It was a blueprint for Live Aid and every mega-festival since. We survey a new archive box set – in full – to uncover the real story of these ‘three days of peace and music’

A few weeks back, my Twitter feed was suddenly clogged with misty-eyed reminiscences of Live Aid. It is now generally regarded as a white saviour festival of mostly dreadful music. Still, there’s much nostalgic love for Tony Hadley’s leather trench coat, and Queen’s alarming “no time for losers” philosophy. I lived through it; I remembered how a bunch of craven, ageing rock stars fell over themselves to reboot their careers. OK, I was 21, and cynical, but I was there for it, watching it all unfold on TV. I understand it.Woodstock – which celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend – was a primitive blueprint for Live Aid, and every mega-festival since. Its cultural weight has risen and fallen over the decades – depending on who you talk to, it was either the pinnacle of 1960s counterculture or the rain-sodden end of a dream. I was four years old. The soundtrack album would be in friends’ houses in the 70s, and the movie seemed to be on TV every year, so I’m part of a generation that thinks it knows Woodstock without having been there. But the movie is incomplete and out of sequence – some of the story is as fictionalised as Bohemian Rhapsody.

Out this month is a 50th anniversary archive box set – all 38 CDs of it – which presents the festival in something approximating real time. Folk-blues singer Richie Havens, who opened the event while almost every other act was stuck in traffic, would later claim he “played for nearly three hours … I sang every song I knew!” We now know he only played for 45 minutes. This is an audio vérité documentary, right down to the on-stage announcements: “Eric Klinnenberg, please call home … Dennis Dache, please call your wife … Karen from Poughkeepsie, please meet Harold at the stand with the blood pills …” I listened to all 38 discs in sequence, over three days.

Friday: don’t take the brown acid

“Ladies and gentlemen, one of the most beautiful men in the whole world” is the opening introduction for Havens. “Groovy, groovy, groovy. How are you? Can you hear? Groovy. Groovy. It’s really beautiful to see so many people together. Right? Groovy.” So you may not have the Beatles at Woodstock (or Bob Dylan, who lived within spitting distance) but you do have Havens singing Strawberry Fields Forever as if it had been written in a shack. Havens goes into the terrific Freedom for an encore, which will turn out to be a highlight of the movie; its chopped guitar and conga slaps pre-empt late 90s R&B. Sweetwater, meanwhile, sound like a late-60s parody band; they even take time out to tell us they were busted on the way over. Their set is rescued by the lovely For Pete’s Sake, a “bossa nova blues” vocalese with harpsichord.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Richie Havens at Woodstock. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy

Someone should have told Bert Sommer that, like Cilla Black, his softer register was very sweet, but singing out he resembled a goat caught on barbed wire. Tim Hardin – writer of the immortal Reason to Believe – pulls off the opposite trick: singing out, he still sounds intimate, and though his tuning is wayward, his bruised set is a highlight. We’re only four discs in, and deadpan stage manager John Morris is already telling the “same boring pedantic speech” about not climbing on the scaffolding. The flat, brown acid gets him more exercised: “Everybody please, please … it is poison. There are 15 people who are very ill from it …” Rain is pouring down.

“Friends, we begin this evening’s recital …” Ravi Shankar had blown minds at the Monterey pop festival two years previously, when Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was only a couple of weeks old. His set already feels like reliving the past, but it has the best sound so far. Thanks to the rain, the electrical setup is life-threatening, so the unbilled Melanie takes the stage with her acoustic guitar: Close to It All and Momma Momma are truly intense. Animal Crackers is not only intentionally amateurish but deliberately ugly. We need someone to lift us up.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Best sound so far … Ravi Shankar, centre, with Alla Rakha at Woodstock in 1969. Photograph: Ralph Ackerman/Getty Images

What we hear next is Joe Boyd refusing Morris’s request for the Incredible String Band to go on in the rain with just a couple of acoustic guitars, thereby missing their shot at future immortality. Instead, the unknown Arlo Guthrie takes the stage, ending up in the movie, and – through sheer bonhomie – selling a million copies of Alice’s Restaurant. Joan Baez’s late Friday night appearance, oddly out of time, gives away that Woodstock is a celebration of the 60s before the decade has even ended.

