Music, mud and mayhem

summer, a music festival held on a dairy farm in a tiny rural community exploded into one of the defining moments of the ‘‘flower power’’ generation.

The three-day concert in Bethel, New York State, was expected to attract around 50,000 people, but almost half a million were there to see some of the key acts of the Sixties.

Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and The Who were among more than 30 artists who performed at the Woodstock Festival, named after the nearby village which had become a magnet for musicians of the hippy era.

Billed as ‘‘three days of peace and music’’, Woodstock played out against a backdrop of the Vietnam war. It hit newspaper headlines around the world and captured the mood of the post-war generation, who longed to break free from the past.

Michael Wadleigh was only 26 when he filmed the festival’s music, mud and mayhem. His movie, which won an Oscar for best documentary in 1970, has been remastered and rereleased on DVD with hours of extra performances to mark the 40th anniversary of Woodstock.

Now 66, American-born director Wadleigh is a grandfather and lives on a farm in Wales. His film of Woodstock happened during a year he took off from medical school to make films about topical issues.

His first film was on the American communist party, which was founded in 1911 in Woodstock, New York, a village about 100 miles from New York City. “Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many, many people had moved up there, because it was a beautiful village and kind of a summer retreat for radicals,” he recalls.

‘‘The producers of the Woodstock concert had also been drawn to Woodstock. They expected maybe 50,000 people and they were off by one zero. Ten times as many people came.

‘‘The idea caught fire with America.

As the kids say in the movie, it wasn’t really the music, it was a whole combination of things. It was people trying to find their identity, what the Woodstock generation called the ‘counter-culture’ and that was the gathering point.

“It was largely young, white people, who wanted to be leaders and to find a new direction for America and the world.’’ He feels Woodstock and the film have endured because Sixties music is unequalled. ‘‘You’re looking at phenomenally interesting music that has stood the test of time and, in my opinion, the reason is that in the Sixties, the musicians were competing to be original.

“Everybody wants to be famous, but the idea then was to create an unusual sound and have other musicians envy you because you had musically or lyrically done something unique.

“Today if it’s a hit, then 18 people will try to imitate it and earn more money than you did. Money becomes the standard, not originality.”

Film-makers shot hundreds of hours of footage, filming every one of the 40 groups appearing. ‘‘We couldn’t communicate well. We didn’t have cellphones then and the walkie-talkies we had were very poor, so to make up for the lack of communication, we shot more footage. Then we took nine months to cut it,” says Wadleigh.

For him, the standout moment was provided by the intensity of Janis Joplin’s singing. ‘‘It’s almost scary the amount of emotion and energy and passion she puts into her performance,” he says.

“I was with Tina Turner when she first saw Janis Joplin, and she said to Janis ‘honey, you can’t continue to sing like that or you’ll have no voice’, and Janis’s response was just to laugh and take a swig on her Southern Comfort.

‘‘It’s a terrible thing, but on the credits at the end of the film, the number of people who died young is astounding. They lived life at full tilt.

‘‘Everybody says, ‘It’s substance abuse’, but it’s also given to us incredible music. In a sense they paid with their lives and we’re the beneficiaries.

You just can’t expect that they can rigorously separate harmful abusiveness from passion and conviction.”

The 40th anniversary edition is the four-hour long director’s cut, plus two hours of separate footage of some great performances.

A lot of footage was destroyed in a flood at the Warner Brothers’ vaults a few years ago, an accident caused by an earthquake in California.

‘‘So what you see there is the extra footage of the best performances that survived. As a music lover, I want to see them. You know, Creedence Clearwater, Johnny Winter, Grateful Dead are in there,” says Wadleigh.

■ Woodstock 40th Anniversary edition: Warner Home Video DVD, £19.99