MUNCIE, Ind. – Thirty years after the original Woodstock, Ball State University rock and roll historian Richard Aquila still chuckles about missing out on the concert.

While in his early 20s, he was living in Buffalo, N.Y., when a friend offered him a ticket.

"I thought about it for a second and turned him down," said Aquila, a Ball State history professor and creator of the National Public Radio show, "Rock and Roll America." "I thought it would be just another concert.

"I was probably one of the few people my age in New York who wasn’t at the concert," he said.

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969 drew more than 450,000 people to a pasture in New York, Aug. 15-19. For several days, the festival became a counter cultural mini-nation in which minds were open, drugs were all but legal and love was free.

Aquila believes that Woodstock’s mythology has become part of the cultural lexicon for a generation that only a few years before had wanted to change American society for the better.

"I think it was the last gasp of the counter culture because by 1969 things were looking pretty bleak in the United States," Aquila said. "The highlight of the counter culture was in 1967 and by 1969 the Vietnam War and its protests had escalated, there were political assassinations and the mood of the country was bad.

"However, for that brief moment in the summer of 1969 there was a possibility of hope," he said. "Maybe the dream of peace and love could happen after all."

While the counter culture and its ideas died as the Vietnam War dragged on, violent anti-war demonstrations occurred and the economy stalled, the mystique of Woodstock grew. Three decades later, the mythology is more important than the facts, Aquila said.

Eventually, the history books will remember Woodstock as a counter cultural highlight instead of the disaster that it was in reality, he said.

"What people think happened is focused on the myth that it was three days of peace and love, and the young tribes came together," Aquila said. "Back then, I thought it was just another festival with bands that weren’t that hot and I had something else to do. Who knew it would be that big?"

By Marc Ransford, Communications Manager

(NOTE TO EDITORS: For more information, contact Aquila by e-mail at raquila@bsu.edu or by phone at his office (765) 285-8728 or home at (765) 286-8231.)