbie with his guitar.
Jimi Hendrix was the highest paid performer of the event, and was the closing act. Problem was, due to delays Woodstock ended up not being a three-day festival, but a four-day one. Jimi didn’t take the stage until the morning of the fourth day when 90% of the crowd had left. His three minute and 46 second rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner was seen by relatively few people, and wouldn’t become iconic until the Woodstock movie came out the following year, turning it into an anthem for a nation mired in a war most wanted no part of.
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