Producer Andy Zax gives us a way to relive the original Woodstock with a 38-disc box set

Fifty years ago, hundreds of thousands of people gathered for three days of peace, love and music. It was the era-defining 1969 Woodstock music festival and artists like Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Santana and dozens more performed.

Woodstock has now become an almost mythological part of pop culture, but there's so much more to it than most of us realize. For the last 14 years, producer Andy Zax has been working on the definitive, most complete document of what Woodstock was really like.

The ambitious project is called Woodstock - Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive and it tops out at 38 discs and 36 hours long. It's a massive box set that includes every single performance at Woodstock — many of them never released before — along with announcements from the stage and conversations with festival-goers, presented in chronological order. 

Zax joined q guest host Nana aba Duncan to tell us why he wanted to preserve this piece of history for generations to come.

"I wanted listeners to hear the real Woodstock and I felt that they had not really heard that before," said Zax. "The original iterations of Woodstock that had been released before — I didn't like them because they were very constructed. … There had been weird edits, strange overdubs and things had been mixed poorly in an attempt to try and de-emphasize what people 50 years ago saw as problematic flaws in the recording: a helicopter flies overhead, somebody kicks a microphone stand, you can hear a conversation between roadies in the background during a song. To me, that was the stuff that I most wanted to preserve because that's the real texture of Woodstock. ... I really wanted people to hear this thing as much in the way that it happened as possible. And you know, flaws be damned."

Download our podcast or click 'Listen' near the top of this page to hear the full conversation with Andy Zax.

— Produced by ​Chris Trowbridge