Juxtaposing reportage on “prohibited festivals” with an eye-catching mashup of détourned images and headlines featuring “permanent revolution” (among other things), a layout in the French zine Parapluie (above) brilliantly illustrates the centrality of rock festivals in the underground media networks of radical counterculture after 1968 (see upright display at left). But what did they have to do with protest culture? Music itself certainly played a role, as performances often revolved around activist messaging. Beyond that, festivals also offered occasions for audiences to enact and perform the kinds of alternative community they imagined en masse, in the here and now. The legendary Woodstock Festival was transformative not only for the experience of vast crowds living together out in the open for days, but also because of the logistics involved. Traffic, crowd control, provisioning, sanitation, health care, permits—the prefigurative performativity of festivals was as much about organi...