Why Neil Young Turned Down a $1 Million Headliner Spot at Woodstock

Among his many career-defining accolades and awards, perhaps the most decade-specific was Neil Young’s inclusion in the proud, original lineup of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair 1969. Still, not even the joyful nostalgia of this iconic event was enough to convince Young to return to the stage for Woodstock 1994.

A million-dollar check for his troubles certainly didn’t help, either.

Why Neil Young Turned Down a Woodstock Headliner Spot

The concept of Woodstock ‘94 was simple enough. In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the upstate New York event, the founding organizers (and financiers) of the 1969 event joined forces once more for a three-day music and art festival. The 1994 lineup included some musicians who were there to see the inaugural event come to be, including Joe Cocker, The Band, and Santana. Other notable acts of the same era, like Bob Dylan, also joined for the 25th anniversary.

Neil Young, however, refused to be one of the returning lineup members—even after his former bandmates, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash, agreed to play. For Young, commercialization had started eating away at Woodstock’s true purpose from its first muddy weekend in August 1969. In a 2014 interview with Charlie Rose, Young got candid on the parts about the inaugural Woodstock he decidedly didn’t enjoy.

“The thing about it that wasn’t so beautiful to me was the filming,” Young said. “I thought that these guys with their cameras all over the stage were in the way of the music and the people. They were a distraction. We’re playing, and they’re right here, you know, with a camera. I told them, ‘Don’t come near me. I have a very heavy guitar. If you come near me, I’ll hit you with it.’”

When press members told Graham Nash about his bandmate’s opinion on the commercialization of the festival, he replied, “[Forget] Neil. I don’t see him playing for free.”

The Canadian Songwriter Likened The Festival To a Garden

During his 2014 conversation with Charlie Rose, Neil Young compared a musical performance to a flower garden. One could easily document a flower garden by stomping into the beds, tramping down a few blooms in the process, and setting up their cameras to get the close-ups they need.

Or, Young argued, that same camera crew could stay out of the garden beds and use long lenses and other creative techniques to document the blooms without getting in their way or, worse yet, damaging them. (It’s safe to assume that Young, armed with a heavy guitar, was the “bloom” in this analogy.)

“When [Woodstock] happened for the first time, it was something special. Because there you were, and there are half a million people, and we’re just realizing, ‘Hey, we have a generation. We are somebody,’” Young recalled. “It’s right now. We are somebody. We’re making a difference. The music is part of that. The music is not a commodity or content; the music is the life of the thing.”

“You’re singing your songs and people are listening,” Young continued. “It’s going back and forth like one big thing. That’s what was so beautiful about that.”

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