The organizers of the Woodstock 50th anniversary festival are relocating the concert to Maryland from upstate New York, more than 250 miles away from where the original 1969 music festival took place, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
The festival is now slated to take place at the outdoor amphitheater Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, which accommodates about 32,000 people.
“When we heard that there was an opportunity to save this festival and bring a piece of American history to our community this summer, we jumped at the chance,” Calvin Ball, an executive of Howard County, Maryland, wrote in a note to Greg Peck, one of the organizers. “Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia is a jewel of Howard County and one of the top music venues in the nation,” Ball wrote in the note obtained by Bloomberg. “It felt like such a natural fit to host a historic festival on our storied stage.”
Jay-Z, jam band Dead & Co. and folk rocker John Fogerty have pulled out of Woodstock 50 music festival after the organizer relocated the event to Maryland.