Even 5 and a half a long time after it occurred, Woodstock nonetheless looms massive in the minds of lots of people, each performers and attendees.

The three-day competition started on Aug. 15, 1969, that includes over 150 musicians taking part in to tons of of 1000’s of individuals. Even these not current at the occasion may really feel its energy from miles away. Joni Mitchell, who didn’t seem at the competition, would write a tune about it which CSNY changed into successful — “Said I’m going down to Yasgur’s Farm / Gonna join in a rock ‘n’ roll band / Got to get back to the land / Set my soul free.”

READ MORE: Do You Remember These Bands Who Played Woodstock ’99?

Thanks to the abundance of medication and alcohol, there are many gaps in the recollections of those that did play Woodstock, however there’s additionally nonetheless a lot that’s remembered. Below, so as of their look at the competition, we’re having a look at 15 rock acts and their retrospective ideas on taking part in Woodstock.

1. Arlo Guthrie

They say that if you happen to keep in mind the ’60s, you were not there. Arlo Guthrie, son of the well-known folks pioneer Woody Guthrie, was actually there. “I remember gettin’ there,” he stated of Woodstock at a 2023 occasion, “but I don’t remember leavin.’”

But that was principally a joke, since Guthrie does have fond recollections of the day, as he recalled to Smithsonian journal in 2009: “One of the things that was interesting to me was that everybody at the time knew that we were in a history-making mode. It was plainly evident from the size of the crowd and the overwhelming factors like weather, roads and food that we were in the middle of a disaster. And we knew that it was historic in proportion. Nothing like this had ever happened before, planned or by surprise. When you realize that most historic events are written in hindsight – you don’t realize you’re in a historic event at the time – so it was special to be in a historic event and know that it was just that.”

2. Joan Baez

By the time Joan Baez hit the Woodstock stage, she had already made historical past a number of occasions over in her profession as a folksinger, however this was a wholly completely different ballgame. “Everybody was crazy,” she stated to Rolling Stone in 2009. “I guess the collective memories that people have, I have in a sense. It’s the mud and the cops roasting hot dogs and people wandering around in the nude. And the fact that, looking back, it was in fact a huge deal. I think of the events that happened around that time, it was a perfect storm, which is why people wish they’d been there.”

It was a very memorable expertise for Baez as somebody with a extra political mindset than most of the different acts. “I was always an outsider,” she advised The New York Times in 2019. “One, I was a girl. And two, I didn’t do drugs or drink alcohol. I remember running into Janis Joplin a couple of times. I said, ‘Oh, Janis, you’ve got to come over for tea some time.’ She held up her bottle [of booze] in the paper bag. I was a political activist, and there were not many of those at Woodstock.”

3. Santana

For the members of Santana, taking part in Woodstock was an particularly huge deal as a result of it was their first time taking part in a gig outdoors of their hometown of San Fransisco. “We stayed in the town of Woodstock and Paul Butterfield’s band was there,” percussionist Michael Carabello advised SFGate in 2009. “There was a saloon of some sort that for a week and a half we made into a jam place and everybody would come down there and play. It was great, just great, even before getting to the gig.”

The gig helped deliver Santana nationwide consideration, the sort that will guarantee a profitable future. “I’ve always said that if you played at Woodstock, you had a career,” keyboardist Gregg Rolie advised UCR in 2014. “It was just wide open.”

4. Mountain

Even rock ‘n’ roll musicians need to eat at some level. Leslie West of Mountain vividly remembered the meals scenario for the band at Woodstock. “There were bagels backstage, and they were going real quick,” he advised Rolling Stone again in 1989. “I remember that distinctly because our manager brought these barbecued chickens up in the helicopter — his wife had told him he’d better bring something to eat, and we were the only ones with food. Well, with all the smoke that was there, the appetites were crazy, and there was absolutely nothing to eat. We could have probably sold those chickens for like five grand apiece.”

5. The Grateful Dead

Both Bob Weir and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead acknowledge the cultural significance of Woodstock, however neither of them felt their band’s efficiency was something to put in writing dwelling about. “You don’t see festivals that draw half a million people any more,” Hart as soon as stated to The Detroit News. “I recall the people who played really well at Woodstock — Carlos Santana, Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix — were over-the-top great. But we just didn’t play well. It was a missed opportunity.”

