50 things you didn’t know about Woodstock on its 50th anniversary year

Woodstock was billed as a three-day festival. But the chaotic conditions, including crowding, inclement weather and rampant drug use, led to delays, and the festival ended up stretching to a fourth day.

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The first performer was supposed to have been Sweetwater, but they were stuck in traffic, so to get things going, the organisers asked folk musician Richie Havens to step up and perform the first set. Many acts had to be helicoptered in, including Arlo Guthrie and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

Once Havens began, “Every time he tried to leave the stage, organisers convinced him to keep playing, as they still hadn’t rounded up the next act,” according to History. At some point, Havens ran out of music of his own and was left to improvise. He played Beatles tunes.

It wasn’t until one of those aforementioned U.S. Army helicopters landed with more performers, some say onstage, that Havens was finally “allowed” to leave the stage.

Jimi Hendrix’s contract with the organisers stipulated no act could perform after him. Despite the chaos that had thrown the schedule off track, the organisers honoured Hendrix’s contract. At 9am Monday morning, after most of the crowd had already begun to head home – because the festival had been scheduled to end on Sunday night – Hendrix performed the festival finale, including his epic version of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Creedence Clearwater Revival had been the first big act invited to play at Woodstock. Originally scheduled to go on in the prime spot of just-after-midnight on Saturday night, Creedence had to wait until after 1am due to delays, including technical difficulties during the Grateful Dead’s performance. Most of the audience was asleep. Lead singer John Fogerty described the scene to Culture Sonar as “bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud.”

“The weekend was great, but our set was terrible. We were all pretty smashed, and it was at night,” he’s quoted by Biography as having said in 1971. Not only was he terrified the stage was going to collapse, the rain was causing the band’s guitars to spark. “Every time we touched our guitars, we’d get these electrical shocks. Blue sparks were flying out of our guitars.”

An abundance of psychedelic drugs was freely available during the festival. In addition, as History tells it, “more than a few couples at Woodstock…made love whenever and wherever the mood hit.”

It wasn’t just the audience members who were “tripping” but also the performers. Sometimes it was by choice. Sometimes not. The Who’s Roger Daltrey noted in his memoir, Thanks a Lot Mr. Kibblewhite, that it was almost impossible to find food backstage that wasn’t laced with LSD.

“I was fine right up until the moment I decided to have a cup of tea,” observed Daltrey, who was not, at the time, a drug user. Turned out that tea was laced with psychedelics, and he wasn’t happy about it at all, according to Vulture. “It was billed as an Aquarian exposition –three days of peace and music. But it was chaos,” he’s quoted as having said.