Fifty-five years ago today, nearly a half-million fans descended on Woodstock, New York, for one of the most significant events in music history.
And the most collected item from Woodstock is the ticket.
But what might shock you is that you can get a full three-day Woodstock ticket raw for $35 and a graded and slabbed PSA 10 for $600.
How?
Well, the ticket is actually the most available graded ticket from any event in the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s. Check out the population of Woodstock tickets graded by PSA:
- Day 1, Aug. 15: 303 graded full tickets, five graded stubs
- Day 2, Aug. 16: 1,093 graded full tickets, 20 graded stubs
- Day 3, Aug. 17: 265 graded full tickets, 22 graded stubs
- Three-day ticket: 1,915 graded full tickets, nine graded stubs
So, how is this possible? And why are there 63 times more unused tickets than used that have been graded? The answer is two-fold.
The legendarily raucous event had massive crowd-control issues and was notoriously under-prepared. When the concert opened Friday morning, the promoters realized they had forgotten a key component: Ticket booths.
Some retellings of the morning recount a brief attempt to convince the concert-goers to leave and come back, only for the idea to be quickly abandoned, rendering Woodstock an effectively free concert. No need for tickets.
The second, and more significant reason for the massive supply of full tickets came in 1981. A man named Norman Karp bought a few safes from a friend who had leased them to Woodstock Ventures and never opened them, according to a 1999 report in the Tampa Bay Times. Karp paid $14,000.
Inside the safes, Karp uncovered 150,000 unused tickets, in addition to Jimi Hendrix's signed contract and other Woodstock merchandise.
"He placed ads in national newspapers and magazines and sold 30,000 tickets at $29.95 each," the Times reported. "He claimed to have made nearly $1 million from the sales."
This created a rare instance in which the full-stub dichotomy was flipped on its head.
Unlike other events, where the population is up because people saved their tickets (see Don Larsen's perfect game no-hitter in the 1956 World Series), this is more that there were real tickets made that weren't used and were inadvertently saved.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct.com and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectible market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.