“Had we played a good set, we probably would have transported them to another reality entirely,” Weir advised Rolling Stone in 1989. (*15*)

6. Creedence Clearwater Revival

Not solely did Creedence Clearwater Revival battle to get to Woodstock due to the horrible climate, additionally they had the misfortune of getting to comply with the Grateful Dead, whose discombobulated set went over their allotted time. So when CCR lastly hit the stage it was someplace round 2:30 a.m. “We ran onstage ready to rock ‘n’ roll, but everybody was just lying there in front of the stage asleep,” John Fogerty recalled to the Los Angeles Times in 2019. “About halfway through, I went to the microphone and said, ‘We’re playing our hearts out for you and want you to have a good time.’ And from the back of the field somewhere I heard a voice shout, ‘Don’t worry about it, John.’ So in my mind, there was one guy who was awake and we finished our set for that guy.”

Drummer Doug Clifford had really been anticipating one thing like that occuring. “It’s what I expected, to be honest,” he advised Rock Cellar in 2019. “We were a pretty disciplined band. We prided ourselves in being consistent. It was another walk in the park; that’s what we do it for.”

7. The Who

Roger Daltrey has stated that he feels Woodstock was maybe the Who’s worst gig ever. “It was a particularly hard one for me, because of the state of the equipment,” he defined to The New York Times in 2019. “It was all breaking down. I’m standing in the middle of the stage with enormous Marshall 100 watt amps blasting my ears behind me. [Keith] Moon on the drums in the middle. I could barely hear what I was singing.”

Like CCR, the Who performed their set in the wee hours of the morning to an exhausted crowd. Pete Townshend wasn’t actually a fan of the expertise both. “Well, it changed me, I hated it,” he as soon as stated (by way of Far Out Magazine). “I took my six-month-old child, and it was very weird. I didn’t like it all. They dumped us out of a limousine into six feet of mud, and we stood there for five hours waiting to go on.

“I drank a cup of espresso, and 5 minutes later, I’m on an LSD journey, unwillingly. They put LSD in the espresso, LSD in the mud, if you happen to fell over and by chance drank some muddy water, you had been on a visit.”

8. Jefferson Airplane

Many people who were present at Woodstock — both on the stage and in the crowd — have spoken about the feeling of togetherness that was there. “The factor that actually hit me was the sense of identification and group,” Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen once said (via woodstock.com). “The counter tradition prepare had been rolling for a few years by that point, however impulsively these of us who had been participating in the circus discovered that we had a nationwide identification. That sea of humanity…we may look out at them from the stage and know that everybody knew the place we had been coming from.”

But it was also, as singer Grace Slick recalled to CBC in 2019, muddy, messy and logistically complicated. “For us, it wasn’t fairly as marvelous because it may be for anyone who’s 18 years previous,” she said. “I used to be 29, so my thought of enjoyable isn’t having to be careful for a white costume and no bogs and taking part in at six o’clock in the morning. So Woodstock, personally, was not enjoyable. But the thought of it, and the concept that we attracted that many individuals, was form of wonderful. But that is all in your head. That’s not what really occurred.”

9. Country Joe and the Fish

The same year that he performed at Woodstock, Country Joe McDonald was also issued an arrest warrant for inciting an audience into lewd behavior at a concert in Massachusetts. (He wound up paying a $500 fine.) So for McDonald, playing Woodstock was nothing short of a rags to riches type of story. “I by no means had a plan for a profession in music, so Woodstock modified my life,” he told The New York Times in 2017.

It should be noted that in addition to the festival itself, the movie made out of it also helped bring the bands more and more attention, which guitarist Barry “The Fish” Melton would describe as the “finest paying minute I ever spent in my life.”

10. The Band

If there was one act that could be considered the hometown group at Woodstock, it was the Band, who had moved to the town in 1967. After spending a few years in semi-seclusion, suddenly performing for that many people was shocking, as Robbie Robertson would recall to Rolling Stone in 1989: “I keep in mind wanting on the market, and it appeared as if the youngsters had been wanting at us form of humorous. We had been taking part in the similar approach we performed in our front room, and which may have given the impression that we weren’t up for it. But it may’ve been that we simply could not get that very same intimate feeling with just a few hundred thousand individuals.

