WThe Acid Tests were a series of parties held by author Ken Kesey primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area during the mid-1960s, centered on the use of and advocacy for the psychedelic drug LSD, commonly known as "acid". LSD was not made illegal in California until October 6, 1966.
WArgyle Street was a Victorian terraced street in Norwich, Norfolk. It became a squat lasting from 1979 to 1985. The street was then demolished in 1986. Some of the newbuild houses were subsequently demolished in 2015.
WThe Ashton Court Festival was an outdoor music festival held annually in mid-July on the grounds of Ashton Court, just outside Bristol, England. The festival was a weekend event which featured a variety of local bands and national headliners. Mainly aimed at local residents, the festival did not have overnight camping facilities and was financed by donations and benefit gigs.
WThe Bath Festival of Blues was a music festival held at the Bath Pavilion Recreational Ground in Bath, Somerset, England, on Saturday 28 June 1969. It featured a lineup of British blues bands, including Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Ten Years After, Led Zeppelin, The Nice, Chicken Shack, Jon Hiseman's Colosseum, Mick Abrahams' Blodwyn Pig and Principal Edwards Magic Theatre amongst others.
WThe Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music was a counterculture era music festival held at the Royal Bath and West Showground in Shepton Mallet, Somerset, England on 27–29 June 1970. Bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin performed, and the festival was widely bootlegged. An 'alternative festival' was staged in an adjoining field where the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind played on the back of a flatbed truck.
WThe Battle of the Beanfield took place over several hours on 1 June 1985, when Wiltshire Police prevented The Peace Convoy, a convoy of several hundred New Age travellers, from setting up the 1985 Stonehenge Free Festival in Wiltshire, England. The police were enforcing a High Court injunction obtained by the authorities prohibiting the 1985 festival from taking place. Around 1,300 police officers took part in the operation against approximately 600 travellers.
WThe Big Sur Folk Festival, held from 1964 to 1971 in California, was an informal gathering of prominent and emerging folk artists from across the United States. Nancy Jane Carlen (1941-2013) was working at the Esalen Institute when Joan Baez was asked to lead workshops on music. Carlen was a good friend of Baez, and they decided to invite other artists, which turned into the first festival.
WBlazing Swan is an annual regional Burning Man event held near Jilakin Lake in the Shire of Kulin, Western Australia. It is an experiment in temporary community and artistic expression, and is guided by eleven main principles, including radical inclusion, gifting and radical self-reliance. The event occurs around Easter each year, usually over a period of seven days. The event location is in dry bushland adjacent to Jilakin Lake, and is referred to as Jilakin Rock City. Each year a swan-shaped wooden effigy is built and burned at the culmination of the event.
WThe Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival is an American annual four-day music festival developed and produced by Superfly Presents and AC Entertainment. Since its first year in 2002, it has been held at what is now Great Stage Park on a 700-acre (280 ha) farm in Manchester, Tennessee. The festival typically starts on the second Thursday in June and lasts four days. It has been held every year except 2020 when it was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and 2021 when it was canceled due to excessive rain from Hurricane Ida flooding the campground. Main attractions of this festival are the multiple stages featuring live music with a diverse array of musical styles including indie rock, classic rock, world music, hip hop, jazz, Americana, bluegrass, country music, folk, gospel, reggae, pop, electronic, and other alternative music. Musical acts begin Wednesday evening for early arrivers, continued throughout the festival with performances starting each day around noon, and some stages entertaining festival goers until sunrise.
WBoomtown is a British music festival held annually near Winchester, Hampshire on the Matterley Estate in South Downs National Park. It was first held in 2009 and has been held in its current site since 2011. Its diverse line-up of bands, DJs and speakers perform on many different stages each a part of a district with its own individual theming. Each yearly event is known as a Chapter and expands on the storyline from the previous year, told through the sets, live actors and many forms of alternate reality games. The festival site is split into several districts, and the narrative is reflected in the design of the districts, streets and venues, which are populated by hundreds of actors to play the role of inhabitants.
WBurning Man is an event focused on community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance held annually in the western United States. The name of the event comes from its culminating ceremony: the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, referred to as the Man, that occurs on the penultimate night of Burning Man, which is the Saturday evening before Labor Day. The event has been located since 1991 at Black Rock City in northwestern Nevada, a temporary city erected in the Black Rock Desert about 100 miles (160 km) north-northeast of Reno. As outlined by Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey in 2004, the event is guided by ten principles: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.
WCaesar's Camp is an Iron Age hill fort around 2400 years old. It is located just in Crowthorne civil parish to the south of Bracknell in the English county of Berkshire. It falls within the Windsor Forest and is well wooded, although parts of the fort have now been cleared of some trees. The area is managed by the Forestry Commission but owned by Crown Estate, and is open and accessible to the public. The hill fort covers an area of about 17.2 acres and is surrounded by a mile-long ditch, making it one of the largest in southern England.
