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Fifty-four years ago today Richie Havens, substituting for the band Sweetwater, who were stuck in traffic, opened the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. While The New York Review of Books did not send a correspondent to the muddy dairy farm in Bethel, New York, many of the thirty-two musical acts who performed over the four days of the festival—as well as the ethos that Woodstock has come to represent—have been discussed in our pages, including a 2017 review of Robbie Robertson’s memoir, Testimony, by Greil Marcus.

Greil Marcus
The Brotherhood of Rock

“In rock and roll there is always an origin story, because whether in one’s own perceptions or in the world at large, there is always a time when there was no rock and roll and a time when there was. For Jaime Royal Robertson, born in Toronto in 1943, it was

at the end of the summer of 1956 that—wham!—the world had changed overnight…. I would go on to learn that this new music had been seeping under the door for years with artists like Fats Domino, but to me it felt like it happened in the blink of an eye.

Testimony, Robertson’s account of his life as a teenage member of the rockabilly band Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, and as the guitarist and a songwriter for the Band, a group that in the late 1960s rewrote the American story as surely as Mark Twain, Mae West, Uncle Dave Macon, or Robert Johnson had done before them, is a book about the revelation of such moments.”

Lorrie Moore
Ain’t It Always Stephen Stills

“I began to marvel, yet again, at how much, for a particular generation, the songs of Stephen Stills were marinated into our minds, our spines, our bones.”

Adam Shatz
The Beautiful Sounds of Jimi Hendrix

“This was not a revival act: Hendrix used a range of technological innovations (feedback, sustain, effects pedals) to expand the sound of the guitar, to make it “talk” in ways that it never had. His mastery of the devices that the engineer Roger Mayer would later create for him was as comprehensive as his mastery of the guitar.”

Mark Crispin Miller
What Happened in the Sixties

“This is not to say that the protests of the Sixties were inconsequential, but rather that they did not cut deep enough: the major problems of the Fifties are still with us, and the Sixties’ zeal for betterment has gone the way of all flash, having dwindled into the activities of sober Naderites, ecologists, and careful lawyers.”

Mark Crispin Miller
Where All the Flowers Went

“Woodstock made it clear that rock would spark no revolutions. Because that gathering took place without bloodshed, journalists wrote happily that the kids were okay after all. But Woodstock was peaceful because most of its 300,000 participants were too stoned to stand up, let alone make a fist.”