“Most of the other musicians went up and said, ‘Everybody clap your hands and sing along with me.’ But that wasn’t our calling. We were thinking, ‘These poor suckers have been putting up with a lot of stuff, so maybe we should send out a little spiritual blessing to them.’”

11. Johnny Winter

When requested in 2009 by The Repository what he remembered the most from taking part in Woodstock, Johnny Winter replied: “That it was very muddy!” Yet, when Winter took the stage, on day three of the competition, the climate had improved. “I played Sunday around midnight. It was probably the time of the largest attendance and the weather was great at that time,” he stated. “I had Tommy Shannon on bass and Uncle John Turner on drums. It was a special night.”

12. Sly and the Family Stone

“I kicked ass,” Sly Stone recalled in his 2023 memoir Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) (by way of The Guardian), reminiscing on his Woodstock efficiency with the Family Stone. “Did I feel the moment as pressure? I knew we had to live up to it, not to mention rise to the level of the other artists. Janis Joplin was on before us, and then there was a break, and it was like the sky split open with rain. More than one of us was afraid to touch the equipment because of the danger of getting shocked.”

13. Blood, Sweat and Tears

The factor that has struck singer David Clayton-Thomas of Blood, Sweat & Tears the most in the years following Woodstock is how wonderful it was that even with all the mud, medication and late nights, the whole occasion occurred peacefully. This is very fascinating when you think about that a lot of the individuals attending Woodstock had been pissed off and fed up with points like the Vietnam War and different choices being made by a authorities they felt managed an excessive amount of of their lives.

“The legacy of Woodstock is that a small city’s worth of people, up to their asses in mud, sharing only a few Port-a-Potty’s with little refreshments didn’t kill one another,” Clayton-Thomas stated to The Western Gazette in 2009. “There was not one assault reported. The three days of love and peace could have easily been a bloodbath.”

Bandmate Steve Katz does not recall the gig all that fondly on account of the climate, to not point out the lack of reference to the crowd.

“When you’re looking out at 300,000 people or whatever it’s just like a curtain. I think the problem was the audience was far from us,” he advised Radio New Zealand in 2019. “And when the audience is far from you, you lose intimacy and basically you’re playing for yourself.”

14. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

When Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young hit the Woodstock stage, it was solely their second time performing collectively. But with all of the dope round and common good vibes, it did not unsettle them.

“I thought we did a lousy set,” Graham Nash advised Rolling Stone in 1989. “When you consider playing acoustic guitars to 400,000 people and trying to reach to the back of the crowd with songs like ‘Guinnevere,’ it was absurd. But we certainly gave it our best shot. Sure, the ‘Suite’ was a little out of tune, but so what?”

“We were all searching for enlightenment, but it turned into a lot of rants,” Stephen Stills recalled to The Independent in 2023. “Watching all the American kids lolling around in the mud, I remembered that there were peace talks trying to go on at the time. I thought: ‘Oh, the North Vietnamese must be quaking in their fucking boots looking at this!’ Those ironies struck me, here at age 78.”

15. Sha Na Na

Out of all the bands that carried out at Woodstock, Sha Na Na stood out as the solely doo-wop revival group. Singer Henry Gross set the report for the youngest particular person on the invoice at 18 years previous — he graduated highschool only a few months earlier than the competition — and he abruptly discovered himself rubbing shoulders with a few of the most well-known individuals in the music business.

“I got there at 9 in the morning, I was drinking all morning, drinking Jack Daniels out of a bottle with Jimi Hendrix,” he advised TraditionSonar in 2019. “I went in the car with Jerry Garcia. It took us about an hour to get to the backstage area from the hotel, which was actually only a minute away because there were hundreds of thousands of kids in the way. … And Jerry got me so stoned. I didn’t remember that I spent the entire day before the concert started at night with Jerry. When Jerry Garcia got you stoned, you were ready for surgery.”