WThe Camps for Climate Action are campaign gatherings that take place to draw attention to, and act as a base for direct action against, major carbon emitters, as well as to develop ways to create a zero-carbon society. Camps are run on broadly anarchist principles - free to attend, supported by donations and with input from everyone in the community for the day-to-day operation of the camp. Initiated in the UK, camps have taken place in England at Drax power station, Heathrow Airport, Kingsnorth power station in Kent, the City of London and The Royal Bank of Scotland Headquarters, near Edinburgh. During 2009 camps also took place in Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Netherlands/Belgium, Scotland, Wales and Australia.
WThe Castlemorton Common Festival was a week-long free festival and rave held in the Malvern Hills near Malvern, Worcestershire, England between 22 and 29 May 1992. The media interest and controversy surrounding the festival, and concerns as to the way it was policed, inspired the legislation that would eventually become the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
WIn the 1960s, several "be-ins" were held in Central Park, Manhattan, New York City to protest against various issues such as U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and racism.
WCRACK International Art Camp (CIAC) is a multi-disciplinary art camp arranged every year over several days in Smaran Matshya Beej Khamar, a fish seed farm in Rahimpur, Kushtia, Bangladesh. The purpose of the outdoor art camp is promoting inter-disciplinary art collaborations. It was launched in 2007 by artist and researcher Shawon Akand, along with artist Delowar Hossain as Crack International Art Camp.
WCzechTek was an annual teknival normally held on the weekend at the end of July in the Czech Republic. It attracted thousands of free tekno dancers from several European countries. Open invitations were usually made to all sound systems, performers and all people with positive thinking.
WDjakarta Warehouse Project (DWP) is a dance music festival held in Jakarta, Indonesia. It is one of the largest annual dance music festivals in Asia, featuring dance music artists from around the world.
WElectromagnetic Field is a camping festival in the UK, held every two years, for hackers, geeks, engineers and scientists. It features talks and workshops covering a wide variety of topics. EMF is a non-profit event run entirely by a team of volunteers.
WFree festivals are a combination of music, arts and cultural activities, for which often no admission is charged, but involvement is preferred. They are identifiable by being multi-day events connected by a camping community without centralised control. The pioneering free festival movement started in the UK in the 1970s.
WFrozen Dead Guy Days is an annual celebration held in the town of Nederland, Colorado, to loosely celebrate the cryopreservation of Bredo Morstoel.
WThe Fusion Festival is a music and arts festival with a countercultural character. It takes place at a former military airport called Müritz Airpark in Lärz, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in northeastern Germany. The festival name is often depicted in Cyrillic letters as Фузион, but pronounced like the English word fusion []. The annual festival was started by the Kulturkosmos organisation in 1997. It lasts four to six days, usually at the end of June. In 2016, the Fusion Festival event took place from June 29 - July 3, and which has attracted some 70,000 attendees for each year's festival, since the 2013 event, which the comparable American Burning Man event only matched in 2015.
WGlastonbury Festival is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts that takes place in Pilton, Somerset, in England. In addition to contemporary music, the festival hosts dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret, and other arts. Leading pop and rock artists have headlined, alongside thousands of others appearing on smaller stages and performance areas. Films and albums recorded at Glastonbury have been released, and the festival receives extensive television and newspaper coverage. Glastonbury is attended by around 200,000 people, requiring extensive infrastructure in terms of security, transport, water, and electricity supply. The majority of staff are volunteers, helping the festival to raise millions of pounds for charity organisations.
WThe Green Gathering, formerly known as the Big Green Gathering is a festival with an environmental and social justice focus, including workshops and talks on permaculture, politics, ecology and crafts, as well as art, live music and spoken word performances. The first Big Green Gathering was held in 1994 and the festival is currently held in Chepstow, Monmouthshire although it has previously been held in various locations in Somerset and Wiltshire, England.
WThe How Weird Street Faire is an outdoor street fair held each year in San Francisco, occupying several blocks of Howard Street and the surrounding area, in the SoMa neighborhood. The event has been held yearly since 2000, and is currently centered at the intersection of Howard and Second Streets. The How Weird Street Faire claims to be the longest-running electronic music street festival in North America, showcasing diverse forms of dance music including live electronica, downtempo, breaks, electro, trance, house, techno, dubstep, drum & bass, dub, and world beat. As of 2017, it had several thousand visitors, many of which come dressed in costumes.
WThe Human Be-In was an event held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park Polo Fields on January 14, 1967. It was a prelude to San Francisco's Summer of Love, which made the Haight-Ashbury district a symbol of American counterculture and introduced the word "psychedelic" to suburbia.
