Reaching the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival can only mean one thing: nostalgia. It’s been in plentiful supply during the past few months. Predictable retrospectives have been written. An obligatory Blu-ray DVD of Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 docu­mentary Woodstock has been released, with a multitude of extras and a hideously tacky dashiki cover. Even the director Ang Lee is capitalising on the occasion with his portrait of Elliot Tiber, a key figure in finding the festival site, in the forthcoming feature film Taking Woodstock. While those boxes of remembrance have all been ticked, an official 40th anniversary concert is off the agenda.

Michael Lang — one of the impresarios behind the original festival, who recently added to the wave of nostalgia by publishing his memoirs — tried to get the ball rolling in March by announcing plans to hold a back-to-its-roots free festival somewhere in New York and, bizarrely, a concurrent gig to be held at that well-known mecca of peace and love, the now abandoned Tempelhof airport, in Berlin (Hitler’s favourite aviation hub, no less). The Who, Santana and Crosby, Stills and Nash were all mooted to reprise their 1969 roles as the big pulls of the festival, while Lang suggested such stalwarts of bland MOR as Red Hot Chili Peppers and Dave Matthews Band as a way to contemporise proceedings. The idea was greeted with a yawn across the music business.

When Brooklyn’s Prospect Park emerged as a possible contender for a venue in April, the local outcries and heated debates turned out to be little more than a few residents of the gentrified surrounding areas voicing concerns that the grass might have to be relaid. Negotiations petered out and, at the start of August, Lang glumly announced that there would be no event at all. The poor economy and a lack of willing sponsors were cited as the main obstacles, but could the reality be that, after 40 years, the world is finally letting go of the outdated ideals of the hippie generation?

In truth, the rebellious flower-power spirit so closely intertwined with the American pop culture of the 1960s was in its death throes by the time Woodstock happened. The youthful push towards liberal politics, social unity and higher states of consciousness reached a peak in 1967 with the Human Be-In, in San Francisco, which popularised hippie culture, giving rise to the so-called Summer of Love later in the year. Subsequently, the term “counterculture” became a part of the national idiom, but the hippie movement’s rapid growth also signalled its dilution. In 1968, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and the ensuing chaos at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, left political reformists floundering. The slaying of Martin Luther King Jr further polarised the civil-rights movement between nonviolent protestors and the growing “by any means necessary” contingent. Meanwhile, the nationwide unrest over the escalating Vietnam conflict grew ever more pronounced. Perhaps most damning for the hippie populace, however, was Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential election — something he achieved, in part, by appealing to that “silent majority” of the electorate who viewed the counterculture as an ugly blot on the American landscape.

The influence of hippie culture was dwindling as the 1960s drew to a close, but there was a commercial viability that Michael Lang and his friend Artie Kornfeld could see. At the start of 1969, Lang was a band manager and Kornfeld was an A&R man. The duo developed the idea of a recording studio in Woodstock, in upstate New York, and pitched it to Joel Rosenman and John Roberts — a pair of bored Wall Street types with time, energy and money to spare. The studio idea was superseded by the suggestion of having a giant three-day festival in the town, which had gained a near-mythical status in the music world as Bob Dylan’s stomping ground. The dates were set as August 15, 16 and 17; 186,000 advance tickets were sold at $6 a day; and Woodstock Ventures was born. When local residents refused permission for the festival to be held in their town, Lang and Kornfeld kept the name but moved the site to Wallkill, only for its residents to object too, leaving the festival without a venue barely a month before the confirmed dates.

In the nick of time, a struggling farmer named Max Yasgur saw an opportunity to shore up his own finances and offered his land in Bethel as a venue. Roberts has always claimed that Yasgur was acting out of altruism as much as monetary motivation, arguing, years later, that “Yasgur was a genuinely decent man”. Probably so, but $75,000 must have helped.

From the start, the Woodstock endeavour was based firmly on profiteering for the main parties, and the blissful mantra of “3 Days of Peace and Music”, used for the advertising material, was what was offered in return.

Not that there wasn’t anything to remember about the festival, of course; performances by Sly and the Family Stone and Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix’s stellar reinterpretation of The Star-Spangled Banner, have become cornerstones of American rock history. But their contributions didn’t materialise simply from goodwill. The Who had to be begged to play by their management, and received a then staggering $12,500 for their headline set, which was interrupted by the Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman, venting his fury about the imprisonment of the White Panther John Sinclair. Already unimpressed with the mud-caked longhairs (“I felt like spitting on the lot of them,” he recalled in 1982), Pete Townshend showed his lack of interest in this show of political righteousness by clobbering Hoffman with his guitar. The irony was that Hoffman had threatened to gatecrash the event, and was paid $10,000 by Lang and Kornfeld to stay away. So much for a come-one, come-all utopia.

Thanks to such financial haemorrhaging, the cost of staging the event reached $2.5m, but what Lang and Kornfeld unwittingly did was create a franchise that would reimburse them this overspend, and a whole lot more, in the next four decades. The aforementioned film earned millions, and all but saved Warner Brothers from going out of business, while the soundtrack album spent a month at No 1 in the Billboard charts in 1970, giving rise to a second volume a year later. Lower-key anniversary concerts followed in 1979 and 1989, but it was in 1994 that organisers shifted into corporate high gear with the 25th anniversary concert in Saugerties, NY. Sponsorship for the event was secured by Pepsi, and anyone not willing to brace the on-site quagmire could watch the three more days of peace and music on pay-per-view TV. In fairness, there was a wry acknowledgement of the original ideals being muddied — adverts promoting the event featured middle-aged yuppies ditching their BMWs for a weekend of tie-dyed wistfulness.

The dream truly turned into a nightmare in 1999, when looting and violence overshadowed the 30th anniversary celebration. This time it was held at an air-force base in Rome, NY, and fans were forced to pay inflated ticket prices and extortionate rates for food and water, as well as having to endure poor on-site sanitation. The crowd reacted to the squalid environment by lighting fires across the site, and a full-scale riot took place on the final night. The multiple rapes that were also reported underlined the fact that the event was reprehensible, and no amount of rose-tinted hippie mythology could obscure that.

The memory of that decidedly hostile weekend is fresh enough to mute this year’s 40th anniversary celebrations. Numerous small-scale events are planned across the world, but, overall, fewer music fans seem willing to deal with the bluntly obvious money-making intent of Woodstock Ventures. Lang isn’t helping to reverse this image: when plans were announced in June for an unofficial free festival in San Francisco, called West Fest: 40th Anniversary of Woodstock, he issued a cease-and-desist order over the use of the word “Woodstock”.

The true hippie ideals are long dead, but, more than 40 years on, there are still plenty of people striving to keep its profitability alive and well.

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010