A plethora of age-defining musicians are busy on tour this summer, and many of them are coming to the Bay Area. “Legends of the Summer,” a concert featuring pop culture icons Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z, is coming to Candlestick Park in July. Timberlake will certainly be entertaining with his “Suit & Tie,” the recent staple of the former N Sync lead’s return to the music scene.
Fans of a certain UK boy band will also be pleased to know that they are headed to the HP Pavillion in July. One Direction will be playing there as part of their extensive summer tour of the U.S.
Outside Lands will be back with another lineup of high profile musicians from a variety of eras. Last year, legendary artists including Stevie Wonder, Metallica, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Jack White, and the Foo Fighters headlined the concert. This year, the concert will be bringing 70-year-old Beatles legend Paul McCartney, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Young the Giant, along with many others, to Golden Gate Park.
Outside Lands has been a premier music festival in San Francisco for five years now, attracting world famous acts for a three day venue that draws tens of thousands of people to Golden Gate Park each day of the concert.
Other festivals include Southern California’s famous Coachella, a festival that brings in many rock acts from across the globe. Smaller and more local festivals include live 105.3’s BFD, which featured 30 Seconds to Mars, Passion Pit, and Silversun Pickups as its headliners this year.
The excitement and bustle of a huge music festival like Outside Lands conjures images of the quintessential festival: Woodstock. Regarded as a defining moment in music history, the cultural impact of Woodstock turned the 3 day venue into a household name.
Aragon principal Pat Kurtz was at the 1969 Woodstock, a now-legendary festival that featured acts like The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Santana, The Who, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. The concert attracted nearly half a million people to a 600 hundred acre farm in the rural town of Bethel, New York.
Kurtz attended the concert with a couple of friends while going to college in Albany. “I just knew it was a big concert. We were planning on meeting some college friends. We at first thought it would be easy to meet up,” Kurtz says, commenting on how crowded the festival was.
She says, “One of the reasons I think it was so popular was that it was not expensive. I remember the tickets went for about $25, in comparison to the price for three day festivals nowadays, that is not very much.” $25 translates to about $161.69 in today’s money, still a little more than half the price of the local three day Outside Lands music festival in San Francisco.
The concert attracted so many people that the Governor of New York considered sending in the National Guard to make sure that the festival did not descend into chaos. However, the concert manager was able to prevent the interference.
Advertised as “Woodstock Music and Arts Fair: 3 Days of Peace and Music,” a big part of the Woodstock legacy is, in fact, its simple combination of peace and music. Kurtz says, “It was during the Vietnam War. It was… the peace movement.”
The concert happened a couple of years after many major events in U.S. history, including the institution of a draft for the Vietnam War and the massive protests like March on Washington that Kurtz was actually a part of. The concerns about the war and the protesting that occured in the previous and future years added much meaning to the venue’s theme of peace through music. Remarkably, the potential for mass violence and disaster mostly avoided, replaced instead by an incredibly successful three days. Two deaths occured, one from heroin overdose and another from a tragic accident where a tractor ran over a sleeping attendee.
The legacy of Woodstock remains influential at many multi-day concerts today, and this summer promises to bring many big names to the Bay Area as Woodstock once did in New York.
