Woodstock, the most famous music festival of all time, took place 50 years ago this week, August 15th to the 18th, 1969, in Bethel, New York.
The Who were one of the biggest acts signed to perform at the festival, but Pete Townshend wasn’t keen. He says he was “held hostage” by his booking agent Frank Barsalona and festival production director John Morris until he finally said yes, agreeing to a fee of $12,500.
Originally scheduled to perform on Saturday night, August 16th, they didn’t go on until 5:00 o’clock Sunday morning. They did a selection of songs off the newly released Tommy, reaching the album finale of “See Me, Feel Me” just as the sun came up at 6:05 a.m.
Roger Daltrey tells The New York Times that their performance was among their worst. “It was a particularly hard one for me because of the state of the equipment. 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.”
Townshend has said he hated it, but has also said it was career-defining.
“It was much more important than Monterey [Pop festival in 1967], much more important than our first show in New York and much more important than anything that followed. It was the single most important concert in our career. And the movie, which then followed [in 1970], was just about as important because it not only re-engendered sales of Tommy, which was then starting to fail — it’d already done a million-and-a-half or something. But it sold that many again. It was a three-million [selling] album in that period of 18 months. But it wouldn’t have happened the way it happened without Woodstock ’cause I think what happened with Woodstock is that people remembered Tommy.”
Photo Credit: Robin Wong/PR Photos
