August 15, 1969: Pioneering Hipsters Land At Woodstock Festival [PICS]

You’ll find a lot of nostalgic old folks celebrating today as the 45th anniversary of the start of the Woodstock Music Festival back in 1969. That’s the legendary music festival that was meant to be a simple event in upstate New York, and then became a cultural touchstone when pretty much every young person in a five-state radius decided to attend. The epic crowd grabbed the media’s attention, and Woodstock quickly became a big event in the history of the ’60s. [photo: Hulton Archive/Getty]
Then the Altamont Festival happened in 1969 where the Hells Angels’ killed a kid while working the crowd, and Charles Manson came along right after that, and the whole Summer of Love kind of fizzled. But it’s still really cool to check out these pioneering hipsters who showed up at Woodstock on this day.
For example, you’ll find that there aren’t too many classic hippies in the crowd. There were plenty of hippies onstage, of course, and some hardcore hippies were attending, but the Woodstock crowd was mostly cool kids who probably still took their fashion cues from the 1950s definition of a badass. That might also explain why a novelty act like ’50s revivalists Sha Na Na were on the bill.
We really like how how many of the kids in these pics look they could be dating the Hottest Girls of Coachella or the Hottest Girls of Bonnaroo. Maybe your dad is in one of these pics, which would be cool. Maybe less so if you see your mom, but that’s because there’s a double standard in our society. Wasn’t something like Woodstock supposed to wipe that out? Oh, well–check out the groovy folks who tried…