Presented here is a three day ticket for the iconic Woodstock Music Festival that took part August 15-17, 1969 in Bethel, NY. The performances spilled over into the morning of Monday April 18. Performers included Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, The Who, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Festival organizers originally planned to offer three-day passes for $18 in advance, and for $24 at the gate (this is a $24 gate pass). Each pass included three perforated tickets, one to be used each day of the festival. Approximately 180,000 of the $18 passes were sold in advance, but difficulties with crowd control and ability to set up barriers quickly turned the festival into a free event.  Because of this, many of the three-day gate passes were never distributed, and many of the passes that were distributed were not used, and many were discovered long after the festival.  As a result, the three-day passes are plentiful in high grade - PSA has graded 4,106 passes as of this writing (they do not differentiate between the advance passes and gate passes, perhaps because many people do not notice the difference since the artwork is identical).  Of the 4,106 passes they have graded, 86% of them have graded NM-MT 8 or better, with a whopping 981 examples grading GEM MINT 10.  Unused, high-grade Woodstock tickets are by no means rare.

This example is not one of those.  Heavily stained and worn on one end, this example grades FAIR at best, with some mild wrinkling and considerable surface wear.  The display value remains strong despite the wear.  While it is impossible to know for certain, it seems far more likely that this pass was purchased at the gate and remained on the person of a concert attendee back in 1969. For ticket collectors who feel strongly that their collection includes only tickets that attended the event, this example seems a better bet.