More than a star-studded music festival, it was a defining moment in our nation's history. Today a museum marks the spot, courtesy of an earmark from Senator Hillary Clinton, and a totem pole pays tribute to three dead rock 'n roll legends who played there — Hendrix, Joplin, and Garcia.
Forty years ago from my Midwest perch I wondered why all the hoopla about a music festival called Woodstock in far-off New York state. Far too much was being made of it, I thought, dismissing it as one enormous frat party gone crazy. Was it news?
Yes, it was. Nearly a half-million mostly young people flocked lemming-like to a gooey, mucky cow pasture near Bethel, NY, to hear the greatest rock musicians assembled in one place. Most camping out at Woodstock that weekend were younger than I, just then back from Southeast Asia, as I tried to figure out the wild-eyed "hell no, we won't go" crowd back home — "stateside" to us ex-GI s who tried to do our country proud in Vietnam.
The multitude in that cow pasture in New York, fields muddied after recent downpours, enjoyed a weekend, it was said, of "peace, love and music." Music was the glue that brought the baby-boomers together; love and peace were gaudy sideshows.
Woodstock was a puzzlement to me, then a young reporter. I read the AP wire reports on the telex machine going ding-ding-ding in the newsroom, signaling "Bulletin!" Read this! I saw the grainy, sometimes provocative photos coming in. Seemed to be only a booze-filled, drug-inhabited weekend party, nothing more. So what? No Big Deal. Little did I know it was to be a cultural-defining event. Nothing after Woodstock was quite the same. It bears some analysis.
Okay, the musicians were fabulous, their music off the charts. To dance to, sing along with, toe tap, get high to. Headliners all, if you could hear them off in the distance. Dream tickets to die for if outdoor field concerts were your thing. (Not mine, but our teen daughters later on.)
On that weekend in a jam-packed, 600-acre cow pasture, perhaps indicative of a New Age a-brewing, inhibitions were tossed aside, left at the gate, and for thousands, outrageous conduct shook loose, a whole lot of shaking going on, amid a sea of boozy, hazy, crazy-like boisterousness, fueled a lot by hallucinatory drugs. Uninhibited counterculture, raw sex, incivility took hold among that teeming mass, ushering in a new permissiveness in a New Age of, well, a nearly anything goes selfishness. Or was it a precursor of 50% divorce rates to come, of broken homes, of deadly Vietnam protests yet to come. Who knew?
Oh, it was a groovy weekend all right. Crowds often unruly overwhelmed all facilities. Traffic was gridlocked for miles, to include the New York Thruway. Not enough food. Scarce portable potties, some tipped over. (Laughter!) Oh what fun. No first aid stations. No shelters. Scant security, except to protect the bands. Purse snatching, wallet lifting, folks being beaten up. It was the zenith of unpreparedness, with not a Boy Scout around.
Woodstock, as it came to be known for the place the festival was originally scheduled, was to be a celebration of music – if you could hear it. Bands on a massive, far-off stage looked like inch-high Lilliputians to most of the huddled masses. Some saw nary a band, and didn't care. The greatest of the rock groups of that day performed — brilliantly, it was said — for three days plus. Name groups such as the Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Sly, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, among other marquee players. Bob Dylan did not make it (due to illness), other notables had previous gigs. Their loss.
Throughout, "love" took center stage off-stage, so to speak. It was love in that non-literal way, of course, the non-semantical kind, for sport for the most part. It became, whether it set out to be or not, a sort of Bacchanalian joy ride (without the grapes), an outpouring of unabashed, and flaunted "free sex," and lessons in oral sex 25 years before Bill Clinton rendered them nakedly to the general populi in the White House, of all places. Civility, manners, mere morals, societal mores, plus of course natural casualties modesty and decency, took a back seat in the then-AIDS-free, "safe" environment. Just think! Sex in an open cow pasture! Skinny dipping in the cows' watering hole! What a blast. Like, cool, man.
Woodstock was a profit-making venture, well-advertised as a music and "arts" festival. It was oversold from the get-go.Profit-thirsty organizers told local authorities no more than 50,000 would show up. Instead nearly half a million did, depending on who did the crowd count. (Estimates vary.) Mostly they were young, with a few 30-somethings mixed in, some as old as 40 but young and forever rebellious at heart, to protest the human condition, or something, including but not limited to: Conformity, staid middle class values, and those twin bug-a-boos, the war in Vietnam and arch villain "Wall Street." Booo! Real baddies.
