There are many misconceptions about the 1969 Woodstock festival, but for something as safely installed into popular culture myth as this, a little fallacy and legend is sometimes a good thing. After all, if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t really there, man.

Then there are the misunderstandings that need to be set straight. First of all, the Woodstock festival was not in Woodstock. Secondly, the festival was not the end of the hippy dream – we’ll leave that to The Rolling Stones (with a little help from the Hells Angels) at Altamont Speedway some months later. Thirdly, it wasn’t an absolute catastrophe of organisation… well, not at first, anyway. Organisers told local authorities to expect about 50,000 people. Privately, they expected 100,000. One and a half million tried to get in; 450,000 succeeded. The toilets stopped working on the first day, and the relief trucks were unable to access the site. OK, so maybe the third “misunderstanding” was true.

Myths mostly busted, 55 years later, I touched down at New York’s JFK with the intention of driving upstate to see if any residue of hippiedom still resides. Does “peace, love, and music” still echo among the rolling hills of the Catskills?