Remembering Woodstock: 3 days of peace, music and rain
The weather at Woodstock in 1969 had far-ranging effects on the event itself and the hundreds of thousands of youth attending.
It was on this weekend, 55 years ago, that half a million people gathered on a farm in Bethel, New York, for one of the world's biggest concerts and a pivotal moment in music and politics. But music wasn't the only major story to come out of Woodstock. The weather, and especially the rain, was as inextricably intertwined in the festival as were peace and love.
A poster for the movie 'Woodstock', chronicling the legendary 1969 music festival, 1970. The tagline reads 'This way to Woodstock - the movie'. (Movie Poster Image Art/Getty Images)
Wet weather helped secure the venue
The small town of Woodstock, New York, was supposed to be the original location of the festival, but the search for a suitable venue for a massive crowd led festival creators to nearby Wallkill, New York. After their permit was rescinded there, they ended up at Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, New York.
"It started as a straight business deal," Sam Yasgur, son of Max Yasgur, who rented the farm out for the concert, said in "Woodstock: 3 Days That Changed Everything."
"The Summer of '69 was a very wet summer. We couldn't get hay in the barn. This was a hayfield. When you have that many cattle, you've got to put up enough hay to get them through the winter, and you can't make it yourself. The prospect of having to buy that amount of hay was daunting, to say the least."
According to NOAA, July 1969 delivered 7.17 inches of rain to Sullivan County, New York, compared to a historical average of 4.28 inches, making it the wettest July since 1947. By the end of August, more than 16 inches of rain had fallen in the county.
Rain stymied construction at the site
"In Bethel, I think of the 23 days that we worked up there... it rained probably 20 days," Michael Lang, the festival organizer, said in 2005.
"It was unbelievable the amount of water in the ground, and it's all clay. I remember one piece of road across the top of the hill, I think I put the road in eight times and it sank and we put the road in and it would sink [again]."
Because they couldn't pipe the water out without encroaching on land they hadn't leased, the road had to be rebuilt again and again.
Torrential rain and thick mud at the Woodstock music festival result in some people removing their shoes to allow them to dry. (Three Lions/Getty Images)
Weather affected the musician lineup
Lang also had to reconsider and constantly retweak the artist lineup due to the rain.
"It was determined organically [that] we needed acoustic, it was wet, it was rain, we didn't want anybody to fry, so it was a question of who's here who's ready to go on and who's acoustic," Lang explained in the documentary.
But the scheduling didn't always work out. Bob Weir of The Grateful Dead told Rolling Stone magazine about his performance Saturday night, "Every time I touched my instrument, I got a shock. The stage was wet, and the electricity was coming through me. I was conducting! Touching my guitar and the microphone was nearly fatal. There was a great big blue spark about the size of a baseball, and I got lifted off my feet and sent back eight or 10 feet to my amplifier.”
The rain and mud became part of the experience
Many of the iconic photos from Woodstock show the mud that plagued the farm after frequent rainfall during the event. This worsened during a severe thunderstorm on Sunday afternoon, which dumped heavy rain, turning the farm into a sea of mud.
General view of people walking through the mud after a rainstorm during the Woodstock Rock Festival circa August, 1969, on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York. (Howard Arnold Collection/Getty Images)
It may have rained toads on Woodstock
"It was raining toads when we played. The rain was part of our nightmare," Weir told Rolling Stone magazine about his performance Saturday night.
The "raining toads" comment is interesting as there have been documented events of tornadoes or waterspouts that have carried small animals such as frogs or fish and deposited them somewhere else. However, there are no weather observations that would have indicated a tornado near Woodstock that night.
What else do we know about the weather at Woodstock?
Weather maps from Aug. 15 to 18, 1969, show that the weather pattern was stuck in a loop as a pesky stationary front north of New York contributed to the showery weather.
Friday was arguably the best weather day, and attendees weren't aware of the forecast for worse weather.
"There was no 24-hour weather channel. It was hot and sunny on Friday, so we didn’t bring any rain gear or ponchos," attendee Nancy Einstein told the History Channel in 2019.
There's no way to know for sure how much rain fell during Woodstock. There were no weather stations in Bethel in 1969, but nearby rain gauges in a 10-mile radius measured between 0.36 and 1.37 inches of rain during the festival.
People under the rain at the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969 (Owen Franken/Getty images)
The 1.37 inches of rain included 1 inch on Sunday, which was likely the large thunderstorm that hit Bethel that day. One iconic photo by photographer Elliot Landy shows an approaching thunderstorm about to overtake the crowd.
Using reports from The Rolling Stone, the New York Times and the documentary movies, the concert weekend weather is summarized thusly:
On Friday, Aug. 15, rain started before midnight and continued overnight. There was drizzle Saturday morning, which gave way to the sun by late afternoon. But, after dark, it was raining again. On Sunday, it was sunny and breezy with a big thunderstorm in the last afternoon.
Sunrise over the lighting stand at the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969 (Owen Franken/Getty images)
The last day, as the music lingered on and as concertgoers departed Monday, the sun rose and stayed out for the day, a peaceful end to the festival.
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