The Holy Grail: The Original Woodstock Tee

Or, Is This Woodstock shirt from the Woodstock Festival in 1969?

The TL;DR… Woodstock didn’t sell shirts at their festival, the only shirts were for staff, and in 50 years, there has never been positive proof of any shirts being sold on the way to the festival, or in the festival.

Woodstock ’69 is that magical moment in time where it seemed like all the bright shining optimism in the world came together for the biggest culture-changing bash in American history. There’s a long-running joke that if everyone who said they were at Woodstock were actually there, the earth would tip over.

Likewise, in the 50+ years since Woodstock Festival, there have been nonstop claims to an old Woodstock shirt from a box in Mom’s attic being an original from the festival!

We at Bluescentric are proud and humbled to help dream up and make official merchandise on behalf of Woodstock Festival. To stay true to our mission of authenticity, we study the depths of the festival’s merchandising journey. There wasn’t a lot of good sources out there compiling the details of original Woodstock tees, and we get a lot of questions, so we put together this little guide.

Unfortunately for vintage t-shirt hunters, old Woodstock shirts are for sure very cool, and some have value, but extremely few are likely to have actually come from “the” Woodstock 1969.

Here we’re going to address some points about 1969 Woodstock Festival T-Shirts:

Woodstock DID have t-shirts at the festival, but only a very limited amount for staff

Those are the holy grails, if you were wondering. Based on photo evidence and what few have survived, staff were given mostly red, green or navy t-shirts, The most common of these original Woodstock t-shirts was the RED one, with a PEACE logo on the front, and the Woodstock Bird and Guitar on the back. You can find one displayed at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, at the site of the original event.

There are several photos of staff wearing the Woodstock shirts. They are the only photos of Woodstock t-shirts at Woodstock festival. Very few of these have made it to modern times.

In recent times, an auction house sold a green Woodstock jacket with a white outer bubble and faded black bird & guitar logo, which came from a security guard who was at the event. It is one of the few original Woodstock 69 garments found that is not a tshirt.

Woodstock didn’t sell their own t-shirts in 1969

It seems like a missed opportunity, but it’s just that the timing was a little early. The era of graphic t-shirts just hadn’t really caught on yet in 1969. If you look at the many photos from Woodstock, you’ll notice very few people wearing t-shirts that we’d think of in the traditional sense today. Even fewer of those shirts have any graphic at all. It just wasn’t a huge part of how people dressed in that moment.

Woodstock just happened shortly before the rise in graphic t-shirt popularity. And its worth noting that the explosive nature of that first festival really caught everybody by surprise.

So the vast majority of “Woodstock” merch was produced after the ‘69 fest had concluded. “Merchandising” as a festival concept just had not really been fully realized at that point in history.

Coming full circle, Woodstock actually did help create the very concept of festival merch. It just happened after the festival had ended. We’ll get into that in a future point.

Were there Bootlegs in, at or around the Woodstock Festival?

There may have been bootleg Woodstock shirts sold there, but no definitive proof has ever been presented to authenticate the claim.

It’s important to remember that, following Monterey Pop Festival in ’67, Woodstock was really one of the “first” modern music festivals, and all festival culture followed in its footsteps. The era of ‘parking log bootlegs’ wasn’t a fully formed idea yet.

It is true that there were hundreds of thousands of people at Woodstock, but the event became widely known by the public in the weeks after the festival, when people came home to tell all their friends, and others read about it in newspapers. News traveled slower in 1969 than it does today.

It was also a well known fact that people abandoned their cars for many miles on the road to Woodstock and just walked. Since there was no good way to get in, organizers actually had to hire helicopters to cart in many artists. Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young and their lawyer told a story about stealing a truck to get closer to the event… It became difficult-to-impossible to get any goods into Woodstock as the festival went on.

Bootleg Woodstock tees from the event are also a logistics problem: 30 – 50 t-shirts weighs 20 to 25 pounds (trust us on this). So it would be particularly difficult for bootleggers to get very much product into or even close to the event on foot.

Also, there’s a practical question about how many shirts a bootlegger could actually screen print, take to upstate N.Y. and sell in the time it takes to hear about this gathering? It’s possible, but unlikely.

But band tees are still tied to Woodstock festival in part because they helped usher in the idea of Festival Merch

It began as a big problem. The ’69 festival was NOT profitable. in fact it was a major loss that the founders were on the hook for, big time. They just weren’t prepared for the explosion of people. They didn’t have food or merch to sell, and their way of making money by ticket sales, was completely compromised when people stormed the gates and broke down the fences. They had to pay all these artists huge sums of cash and expected the now-lost ticket sales to bring it back. Then there was all the money they had to find for last-minute helicopters just to get artists in…

So to pay off the debt, instead of running more festivals, (which was probably uninsurable), Woodstock got into merchandising and licensing. It started with the Woodstock movie, and the popular vinyl records of ’69 Woodstock festival performances which can still be regularly found at record stores, but Woodstock had tapped into something special, and as the legend grew, so did the people who wanted Woodstock shirts. These days, the way of life that is Woodstock can be found on a huge span of merchandise products.

How do I know if I’ve got an original Woodstock tee?

The easiest way is probably the tags. The original shirts mostly had Felco N.Y. tags.

Adding to confusion, to promote the movie there were Woodstock shirts and posters made, months after the festival had concluded. Often times but not always, these will have a © copyright, which originals did not.

Truth could still be out there!

There were 400,000+ people jammed into a New York state dairy farm hill, so anything is possible.

People’s moms, dads, grandparents may still have uncirculated photos or relics of the 1969 Woodstock Music & Arts Festival. If you think you have new information to contribute, contact us!