Woodstock revisted, man

"Man, if you don't know where the Woodstock festival happened, you shouldn't be here." Those kind words came from a silver-haired and exceedingly grumpy latter-day hippie I had stopped on the pavement in the village of Woodstock, upstate New York. All I did was delay the tie-die obsessed old codger from munching on his wheat-free chickpea blini for one second to ask on what street the site of the famed 1969 festival and the new museum celebrating it might be found. Peace and love were not in the air that day – just a few marinated remnants of his lunch spluttering out in my direction.

But, he was right – and wrong. Right, because I shouldn't have been there. Wrong because if I had known where the Woodstock festival had happened I would have been 50 miles south. Despite co-opting the name of this sixties refuge of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, The Band, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and all things counterculture, in the end the three-day history-making event didn't take place in Woodstock but the town of Bethel.

Woodstock tombstone. Photograph: David Vincent I got back in my hire car and took Nasty Hippie's advice. I left for greener pastures. Set in 2,000 rolling acres of them, the museum at Bethel Woods, part of a centre for the arts, opened last month and already it has been receiving accolades. It is easy to see why. Perched at the top of the field where 400,000 Baby Boomers gathered on Friday August 15, 1969, for three days of mud splattered music – the rain storms made the traditional Glastonbury mud bath seem like a region suffering severe drought – the museum might be celebrating what many consider the symbol of a generation and keystone in the history of the 20th century, but the exhibition itself is decidedly 21st century.

'As if you were there'

Music, interviews, moving images and five hi-tech interactive gizmo-packed booths take centre stage – along with the dive-bombing guitar runs of Jimi Hendrix as we see him create a new language on the guitar with his deconstruction of The Star Spangled Banner, an instrumental performance reflecting the state of the country so my rock boffin friends tell me. There's also Janis Joplin's bluesy and explosive rendition of Try and Richie Havens taking folk music into another dimension and using music as a catalyst of change with his improvisation of Freedom.

There are 20 films in all, some in small kiosks, others part of a series of 50ft wraparound screens called the Festival Experience that Lawrence Wade, the museum director, hopes will "provide an as-if-you-were-there version of the festival".