This week marks the 53rd anniversary of Woodstock — the music and artwork truthful of 1969, initially introduced as “An Aquarian Exposition,” which befell at Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York, after promoters couldn’t discover a pageant location within the city of Woodstock itself, a well known haven for musicians on the time.
I all the time take into consideration Woodstock in August, as a result of I used to be there.
In 1969, I used to be 15 years outdated and my progressive dad and mom (learn: sensible, however drug addled) purchased me and my twin brother tickets for what would miraculously turn into an expertise that unfolded in precisely the identical approach it was promised: 3 Days of Peace & Music.
Might there have been different dad and mom like my dad and mom (is it even attainable to think about anyone could be like anyone else’s dad and mom?) who truly purchased tickets to Woodstock as a result of…who knew it could grow to be the factor that felt greater than the world? For one thing that massive, it looks like no person ought to want a ticket. And that first day, as if by divine intervention, no ticket was wanted, due to the gang of us knocking over the protecting fence down after which, grasp of ceremonies Chip Monck, saying inside minutes over the loudspeaker: “It’s a free live performance any further. However what it means is that these folks have it of their heads that your welfare is a hell of much more vital…than a greenback.”
To my thoughts, that announcement modified every thing. It marked the start of recognizing one thing past us, turning virtually half one million folks into the inconceivable — a group sufficiently small to have the ability to hear and reply to bulletins being learn over a loudspeaker. We had been enormous, however we had been native. This wasn’t fairly the identical realization 30 years later.
I just lately watched the Netflix documentary, Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, which isn’t a few prepare wreck, however a people-wreck, the place the protection of human beings was actually not a significant concern for the promoters who had been hoping to strike lightning a 3rd time, simply 5 years after Woodstock ‘94. On the ’99 Woodstock, there was some music, however actually no peace. Lots of of individuals had been complaining about distributors operating out of the overly-priced meals and water. Rapes and different types of sexual assault had been reported. Violence erupted in varied pockets of crazies in direction of the tip, largely aimed toward dismantling the stage and its environment. And if that weren’t sufficient, scattered fires erupted throughout the entire expanse of what had been a decommissioned army base in Rome, New York, about three hours north of the unique Woodstock web site. Griffiss Air Power Base regarded like a battle zone, and the seemingly largely white male inhabitants glared into cameras like ravaged zombies who had been dancing wildly on the sting of the apocalypse.
What gave the primary Woodstock its renown was the straightforward undeniable fact that it was, above every thing else, a primary. Any first is extraordinary and also you declare it as both an object of devotion or smash: first kiss, first dying, first actual something. We had been so many individuals having the identical outer expertise in actual time that, I believe, for many people, all the encounter was suffused with the spirit of Joni Mitchell’s prescient recommendation to get ourselves again to the backyard.
When had any of us seen this a lot humanity come collectively for a typical trigger exterior of marching that 12 months and the 12 months earlier than towards the battle in Vietnam? Woodstock confirmed that music itself, together with all of the protests within the streets, was the conduit via which we, the counterculture, had been being taught to take heed to within the first place. And to stand up towards the machine, the institution’s approach of doing issues, which clearly wasn’t working.
Music itself was liable for an eight-hour delay on the New York Thruway between New York Metropolis and the live performance web site, inflicting the New York Day by day Information to proclaim on its Aug. 16 front page: TRAFFIC UPTIGHT AT HIPPIE FEST. The roster of performers at that 32-act hippie fest was extraordinary and a few of them, I’m positive, had been hippies themselves: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin (hippie), Joan Baez, Unbelievable String Band (the hippest of the hippies), Ravi Shankar, Arlo Guthrie, Santana and The Grateful Useless (hippies), simply to call just a few. However what number of acts did anyone actually handle to take a seat via? I believe we might have seen three or 4 complete units.
There are such a lot of other ways of being with different folks when you’re making historical past, particularly when you’ve simply lived via the earlier 12 months’s history-making murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy — assassinations that underlined the atrocious and astonishing undeniable fact that our peacekeepers had been in some way the risk and never the answer to residing in peace.
Woodstock was in regards to the music and it wasn’t in regards to the music.
It was about individuals who had tickets and individuals who didn’t have tickets. (After which it was in regards to the individuals who didn’t have tickets.)
It was a few new good friend named Licorice crawling out of her tent at 7:00 a.m. on the second day and shouting, “Does anybody have any dope to smoke?”
It was in regards to the response of 5 completely different female and male voices saying, “Over right here, over right here, over right here, over right here, over right here.” And never one individual saying, no.
It was about no person saying no to something besides the rain for 4 days.
It was about Swami Satchidananda popping out to bless us and the occasion.
It was in regards to the artisans with their crafts establishing little retailers within the woods that appeared to seem solely at evening in a grove I couldn’t discover a second time and lit up by tiny lights within the branches.
It was about those-were-the-days of the VW bus. And the couple on the third evening who had been braided collectively in a sleeping bag beneath the VW bus and my brother pissing on them as a result of it was too darkish to see them sleeping there.
It was about not remembering cash.
It was in regards to the rains and the rains and the rains that got here on Aug. 17. After which it was in regards to the mudslides.
It was about looking and discovering the folks we had been on the lookout for.
It was in regards to the first time in so many lifetimes that what was occurring held the sort of energy we had been sure was sufficient to rock the world. Rock regular.
It was about the truth that there was just one basic retailer inside strolling distance and it ran out of provides earlier than Ritchie Havens’ opening act was completed.
It was in regards to the medicine in every single place and the way the medicine appeared to loosen up the gang into all of us having virtually the identical excessive till I didn’t hear one argument for all the time I used to be there.
It was in regards to the virtually otherworldly great thing about bare women and men lined in gray mud and yellow flowers singing in a close-by pond.
It was in regards to the watermelon truck we noticed whizz by and, as if, by sheer collective will, just a few dozen watermelons rolled off the truck into the highway.
It was in regards to the stranger from Little Rock, Arkansas, who had a jug of Thorazine for individuals who had been having a foul journey.
It was about Chip Monck once more, saying to keep away from the brown acid as a result of it wasn’t any good. And in regards to the announcement, “Helen Savage, please name your father on the Motel Glory in Woodridge.”
It was about being fortunate sufficient to be fed brown rice and honey by the Hog Farm and tenting out subsequent to The Merry Pranksters, even when Ken Kesey wasn’t with them that journey.
It was about watching Joan Baez rehearsing on the stage at 4:00 a.m. whereas solely about 30 of us had been awake and we had been all very quiet standing there within the discipline of sleeping co-conspirators.
Woodstock was in regards to the music and it wasn’t in regards to the music.
Michael Wadleigh’s Oscar-winning documentary of the unique Woodstock actually does seize the authenticity of what occurred there and completely paperwork a variety of what occurred behind the scenes. After which, after all, there’s Joni Mitchell’s namesake anthem, “Woodstock,” written in absentia, which sees the entire expertise within the context of being a mega-celebration by a counterculture resolutely poised towards violence, the place “the bombers using shotgun within the sky they usually had been turning into butterflies above our nation.”
I do know for me, and I might hope for lots of us who had been there and ended up falling into no matter dream state we ended up falling in (sleeping underneath the celebs or a VW bus, mud dancing within the rain, meditating, or listening to so many various strands of music in the course of a dairy farm in upstate New York), that some gratitude arises for that when-we-were-hippies August; gratitude for being given the immense, however in some way nonetheless secret place to listen to all that music. That music, and in such a stardust time, was the perfect factor about being alive in America.
