On Friday, August 15, 1969, a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, became the most famous field in the history of American music — and the story our chronicle can tell about that day is not the mud or the half-million, but the poster. Woodstock had two.

The first was the one almost nobody saw. When the Woodstock Music & Art Fair was still planned for a site in Wallkill, New York, 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 figure among jewel-toned cupids, flowers, and hearts; it named Wallkill and the dates August 15, 16, 17 (per the auction and dealer records at rockposters and concertposterauction, and the account in americansongwriter of Byrd's rejected design). Roughly ten thousand were printed. Then the town of Wallkill threw the festival out, the site moved to Max Yasgur's farm, and Byrd's poster — too specific to a dead location, and with no room for a performer list — was reportedly warehoused, never circulated. In Paul Grushkin's The Art of Rock it is plate 3.2 — the catalog AOR-3.2, the "original Woodstock handbill," the great poster that history didn't use.

The second is the one everyone knows. Byrd being unavailable, the job fell — on a Thursday, due Monday — to Arnold Skolnick, who cut a white bird, a hand, a guitar neck, and the words "3 Days of Peace & Music" out of paper with a razor and pasted them onto bright red (per americansongwriter, nepm, and Skolnick's own interviews). That is plate 3.1, AOR-3.1: the catalog on which the whole festival's visual memory hangs. A caution to resolve at the gate: the printed Skolnick posters are inconsistent across printings — some read "White Lake, N.Y.," some carry the older "August 15, 16, 17," and a variant is cataloged with "August 17–19"; the exact wording of any given copy is a thing to verify by eye, not assert.

Back in San Francisco that same Friday, the ballroom did not stop for the East Coast: The Who closed their BG-133 nights at Fillmore West and Chuck Berry's BG-187 week rolled on. The scene that had, in a sense, helped invent the very idea of the weekend rock festival watched the biggest one of all happen across the country — and kept its own lights on. (Among the acts who would define Woodstock's next two days were San Francisco's own: Santana, the Grateful Dead, Creedence, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, and Jefferson Airplane — see the August 16 and 17 pages.)