10
GREATEST 50 CONCERTS
GREATEST FESTIVALS OF THE LAST 50 YEARS
A brief history of passionate fans gathering together in the name of music, love and not showering Ð from a generation-defining party in upstate New York to a chill polo field outside Palm Springs, California, to an eclectic jam on a campground in rural Tennessee
MONTEREY POP 1967
Sly Stone at Woodstock
Redding
76 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
WOODSTOCK 1969
CONCERT FOR BANGLADESH 1971
“What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?” thundered the New York Times editorial page after approximately 500,000 rock fans turned a 600-acre chunk of Max Yasgur’s upstate New York farm into the greatest camping trip in rock history – featuring sets by a lineup that included the Who, Sly Stone, CSNY, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Santana and dozens of others. As Jimi Hendrix closed the weekend on the morning of its fourth day with a lysergic “StarSpangled Banner,” history had been made, brown acid notwithstanding. “I think ‘the Big Bang’ is a great way to describe Woodstock,” David Crosby once said.
After a genocidal war in South Asia led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and created a massive refugee crisis, Indian sitar great Ravi Shankar approached George Harrison about a benefit. Two concerts at New York’s Madison Square Garden in August 1971 essentially invented the megastar-humanitarian charity blowout. Harrison led a supergroup featuring his old bandmate Ringo Starr, Leon Russell, Billy Preston and Eric Clapton, and Bob Dylan’s set with Harrison was the first time he had ever played live with a Beatle. “What we did show was that musicians and people are more humane than politicians,” Harrison later recalled.
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“Monterey Pop was the prototype,” concert promoter Bill Graham told ROLLING STONE. It christened the Summer of Love, with around 200,000 flower children happily descending on the quiet Northern California beach community. The Who and the Jimi Hendrix Experience sealed their legends with equipment-destroying U.S. performances, and soul icon Otis Redding, playing months before his tragic death, crossed over to the rock audience with an impassioned set. “I thought the stage was going to fall in when he stomped his foot,” recalled Grace Slick.