Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt, and this is Rolling Stone Music Now.

We are talking about the original Woodstock.

50 years later, there's a mammoth box set that includes 38 CDs and

chronicles every moment of the Woodstock Festival on audio except for the

times when the sound system was just playing albums by other people

to fill the time, they couldn't include that.

But other than that, you can listen to this 38 hours and basically astroly project

yourself like Dr strange into the original

Woodstock festival and I have with me the man who made this possible and he

xaks hello welcome and you worked for how long on this thing? Well in aggregate from start

to finish was about 14 years but that doesn't mean 14 continuous years thankfully.

You know we began working on it in the lead up to the 40th anniversary and then there was sort of a long interregnum period, which was useful because technology caught up to where we were and what we needed and it gave me a few years to think about what

direction I might want to take this in or what the right shape for it was so we've

been working in earnest for about the last year and a half and I don't think I've

slept for about 12 months so it's been long.

What was the biggest thing or things that you learned about this festival because as you made clear our entire idea of it is distorted sometimes in a very

beneficial way by the movie and the album we believe that Jimmy Hendrix's performance

especially the Star Spangled Banner, was this climactic moment, which it was.

It was an incredible performance, but no one was really there. It was incredible and climactic because it was the climax of the movie.

So what we know is a very filtered version

and a very idealistic version.

There could have been a comedy

...