WThe Isle of Wight Festival 1970 was a music festival held between 26 and 31 August 1970 at Afton Down, an area on the western side of the Isle of Wight in England. It was the last of three consecutive music festivals to take place on the island between 1968 and 1970 and often acknowledged as the largest musical event of its time, with a larger attendance than Woodstock. Although estimates vary, Guinness World Records estimated 600,000 to 700,000 people attended. It was organised and promoted by local brothers, Ron and Ray Foulk through their company Fiery Creations Ltd and their brother Bill Foulk. Ron Smith was site manager and Rikki Farr acted as compere.
WJazz Bilzen was an annual multi-day open air jazz and pop festival that took place from 1965 to 1981 in the Belgian city of Bilzen. Jazz Bilzen was the first festival on the continent where jazz and pop music were brought together. For this reason, Jazz Bilzen is sometimes called the "mother of all European festivals".
WThe Kralingen Music Festival was a pop and rock music festival held in the Kralingse Bos, in the Kralingen neighbourhood of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, on 26–28 June 1970.
WLightning in a Bottle (LIB) is an annual music festival in the Central Valley region of California first held in 2006. It is presented by The Do LaB, which seeks to promote sustainability, social cohesion, and creative expression. The Do LaB has also created art installations for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California.
WThe Love Parade was a popular electronic dance music festival and technoparade that originated in 1989 in West Berlin, Germany. It was held annually in Berlin from 1989 to 2003 and in 2006, then from 2007 to 2010 in the Ruhr region. Events scheduled for 2004 and 2005 in Berlin and for 2009 in Bochum were canceled.
WLucidity is an annual, three-day transformational festival in Santa Barbara, California.
WThe Mantra-Rock Dance was a counterculture music event held on January 29, 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It was organized by followers of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) as an opportunity for its founder, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, to address a wider public. It was also a promotional and fundraising effort for their first center on the West Coast of the United States.
WThe Miami Pop Festival was a rock festival that took place from December 28-30, 1968, at Gulfstream Park, a horse racing track in Hallandale, Florida, just north of Miami. It is sometimes confused with a separate event that took place seven months earlier, at the same venue, though the two events were unrelated. The earlier event was officially publicized on promotional materials and in radio ads as the "1968 Pop and Underground Festival," and "The 1968 Pop Festival," but later came to be referred to colloquially as the "Miami" Pop Festival, a practice which has led to confusion between the two events.
WThe Miami Pop Festival is the name by which a music festival that took place on May 18-19, 1968, in Hallandale, Florida, is sometimes known. The venue was Gulfstream Park, a horse racing track just north of Miami. The event, which was officially publicized on promotional materials and in radio ads as the "1968 Pop and Underground Festival," and "The 1968 Pop Festival," was promoted by Richard O'Barry and Michael Lang, the latter of whom became famous as one of the four promoters of Woodstock in 1969. Decades later, the May 1968 festival began to be referred to colloquially as the "Miami Pop Festival", leading to confusion with the actual Miami Pop Festival, which took place in December 1968.
WThe Monterey International Pop Music Festival was a three-day concert event held June 16 to 18, 1967, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin and the introduction of Otis Redding to a mass American audience.
WNambassa was a series of hippie-conceived festivals held between 1976 and 1981 on large farms around Waihi and Waikino in New Zealand. They were music, arts and alternatives festivals that focused on peace, love, and an environmentally friendly lifestyle. In addition to popular entertainment, they featured workshops and displays advocating alternative lifestyle and holistic health issues, alternative medicine, clean and sustainable energy, and unadulterated foods.
WThe New Orleans Pop Festival was a rock festival held on Labor Day weekend, two weeks after the Woodstock Festival. It was held at the Louisiana International Speedway in Prairieville, Louisiana, about 65 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans and 15 miles south of Baton Rouge. Over 26 bands performed during the three days of the festival, including seven veterans of Woodstock. It had a peak attendance of 25,000–30,000 people.
WThe Newport Pop Festival, held in Costa Mesa, California, on August 3–4, 1968, was the first music concert ever to have more than 100,000 paid attendees. Its sequel, billed as Newport 69, was held in Northridge, California, on June 20–22, 1969, and had a total attendance estimated at 200,000.
WNowhere is a Burning Man regional event in Spain, the biggest such regional event in Europe. It began in 2004 and is held annually in July in the Monegros Desert, located in Aragon in north-eastern Spain.
WThe Oregon Country Fair (OCF) is a nonprofit organization and an annual three-day art and music fair held outside the city limits of Veneta, Oregon, United States. Located in the Willamette Valley, the site is about 13 miles (21 km) west of Eugene along the Long Tom River near the unincorporated community of Elmira. Annual attendance is approximately 45,000, and the fair has around 960 craft and food booths each year. The event is known as an outgrowth of the counter-culture movement and for using environmentally-friendly practices during the fair.
