15 August

On August 15, 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair opened on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York. Over the next three days, an estimated 400,000 people gathered in a muddy field to hear Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and dozens of others.

The festival was supposed to be a commercial venture — tickets cost $18 for three days — but so many people arrived that the fences came down and it became a free concert. There wasn’t enough food, the portable toilets were overwhelmed, it rained, and the roads were so clogged that some performers had to be helicoptered in. And somehow, despite all of that, it worked. Four hundred thousand people spent three days together in the mud and the music, and there was no violence. It became the defining event of a generation.