Saturday afternoon: jazz rock and tie-dye tents

“Let’s get high!” say Quill, Saturday’s opening act and maybe the most obscure name on the bill. They are also awful. They Live The Life lasts a leaden, eight minutes, ending in a percussive wig out with the band sarcastically chanting: “You’re so free!” This was played during one of the brief sunny spells, but you wouldn’t know it.

San Francisco veteran Country Joe McDonald is melancholy and sweet. Santana’s lithe Latin groove is maybe the first thing that doesn’t sound actively damp. The 21-year-old Carlos Santana has apparently been given mescaline by the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia long before his scheduled set time. Years later, he laughed about it: “I figured I had enough time to come down before it was time for us to play.” But no, because everything is running on Woodstock time, and they go on early, the guitar wriggling like a snake in his hand. You can’t tell – they sound great. Weeks later, Evil Ways will be in the Top 10.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I figured I had enough time to come down before it was time for us to play’ … Carlos Santana at Woodstock. Photograph: Tucker Ranson/Getty Images

By mid-afternoon, insulin and asthma medicine are the main concerns of the MC. And lost car keys. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian walks on stage, slack-jawed. “I don’t know if you can tell how amazing you look. You’re a whole city. You’re something an awful lot of us talked about 10 years ago.” Sebastian adds that he’s been living in California, in a tent, where he met a lady who tie-dyes – “a cloth house is all you need if you’ve got love.” The beautiful Darling Be Home Soon is the only hit single we’ve heard so far. Sebastian goes down better than anyone yet, maybe something to do with the brevity of his set. He plays Younger Generation (“I’d like to dedicate it to a cat whose old lady has just had a baby”) and the lyric still sounds ridiculously grownup, more so than Bowie’s Kooks, coming from a man in his early 20s.

“At the information booth is a three-year-old girl, we don’t know her name, she has light blond hair …” There’s a constant whirr of helicopters before the bludgeoning jazz rock of England’s Keef Hartley Band, who are greeted by one person clapping. By now, the army are flying in medical supplies in helicopters. “They’re with us, man, they’re not against us!” cries lighting man and new MC Chip Monck – amid the chaos, the MCs are notably dropping their wink-wink references to getting high.

The Incredible String Band are very much not bludgeoning. “Hello. I’m going to read a poem before we start.” They sound apologetic yet slightly grouchy. They could have created an indelible moment for Michael Wadleigh’s cameras the previous night; instead they go on at teatime before festival-friendly Canned Heat and play a set consisting entirely of new songs. Canned Heat, at their best, sound like a proletarian Velvet Underground (Rollin’ Blues), or maybe the American Status Quo (the endless Woodstock Boogie). Going Up the Country will become the festival’s anthem, as well as a TV ad staple decades later.

Saturday night: bad moon rising

Mountain? More brutal white blues shouting, more ear-squashingly heavy boogie. Night falls and on come the Grateful Dead, who begin with St Stephen, a pretty song, largely instrumental, that clocks in at two minutes, and follow it with country classic Mama Tried. Garcia, like a proto-Alan Partridge, jokes about “designated parking areas” for 10 minutes while they try to sort out their sound. The 19 meandering minutes of Dark Star are attractive enough but, man, they go on, while poor Creedence Clearwater Revival – headliners, with Bad Moon Rising still in the charts – are watching the clock tick in the wings. Eventually they go on at 3 am.

Creedence’s set is all the more remarkable given the ungodly hour. Fogerty’s voice is raw but focused, they can stretch out on Born on the Bayou and Suzie Q, but can be succinct, punchy and still just as evocatively swampy on Green River. They have punch – this is easily the best set so far.

