| The Woodstock music festival was already passing into legend when The New Yorker’s first pop-music critic, Ellen Willis, published her review later that month. She wanted to correct the record. “Before history is completely rewritten,” Willis wrote, “a few facts, semi-facts, and strong inferences are in order.” Willis, who was twenty-seven at the time, was neither a fogey nor a grouch. She recognized what would become hallmarks of the festival in public memory—“the peacefulness and generosity of the participants,” “warmth and fellow-feeling”—but she was outraged by the “gross ineptitude” of the organizers, whose self-promotion and poor planning might ring familiar to anyone who observed the more recent chaos of the Fyre Festival. (In Woodstock’s immediate aftermath, she reports, there was talk of refunds and a lawsuit.) Willis writes convincingly that, in some ways, Woodstock—which took place fifty-four years ago this week—owed its success less to the performers than to “the state,” and to other unlikely representatives of the Man. Perhaps most surprising, in hindsight, was the role of the music itself. Willis quotes a festivalgoer from California who remarked, “Wow, I can’t believe all the groups here, and I’m not even listening to them.” | 
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