Right now, in America, there are more big-time popular music festivals than at any point in history. Whether it’s a summer institution like Lollapalooza or a daring winter happening like Day for Night, festivals now come with an air of ubiquity and inevitability that make them easy to take for granted.
We should fight that impulse. If you take a look at the timeline of American music festival history, you’ll likely notice a gaping expanse, stretching from roughly December 1969 (the brutality of Altamont) to July 1991 (the first show of the inaugural Lollapalooza). During this span of nearly 22 years, stateside music festivals turned from ascendant cultural phenomena to endangered species, with the few successes vastly outnumbered by the high-profile failures. To find out how that happened, and how the festival staged a comeback, we took a dive into the archives of America’s newspaper of record, The New York Times.
1970: The Beginning of the End
The first wave of rock festivals peaked and cratered within the span of about four months. Attracting nearly 400,000 youths over three days in August 1969, the three days of Woodstock in August 1969 seemed to fulfill the era-defining promise of a burgeoning festival scene that began in earnest with San Francisco’s Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival in 1967. In those two years, more than two-dozen festivals popped up at racetracks, parks, and farms around America. With copious amount of literal sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the festivals became emblematic of late-’60s counterculture, but their power would only extend as far as the decade itself.
Held in December 1969, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival confirmed the worst fears of festival skeptics. Spurred on by violent fans and even more violent Hell’s Angels who’d been hired to work security, the festival’s defining moment wasn’t the music, but the brutal stabbing death of Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old student from Berkeley who’d returned to the stage (allegedly armed with a .22 revolver) after a previous altercation with the Angels.