Janis Joplin sounds unerringly like Ray Stevens’ Bridget the Midget in places. While Raise Your Hand is a pretty undeniable Stax-on-helium workout, her version of the Bee Gees’ To Love Somebody is overegged. By contrast, Sly and the Family Stone sound entirely futuristic – like everyone else they have malfunctioning gear, but they “hurry up and play to avoid hanging you up”. Bang! Straight into Sing a Simple Song. Tight as a drum. Everyday People, a No 1 hit just a few weeks earlier, is a festival high point.

The Who start off ramshackle, draggy even. They pick up while on a run of Tommy songs; by Amazing Journey they sound much more like the fizzing fathers of freak-beat. Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman grabs the mic at one point to moan: “I think this is a pile of shit, while [MC5 manager] John Sinclair rots in prison.” Pete Townshend is heard to shout, “Fuck off my fucking stage!” but we can’t tell whether his guitar, allegedly wielded over Hoffman’s head, makes contact. The set peters out in farts of feedback.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Manic morning music’ … Jefferson Airplane.

Sunday: mud, sweat and fears

Coming on stage at sunrise on the Sunday, Jefferson Airplane greet the new day explaining they’re not a “hippie band” but “manic morning music”, then eviscerate Fred Neil’s Other Side of Life. Somebody to Love is also taken at breakneck speed – this turns out to be an energy tablet before a leaden day. Joe Cocker does Dylan and Ray Charles with added sweat and grease, before another rainstorm means the power is cut for several hours. There is a beautiful – though shorter – ambient interlude on the box set.

By teatime, Country Joe McDonald is back with his band, messier than before. Ten Years After follow with more choogling, formless blues rock, and the MC announces that the hospital has “an awful lot of broken limbs”. The Band’s set is disappointingly heavy, leavened by the lightness of an old Four Tops hit Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever. They are followed by Johnny and Edgar Winter’s endless jamming. Brass rock hitmakers Blood Sweat & Tears would be cut from the movie and the soundtrack, apparently for being out of tune, but you wouldn’t know it. Their take on Randy Newman’s Just One Smile is surprisingly lovely, though there’s possibly an element of Stockholm Syndrome at play.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are balm. Fresh from the Hollies, Graham Nash shows his working men’s club stagecraft by crying, “Ooh, me zip’s come down!” just before the gorgeous Guinnevere. They sound like a cool freshwater stream alive with trout after the clogged, dead mud that has preceded them. It’s back to the wailin’ harp and high-wattage white blues with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, though at least they start with a cowbell-led groove on Born Under a Bad Sign. They have read their audience – Everything’s Gonna Be Alright is a proper party tune.

Monday: Jimi burns the house down

Almost there. It’s breakfast time on Monday, and the crowds are audibly smaller. Fifties revivalists Sha Na Na sound like a less together Showaddywaddy. And finally, Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsies – or Gypsy Sun and Rainbows – play their first-ever show, for two hours, and it is blindingly great. How did the stage sound suddenly get this good? Hendrix is hilarious, as ever, explaining new song Izabella is “about a cat, blah blah, woof woof …” It’s a real shame they wouldn’t keep this lineup together. Hendrix repeatedly comments on the “patience” of the crowd. He plays the national anthem, his guitar dive-bombs at the end of Hey Joe and, that’s your lot. The applause dies away surprisingly quickly.

'We knew we had something extraordinary': looking back on Woodstock, 50 years on Read more

What do you learn from listening to Woodstock in almost-real time? That monumentally heavy, white-blues boogie was massive in America in 1969. That the relative finesse of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and even Melanie was the obvious next move for rock, if only as relief and release. That Sly and the Family Stone were the best new act of the year and created a whole universe for R&B. You wouldn’t really guess that a Peanuts character would be named after Woodstock, or that it would be used as shorthand for the counterculture 60s (1967’s Monterey festival would be more appropriate). But I do understand – now even more – why the footage and the soundtrack completely turned me off festivals as a teenager. It sounds like a battle, and sometimes it’s almost frightening. When I eat my Kerala-style mackerel curry at Green Man this year, I’ll do a silent prayer that, if Ten Years After decide to play an unannounced set, I’ll be able to walk back to my bed and breakfast.