by Rob Patterson
Best Classic Bands
There are two Woodstock festivals that happened in 1969: First and better known is the Woodstock Myth: the paramount Aquarian Age experience, as the mythic echoes imply, and they are not without a sizable measure of truth in some ways.
The second is what really happened: the reality of Woodstock. I can only attest to what the fringe around the event was like. I hitchhiked down on Saturday morning from my hometown, Binghamton, N.Y., about two hours away on the other side of the Catskill Mountains. Then I hiked from Monticello on the interstate about halfway to the festival site at Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, through a traffic jam of parked vehicles on and along a two-lane road, trekking alongside a stream of others also heading to the fest.
I ran into some friends in their car on the way and hopped in to hang out. Word filtering down from the festival site confirmed just what the cops announced as they rode past on horseback, waving us latecomers back (to no avail): It’s a disaster area. Then again, others reported that they’d heard that The Beatles were on their way.
Late in the day, as the traffic jam opened up and state troopers urged us to move on (and away), my friends and I shrugged – “Wanna go?” “Yeah why not…” – and turned around and went home. I never really regretted the decision.
Much to my surprise, the reality of the atmosphere around Woodstock over those three days was captured quite accurately in the 2009 Ang Lee movie, Taking Woodstock. It’s a rather charming little film that tells a side story to the fest. The scenes of the crowds on the roads going to and from the festival look and feel exactly like what I experienced. Given how hideously inaccurate most film and TV portrayals of the 1960s counterculture are, it was gratifying to see that Taking Woodstock got it right.
A number of my friends did make it to the festival. They all had a great time. However, their positive reports were nearly always followed by, “But….”
The rain. The mud. The sound sucked unless you were close to the stage. Barely any food and not much to drink. Too few porta-potties and they quickly overflowed. The music scheduling was a mess. It was a pain to get there and not so easy to get out of there and back home. Or, in a few words, it was a big mess. So most of them didn’t come home infused with the bliss of the Aquarian Spirit even if their time there was a gas, as we said in those days.
And let’s not forget: the festival site was declared a disaster area. The promoters lost a bundle. Some 3,000 people suffered medical emergencies; around 400 sought help for bad LSD trips (“Don’t take the brown acid”). And three people died: one inside a sleeping bag was run over by a tractor, another succumbed from a heroin overdose and the third died from a burst appendix. A woman broke her back falling off a scaffold.
Considering that nearly half a million people gathered at and around the festival site, those bad numbers are pretty slim. And one big true force behind the truth within the myth is how promoters Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman just accepted their fate that the site was overrun, and did all they were able, to make the music happen and festival proceed as best they could under very challenging conditions.
Due credit also goes to Wavy Gravy, the Woodstock “Chief of Please,” and the members of his Hog Farm commune security team that made people indeed feel “secure.” Also to the locals who endured the onslaught of young people with kind patience. And the officials and law enforcement who responded to it all with equanimity.
And ultimately the synergy among all those who attended. It was close to miraculous, really.
“What we have in mind, is breakfast in bed for 400,000… ”
My friend and New York Times music critic Jon Pareles, who attended Woodstock as a teenager, summed it up well in 2009: “sloppy, chaotic, bewildering, drenched, uncertain, sometimes excruciating, sometimes ecstatic.”
Then in May the next year the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young take on Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” topped out at number 11 on the Hot 100 and the idealization began.
I didn’t run into children of God walking along the road toward Woodstock. Instead, the feeling I got after a number of years of getting hassled and threatened with beatings for my hair being too long and dressing weird was that, wow, look at how many of us there are. It was a comforting, if all-too brief, moment of knowing I was not so alone in being outside the mainstream, a measure of solidarity with a burgeoning subculture.
I imagine a similar realization by the hundreds of thousands on the site fed into their communal and cooperative attitude over the three days of the fest. We were all among an astounding and reassuring number of kindred souls.
The Woodstock movie directed by Michael Wadleigh hit theaters that same March. The music was revelatory, and the second unit shots from backstage and around the site – directed by Martin Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker – conveyed some groovy and true “you are there” vibes. The promoters luckily covered their losses when the film became a huge hit.
Add in the simultaneously released three-disc live soundtrack, and it was a hat trick that sealed Woodstock’s stature as the late 1960s festival, even if there were others around that time like the July 4th weekend Atlanta International Pop Festival, the Atlantic City Pop Festival two weekends before Woodstock and the Texas International Pop Festival two weekends later, all with amazing bills.
And they all came off without any of Woodstock’s hitches which, in a way, helped start ginning up the Woodstock myth because the festival overcame them.
And the myth isn’t all that removed from reality. But iconography cannot help but breed mythology. In this case the disparity isn’t all the great, but it does exist.
When history enters the slipstream of popular culture, it cannot resist the hungry maw of mythology. The worst Woodstock example of that I came across was about a dozen or so years ago when I happened to watch the 1999 Diane Lane/Viggo Mortensen movie A Walk on the Moon.
She’s a married-too-young housewife and mother summering in the Catskills in 1969. Viggo is a traveling salesman with whom she runs off to Woodstock. One scene at the fest show the two of them standing on a hillside of pristine green grass, no one else within 10 feet of them, only a gaggle of folks in the distance down the hill huddled around a stage.
I grumbled a lot about how that’s not at all what it was like.
But even if I didn’t quite make it, Woodstock is nonetheless an inescapable skein in my life.
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