WPhun City was a rock festival held at Ecclesden Common near Worthing, England from 24 July to 26 July 1970. Excluding the one-day free concerts in London's Hyde Park, Phun City became the first large-scale free festival in the UK.
WRainbow Gatherings are temporary, loosely knit communities of people, who congregate in remote forests around the world for one or more weeks at a time with the stated intention of living a shared ideology of peace, harmony, freedom, and respect. In the original invitation, spread throughout the United States in 1971, the "Rainbow Family Tribe" referred to themselves as "brothers & sisters, children of God", "Families of life on Earth", "Friends of Nature & of all People" and "Children of Humankind". All races, nations, politicians, etc. were invited in the desire that there could be peace among all people. The goal was to create what they believed was a more satisfying culture — free from consumerism, capitalism, and mass media — one that would be non-hierarchical, that would further world peace, and serve as a model for reforms to mainstream society. However, the values actually exhibited by the group have at times varied quite a bit from this ideal, with recent decades showing increasing levels of crime at the events, and some organizers stating the core principles have been modified, and become more mainstream, in an effort to attract more people.
WReclaim the Streets also known as RTS, are a collective with a shared ideal of community ownership of public spaces. Participants characterise the collective as a resistance movement opposed to the dominance of corporate forces in globalisation, and to the car as the dominant mode of transport.
WThe Red Dog Saloon is a bar and live music venue located in the isolated, old-time mining town of Virginia City, Nevada which played an important role in the history of the psychedelic music scene.
WThe Rocket Festival was a three-day festival of music, circus, performance art and sculpture set in Andalucia in southern Spain that was held in May 2005, 2006 and 2008.
WRuisrock is a rock festival held annually on the island of Ruissalo in Turku, Finland. Ruisrock, founded in 1970, is the second oldest rock festival in Europe and the oldest in Finland. The festival has attracted world-famous artists throughout its lifetime except around the start of the 2000s (decade), due to the organiser's economic issues.
WThe KYA San Francisco International Pop Festival was held at the Alameda County Fairgrounds on Saturday October 26 and Sunday October 27, 1968.
WSeasalter is a village in the Canterbury District of Kent, England. It is located by the sea on the north coast of Kent, between the towns of Whitstable and Faversham, facing the Isle of Sheppey across the estuary of the River Swale. The settlement of Yorkletts is included in the ward. It is approximately five miles (8 km) north of Canterbury.
WThe Stonehenge Free Festival was a British free festival from 1974 to 1984 held at the prehistoric monument Stonehenge in England during the month of June, and culminating with the summer solstice on or near 21 June. It emerged as the major free festival in the calendar after the violent suppression of the Windsor Free Festival in August 1974, with Wally Hope providing the impetus for its founding, and was itself violently suppressed in 1985 in the Battle of the Beanfield, with no free festival held at Stonehenge since although people have been allowed to gather at the stones again for the solstice since 1999.
WStrawberry Fair is a local festival of music, entertainments, arts and crafts which has been held in Cambridge, England, since 1974. The fair is held on Midsummer Common on the first Saturday in June. It is open to the public and free.
WTrentishoe is a village and civil parish in North Devon, England. The parish lies on the coast of the Bristol Channel. The village is 5 miles (8 km) east of Combe Martin, at an elevation of 180 metres, separated from the coast by high cliffs.
WWasteland Weekend is an annual festival held in Edwards, California. The event is listed as a full immersion event, with all participants required to adhere to the set theme. It has since been annually held in September since 2010, except for 2020, when the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, the 10th-anniversary edition of Wasteland Weekend was held from September 25th to September 29th.
WWatchfield is a village and civil parish in the Vale of White Horse in on the edge of southwest Oxfordshire, southern England, about 3 miles (4.8 km) southeast of Highworth in neighbouring Wiltshire. Watchfield is about 1 mile (1.6 km) north of the village of Shrivenham. Both villages used to be on the main road between Oxford and Swindon, which is now the A420 road. The Vale of White Horse was part of Berkshire until the 1974 boundary changes administratively transferred it to Oxfordshire.
WWoodstock Music and Art Fair, commonly referred to simply as Woodstock, was a music festival held August 15–18, 1969, on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, 40 miles (65 km) southwest of the town of Woodstock. Billed as "an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music" and alternatively referred to as the Woodstock Rock Festival, it attracted an audience of more than 400,000. Thirty-two acts performed outdoors despite sporadic rain.
WYaga Gathering is a transformational festival hosted in a clearing in Ežeraitis Forest, at the edge of Spengla Lake in the Varėna District of southern Lithuania. The festival has no corporate sponsors, and is financed by ticket sales. The site of the festival is about 60 kilometres (37 mi) south of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.