Organizers of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair planned for a crowd of 50,000 at their August gathering 40 years ago in rural upstate New York. Instead, nearly half a million people showed up to hear Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Who, transforming the festival into an iconic — and some say spiritual — event that still resonates in America. “A community grew out of Woodstock,” says organizer Michael Lang in his new book The Road to Woodstock.
“A sense of possibility and hope was born and spread around the globe.” Rock historian Pete Fornatale goes further: “I wanted to make the case that Woodstock was a spiritual experience,” says the author of Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock. Fornatale is no religious zealot. “I'm not a believer. I'm not a nonbeliever. I'm a wanna-believer,” he says.
But he's clearly on a crusade to explore the spiritual dimensions of the festival, which organizers moved from the town of Woodstock to a farm near Bethel, which means “House of God” in Hebrew. “Spirituality may not be the first thing people associate with Woodstock,” says Fornatale, who recently talked about his book at the Museum at Bethel Woods, situated on the site of the festival. “But young people were searching for an identity and for a meaning that they found there that weekend.” More>>
