Before Woodstock was Woodstock, it was going to be Wallkill — and there is a poster to prove it.

In the spring of 1969 the Woodstock Music & Art Fair was planned for a site in Wallkill, New York, and the organizers commissioned David Edward Byrd, a Fillmore East poster veteran, to advertise it. Byrd built "An Aquarian Exposition" around Ingres' painting La Source: a nude water-bearer standing among jewel-toned cupids, flowers and interlaced hearts, in the Art Nouveau manner that Fillmore East audiences knew from his hand. It names Wallkill, New York, and the dates August 15, 16, 17. Roughly ten thousand were printed.

Then the town threw the festival out. Wallkill's zoning board banned the event about four weeks before the gates were meant to open, Sam Yasgur persuaded his father Max to offer six hundred acres of dairy farm in Bethel, and Byrd's poster became instantly obsolete — too specific to a location that was no longer happening, and with no room on it for a performer list. It was reportedly warehoused rather than circulated. The job of designing a replacement went to Arnold Skolnick, and the result is the poster everyone can picture.

So this is the great Woodstock poster that history did not use. In Paul Grushkin's The Art of Rock it is plate 3.2 — catalog AOR-3.2 — and its own obsolescence is what makes it worth keeping: it is a printed record of the festival as it was planned rather than as it happened, the only surviving trace of the Woodstock that would have taken place sixty miles away under a different sky.