Roger Daltrey Reveals Why He Hated Woodstock 1969

The iconic Woodstock Festival was painted as a pure hippie and musical utopia: it generated artists who are extremely talented with no hint of commerciality, it spawned peace and love movements, it was a historical event that you wouldn’t want to miss for all its glory. Or at least, that was what’s painted by the many. But for Roger Daltrey of The Who, he is ready to flip the other side of the coin for that.

The charismatic frontman once revealed in an interview that he had hated the festival from its beginning until the end. What most people don’t know, the festival was no fun primarily due to the erratic weather that made not only the event a catastrophe, but from what Daltrey remembers, an annoying quagmire.

“You’ve got to remember, by the time we went on stage, we’d been standing in the mud for hours. Or laying in it, or doing whatever in it.” Daltrey said. Albeit the back stage doesn’t exactly have mud, it was still uncomfortable for the singer to wait hours and hours of artists to finish their performance, until their moment.

The sound equipment wasn’t at their best shape either. Roger admitted to barely hearing himself when he sung, as the booming Marshall 100-watt amplifiers blasted their sound, and Keith Moon’s boisterous sounds aren’t helpful too. Not only that, but from what he had experienced the “peace and love” energy from the festival was nothing but a hoax. The singer expressed: “Woodstock wasn’t peace and love. There was an awful lot of shouting and screaming going on.”

Although it wasn’t what anyone expected, one still couldn’t deny the impact it presented to the pop culture. Perhaps not anyone could agree it’s the best, but it definitely catered some of the finest performances ever-known to man.