Culture
The Rise, and Urbanization, of Big Music Festivals
The legacy of hippie Woodstock is the modern music-festival economy: materialist, driven by celebrities and social media, and increasingly urban.
Woodstock was not the first big music festival. In some respects, it repeated 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival, which also featured Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and The Who, and was also the subject of a documentary film. Before that, the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was where Bob Dylan famously went electric. And even before that, the Newport Jazz Festival started all the way back in 1954.
But Woodstock, and the mythology that grew up around it—fueled by the Joni Mitchell song and Michael Wadleigh’s documentary*—are seared in the popular mind. So it was Woodstock that inspired and set the template for the modern music festival.