Woodstock: The Oral History

Three days that defined a generation, told by those who lived it. Joel Makower's First Edition, August 1989 (Tilden Press, ISBN 0385247176) captures Woodstock not through nostalgia-tinted retrospection but through raw, immediate voices - performers, organizers, attendees, locals, and the farmers whose land became history.

Published exactly twenty years after the festival, this oral history arrived when the '60s generation was reaching middle age and beginning to reckon with what those muddy fields actually meant. Unlike glossy commemorations, Makower's approach lets contradictions stand: the chaos and transcendence, the idealism and commercialism, the music and the dystopian conditions. From Max Yasgur's decision to rent his land to Jimi Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner," these testimonies preserve the texture of an impossible weekend when half a million people created a temporary autonomous zone that both embodied and exposed the counterculture's promises.