Something of a hedonistic mass-mob fling Woodstock became, not exactly inadvertently. Writ small, it was what raucous spring break parties would become — like crazy, man. Uninhibited flings. Woodstock was youthful throngs against all wars, but mostly Vietnam, in favor of loverly peace and flowers. Woodstock was more than simply a war protest. It was open warfare against sexual and civil constraints, old-fashioned mores, silly inhibitions, "pigs" and all military service and, oh yes, that dastardly "Wall Street." (Funny, how the free market, yielding freedom, becomes a target.)
Country singer Jim McDonald's "F"-word-laced lyrics lambasted capitalism and Uncle Sam, to thunderous applause. Oh, what fun! Blast the USA! (Ironically, a late-arriving Jimi Hendrix delivered a twangy "Star Spangled Banner" to a diminishing, largely hungover crowd, ending the party on Monday, its fourth day, to a smattering of boos. Somehow that figured. Well, it's not called the counterculture for nothing.)
Local residents did not want Woodstock. Two local farmers sold out, renting their cow pastures (for an estimated $75 Gs) expecting only 50,000 concert-goers. Nearly ten times (10x!) that number showed up. In the aftermath, fetid garbage and fecal matter littered a foul-smelling, muddy landscape. Overturned portable potties, used condoms, syringes, food wrappers, clothes, soggy sleeping bags, littered the grounds. It took weeks, and dozens of truckloads, to clean up the mess.
Today the site is visited mostly by 60-somethings, maybe reliving their wild-oats heydays, or curiosity seekers, wondering like I, what Woodstock was all about. A museum funded by an egregious earmark from Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) capitalizes on the Woodstock fame, but not its repute, ignoring its legacy of booze and drugs.
Strangely, ironically, a totem-like pole at the site celebrates three headline musicians at the '69 event. Top to bottom, they are: Jimi Hendrix who died a year later in 1970, chocking on his vomit after a bout with drugs; Janis Joplin, who also died a year later, of a heroin overdose in Los Angeles; and in 1995, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, after a lifelong addiction to heroin, of a sudden heart attack.
Woodstock was a defining moment in our culture. Sure, a goodly number of music-lovers and modest carousers had a memorable good time. Bully for them. Luckily, only two known fatalities came as a direct result of the careless merrymaking. One was a heroin overdose, a victim to which an "establishment" ambulance had trouble cutting through the throngs to reach, and the other, a man sleeping in the field, was run over by a tractor. Other deaths would come later on. The totem's Hendrix, Joplin and Garcia, to name just three.
Youth, it is said, is wasted on the young. Woodstock might have proved that, foreshadowing worlds of sea change to come in the 70s, of war protests, and America where the times, they were a-changing. What the fuss was about at Woodstock was news, a defining moment in cultural history written on the run by journalists. Little did we know. Somehow, in retrospect, it makes perfectly good sense as a Big Deal Story. AP's telex machine going ding-ding-ding (for, "Bulletin!") had it right. Front page on a slow news day. Precursor of times to come, is the legacy of Woodstock.
Yeah, well.
Forty years ago a lot of us were not as worried about bad acid as we were about B40 rockets and lead poisoning.
I think a monument paid for by taxpayer funds stolen by the Hillarrhoid is a fitting memorial to the filth that waded through the cow pies for handouts of food and drugs on Yasgur’s farm all those years ago.
It’s fine to acknowledge that many Americans get great pleasure from rock ‘n’ roll, but I pose this thought: of all the cultural phenomena of today, rock is the thing most likely to continue thriving, well into the future, without even a dime of government assistance. Let the private aficionados build a museum.
There’s an Andy Rooney piece where he complains about “government art” and asks “are we really ready for art that is smarter than we are?” Of course he’s talking about the idea that government attempts to make up for the public’s presumed underappreciation of art, by deliberately promoting works of sculpture, music and other media that would be considered abstruse and deep. He appears to believe the bulk of these publicly funded works are pretentious junk, but stops short of committing himself to that position.
Duke Ellington was against government subsidies for arts, arguing that his art form was created naturally, in spite of obstacles to its success, and that the government’s effort to preserve and stimulate art will produce something other than that art to which the expenditure is dedicated.
Rooney concludes by saying “the trouble is, while the public’s taste is the pits, the government’s taste is usually worse.”
In the case of Hillaraoid’s Woodstock museum, I’d say the problem is that the government’s taste, and the public’s taste, are the same, so there’s no necessity for what was done.