The original plan was for an outdoor rock festival, "three days of peace and music" in the Catskill village of Woodstock. What the young promoters ended up with was the third largest city in New York state, population 500,000, all at MaxYasgur’s dairy farm near the town of White Lake.
One of the LIFE photographers on scene during the festival, JohnDominis, summed up his own recollections of Woodstock with this quote:
"I really had a great time.,” Dominis told LIFE.com, decades after the fact. “I was much older than those kids, but I felt like I was their age. They smiled at me, offered me pot. . . . You didn’t expect to seea bunch of kids so nice; you’d think they’d be uninviting to an older person. But no—they were just great!".
Following are some amazing photographs of the event.
Photos by John Dominis, via LIFE archives.
