Fifty years after Woodstock, legends about the music festival are tightly braided with the reality of its three chaotic days. The 1969 show was muddy enough (literally and figuratively) for many people to believe both the myths and the debunking, sometimes simultaneously. Even the name of Woodstock doesn’t hold up to cursory fact-checking, as most people know — while the name of Woodstock, N.Y., was more marketable because of the town’s association with Bob Dylan, the event happened more than 40 miles away, in Bethel. Here are five other Woodstock stories that, like the brown acid, turned out to be problematic.

Image Credit... Ben Giles

Myth: Joni Mitchell wrote the anthem “Woodstock” about her experiences at the festival

Reality: Mitchell never made it to Woodstock — she was stuck in a hotel room in New York City. She had been planning to accompany Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to the festival, but when their joint managers, David Geffen and Elliot Roberts, saw how chaotically Woodstock was unfolding, they instructed her to stay in New York: She had an important appearance booked on “The Dick Cavett Show” taping the Monday afternoon after the festival ended, and they were worried she wouldn’t make it back in time.

“I was the girl of the family and, with great disappointment, I was the one that had to stay behind,” Mitchell told the writer Dave Zimmer for his 1984 biography of Crosby, Stills and Nash. She put aside her bitterness to write a song exalting the festival as a holy gathering, informed by the footage she saw on television and the stories she heard from her then-boyfriend Graham Nash. CSNY had a hit single with their version of it in 1970, while Mitchell included the song on her album “Ladies of the Canyon.”