Counterculture country : nation-building at 1960s rock music festivals

Abstract

Rock music festivals of the late 1960s were the sites of regular and violent contestation between promoters who organized them and the countercultural festival goers who attended. Throughout the final years of the 1960s, many countercultural youth began envisioning the rock music festival as the most practical space for realizing a revolutionary social order. Overwhelming local police and rural communities, these festival spaces were comprised of hundreds of thousands of countercultural youth who gathered and openly embodied countercultural values in plain sight and in solidarity. When promoters recognized the profitability of organizing rock music festivals, they began charging admission and excluding those who could not, or would not, pay admission. This tension between promoters and countercultural youth violently erupted at rock music festivals throughout the era.