Passage 1
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair—better known to its participants
and to history simply as “Woodstock”—should have been a colossal failure.
Just a month prior to its August 15, 1969 opening, the council of
Wallkill, New York, informed the fair’s organizers that it was withdrawing
its permission to hold the festival.
Amazingly, the organizers found a new site, a large field in Woodstock,
New York, owned by a local dairy farmer. Word spread to the public
of the fair’s new location. The event drew a larger audience than the
organizers had expected.
On the first day of the fair, crowd estimates of 30,000 kept rising; traffic
jams blocked most roads leading to the area
.
Some musicians could not reach the site to appear at their scheduled times.
In addition, fences that were supposed to facilitate ticket collection never
materialized, so the organizers abandoned all attempts at taking tickets.
But that was not all: as the large crowd gathered, so did summer
storm clouds. It started raining on opening night and continued for much
of the three-day event. To deal with the crowd, which reached an esti
mated 500,000 by the third day, helicopters flew in food, doctors, and
medical supplies
.
Despite all of its problems, the festival featured some of the greatest
musicians of the 1960s, including Janis Joplin; Joan Baez; Crosby,
Stills, Nash, and Young; Sly and the Family Stone; Creedence Clearwater
Revival; and Jimi Hendrix. Today many people think of Woodstock
not only as a milestone for rock music but as the defining moment
for an entire generation.
The main idea of this passage is best expressed in which
sentence?