Woodstock 50 has been canceled…to the surprise of no one!

The festival, spearheaded by original Woodstock promoter Michael Lang, had promised to revisit the “three days of peace, love and music” spectacle with a bill that was supposed to include Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, the Black Keys, Dead & Company and a bevy of other musicians, including John Fogerty from Credence Clearwater Revival, John Sebastian and Santana, who appeared at the original festival in August, 1969.

In a last ditch effort to salvage the festival, the organizers announced it was being moved to the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland, a 32,000-capacity venue about 250 miles south of the original Woodstock site in Bethel, New York.

But ultimately, the beleaguered 50th anniversary music festival, promoted as a celebration of the seminal baby boomer gathering, finally called time on the event three months after its main backer pulled funding and declared it dead.

So why did it seem that Woodstock 2019 was always doomed from the start?

There are many reasons. One reason is that the wealth and variety of crappy music we have today – and all its many specialized genres – make it harder to hold a festival that everyone wants to check out.

Of course if you’re got hundreds of dollars to burn, you’ve already been to the Desert Trip shows at Coachella featuring Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Roger Waters and the Who. That is the kind of show everyone would still want to see nowadays…but normal people like you and me have been priced out of that market.

That kind of money has absolutely nothing to do with peace and love. Greed is the main reason there can never be another Woodstock.

Also, one could make the argument that musical tastes have been frayed by the relentless dumbing-down of society and the overall lack of musical quality presented to mainstream listeners.

Fifty years ago in 1969 like, who didn’t want to see Jefferson Airplane as the sun rose? Nobody, man! And everyone could agree upon a shared love of Joan Baez and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Credence Clearwater Revival was the most popular band in the world at the time but they weren’t even in the film. Janis Joplin? She was smacked out and pretty awful but nobody wanted to miss her set. She didn’t make the cut, either.

And then there’s Jimi Hendrix. Who cared if he was delayed for 4 hours and ended up playing at 9am on Monday morning? Nobody, man!

But the internet has turned music into a very solitary pastime in the new millennium. No one is going to record stores anymore and getting face-time with other music lovers because there are so few record stores left. The thrill of the physical search for a good rare disc or hard to find import is gone for the most part, replaced by a glowing screen in the bedroom. Nowadays it’s easy enough to scour blogs and music news sites to find hidden gems that fit your personal tastes into something worthy of bragging rights, almost.

Today, people define themselves by their musical tastes through their ear buds, instead of forming a collective identity with others who share similar tastes. Humans have changed the way they consume music. Today people have access to whatever they want, immediately.

But anyone who says that the music of the sixties was boring, repetitive and inferior to today’s output is living in a sanitized electronic fantasy world. For starters, we wouldn’t have today’s music had it not been for the 60s explosion of creativity and experimentation, building on the established jazz, blues and folk traditions.

But most hippies weren’t rich kids. The ‘baby boomers’ included plenty of working class people who didn’t have the option to turn on and drop out or put flowers in their hair and go to San Francisco or Rishikesh before ending the gap years.

Besides the established acts, Woodstock – the 3-hour movie – also made stars out of several relatively unknown performers like Santana, Ten Years After and Joe Cocker. Woodstock the movie saw some of the greatest rock music performances ever committed to celluloid: Hendrix’s awesome, war-like riffing on the Star-Spangled Banner, for one. Joe Cocker. The Santana and Sly & the family Stone sets were also exhilarating.

Some of the performances were underwhelming, however, The Band turned in a desultory set, as did the Grateful Dead. Janis Joplin tried too hard and failed to inspire. CCR disowned their performance due to technical problems – but the audio evidence doesn’t bear this out. They sound great on the CD. CSNY came on at 3am coked to the gills, and in a foreshadowing of what was to come, Neil Young refused to be filmed. Nobody cared that they were out of key most of the time.

The Woodstock crowd included a lot of doe-eyed flower children wrapped in their own little clouds, but the bulk of the audience was responsible, idealistic and fairly sober. Most of the crowd, and the all of the performers, were solidly against the Vietnam War, and not just because their own asses were on the line: they knew it was a brutal, fraudulent crime against humanity.

The spontaneous festivals, before big business really got hold, were a heady mix of music, love, camaraderie and drug-fueled escapism. Woodstock can’t simply be written off as a load of hippie dropouts sticking it to the man for a weekend, though.

Nor can it be characterized as mere white middle-class hedonism. Rock music reached working class people of all races. The music itself encouraged the breaking of racial barriers. If you look at the film or photos from the Woodstock, there are quite a few black and brown faces in the crowd. And even if there were loads of middle-class kids on college break there, so what? They didn’t all turn out to be yuppie wankers (like Jerry Rubin). Quite a few are still knocking around in their tie-dye shirts, beads and bandanas today.

1969 saw the reverie of Woodstock, but only weeks later the Manson murders shook the world…and then the disaster of Altamont happened. That event in December 1969 has since come to symbolize the end of the peace and love era. By then totally different vibes began to engulf the generation, demonstrating that the counterculture hadn’t yet learned to master its contradictions. It wasn’t all about peace and love. There were other forces at play…

But look: Woodstock wasn’t even the biggest or the greatest concert of all time. Not even close. That is just hippie revisionism. The only thing that really made it great was the film – a major box-office smash – which was seen by millions of people all around the world and which won multiple Grammy Awards and Oscars.

In 1970, the year after Woodstock, the Isle of Wight in Britain hosted around 600,000 attendees and featured a far better line up. The Isle of Wight Festival had Joni Mitchell, Free, the Doors, Taste, ELP, Miles Davis, Leonard Cohen and the Moody Blues, in addition to Hendrix and The Who.

The biggest ever concert so far was held down in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where over 800,00 people attended the ‘Rock in Rio’ festival in 1985.

But of course, the first and best pop music festival of all time will always be the Monterey Pop Festival held in June of 1967. Nothing will ever top that.