Woodstock Remembered: Minor Epiphanies and Momentary Bummers
Whenever someone asks me what it was like to be at Woodstock, the first thing that comes to mind is not Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” Country Joe’s F-U-C-K cheer, nude bathing or brown acid. I always think to spaghetti and hot dogs.
That’s what I had for breakfast on Saturday morning, the second day of the festival. That was all the food out troupe of high-school hippie-wanna-bes — six in number, including myself, just turned seventeen — had to last us the rest of the weekend. The watermelon we’d brought with us from Philadelphia was already history, a victim of spontaneous generosity on Friday afternoon while we were stalled on the extended parking lot otherwise known as Route 17B. It was a gesture right out of The Book of Love-Generation Etiquette — passing out slices of watermelon through the windows of our Volkswagen microbus to other weary festival pilgrims who had abandoned their wheels as far back as the New York Thruway. And we enjoyed every second of it — and every smile we got back in return.
It may seem like a small joy in retrospect. But then Woodstock, for most of the people who were there, was not really a weekend date with pop history. It was an unexpected, often exhilarating series of minor epiphanies and momentary bummers — births, deaths, sex, illness, acts of human kindness, commercial enterprise and sometimes downright greed. The only way you could get the big picture was from the helicopters ferrying performers and crew between the festival stage and the Holiday Inn, a.k.a. Tranquillity Base, in nearby Liberty, New York. From up there, though, you couldn’t see the moments of impact and interaction, hundreds of thousands of them, that made up the giant surging whole.
One of those moments came for me on Saturday morning when a wet, disheveled freak came up to our campsite and asked my friend Wayne and me if we could spare a plateful of our undercooked spaghetti and hot dogs. Sure, man, chow down. In turn, he offered us a tab of what he swore was top-drawer acid. We politely declined. As far as Wayne and I were concerned, breakfast was a bad trip in itself.
In the twenty years since Jimi Hendrix signed off in the early morning hours of Monday, August 18th, 1969, with his immortal guitar overhaul of the national anthem, Woodstock has been analyzed, lionized, censured and sold way out of all proportion to the actual event. It was neither the late-Sixties Utopian dream incarnate nor the last wild weekend of a hopelessly naive generation. When you boil away all the bullshit, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair — held August 15th, 16th and 17th on Max Yasgur’s 600—acre farm, near Bethel New York — was a spectacular accident, an improbable collision of events, energies and expectations propelled by the promise of the Haight-Ashbury experiment and the weekend’s principal attraction, rock & roll. What started out as a profit-motivated mega-concert just spun gloriously out of control. Most of the people who were there simply made the best of it.
The radio and newspaper ads in the weeks leading up to the festival certainly didn’t mention anything about a gathering of the tribes or the dawning of a new age, aside from the official all-purpose subtitle, “An Aquarian Exposition.” The real magnet was the music. Woodstock boasted the biggest and most prestigious lineup of rock & roll talent to be gathered on one stage since Monterey Pop, in 1967, and several top acts on the bill were performing in the wake of major artistic vinyl statements: Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, the Who’s Tommy, the Band’s first two albums, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s machine-gun series of classic Rock Americana singles, Conspicuous by their absence were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the rapidly ascending Led Zeppelin and Woodstock’s most prominent resident, Bob Dylan. The festival roster was also noticeably short on color and soul, with a few distinguished exceptions: Sly and the Family Stone, Richie Havens, Ravi Shankar, the Afro-Anglo-Hispanic Santana.
Despite that imbalance, Woodstock seemed like a remarkable opportunity to address the State of the Music at the end of its second, and probably most tumultuous, decade. It didn’t quite turn out that way. The majority of the bands played under adverse conditions; the Grateful Dead suffered a power blackout in midset, and the Jefferson Airplane cooled its heels backstage for seventeen hours before going on at dawn on Sunday morning. A couple of the lesser-known acts, sorely outclassed by the superstars, stayed that way (hands up, everybody who remembers Saturday’s opening act, Quill). Some of the festival’s most highly anticipated performances (Hendrix Janis Joplin and her Kozmic Blues Band, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) were actually mixed bags of the transcendent, the merely great and plain good fun.