Woodstock vs. ACL

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Reviews - Rock Festival Reviews

Aug 10 |16:54

Joe Gross, AMERICAN-STATESMAN MUSIC WRITER

Saturday marks the start of the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, the granddaddy of the American rock festival. Sure, there had been rock festivals before (the Monterey Pop Festival was two years earlier, and Bath Festival of Blues in Somerset, England, preceded Woodstock by a few months), but Woodstock became a legend.

Of course, because nothing quite like this had ever happened before, nobody was prepared for what did happen. Only about 186,000 tickets were sold, but another 214,000 folks showed up. The miracle, of course, is that three days of peace, love and music actually took place with a minimum of incidents. (There were two deaths and at least one birth.)

Over the years, the pop festival has flourished, from the massive Glastonbury festival in England to the traveling Lollapalooza festivals in the 1990s. Now, the pop festival is a regular event in the States, a circuit of gatherings that stretches from New York's All Points West and Chicago's (stationary) Lollapalooza to Los Angeles' Coachella and Tennessee's Bonnaroo.

These days, the festival has become much more civilized. Take our Austin City Limits Music Festival. Instead of 400,000 people on about 600 acres, 65,000 music fans a day on 65 acres. Instead of 32 acts, some of whom took the stage at 4 a.m., ACL features more than 100, none of them playing later than 11 p.m. or so. Instead of $18 for three days of music, ACL costs between $165 and $185. (According to online inflation calculators, $18 in 1969 equals about $105 today.)

Would we have ACL Fest (heading into its eighth year Oct. 2-4 at Zilker Park) without Woodstock? Probably. But it's fun to see how the modern pop festival has evolved. Here are some statistics comparing Woodstock to ACL. As ACL veteran Bob Dylan once put it, "things have changed."

	Woodstock Music & Art Fair	Austin City Limits Music Festival
Dates	Aug. 15-18, 1969	Oct. 2-4, 2009 (first festival in 2002)
Tickets sold	186,000	About 65,000 per day
Attendance	About 400,000	About 65,000 per day
Price for three days	$18 advance	$160-$185 advance
Price for one day	$8	$85
Number of bands	32	more than 100
Time of first act	5:07 p.m. (Ritchie Havens)	11:15 a.m. (Nelo this year)
Headliner	Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin	R.E.M. (2003), Coldplay (2005)
Highlights	Santana, Crosby, Stills & Nash	Foo Fighters (2008), Pearl Jam (2009)
Shortest waiting time	40 minutes	Stages are staggered, between acts so there is no wait, technically
Longest waiting time	120 minutes	See above
Cost of a hot dog	$1 (considered inflated)	$5 (Salt Lick sausage wrap)
Hour of waiting to make a phone call	Two	If you have a cell phone, none. (But if service is spotty, who knows?)
Portable toilets	600 (for 400,000)	About 600 (for 65,000 a day)