Saturday, August 15, 2009
An Aquarian Exposition
in White Lake, N.Y.
Three Days of Peace & Music
August 15, 16, 17
So said the poster, although it ended up on a farm in Bethel.
I rarely talk about being at Woodstock 40 years ago. Several reasons. I was very young. Woodstock wasn't the signature cultural experience of my youth, remembered with soft, hazy nostalgia. I had no such experience. Woodstock was unique for me. Also, hundreds of thousands were there, hundreds of thousands tried to get there, & many more claim they were there. My experiences weren't exceptional. I was part of a giant, accidental crowd gathered for the same purpose; lots of great music in one location at a bargain price. Like almost everyone else, I went to Woodstock with no idea it would be so large & famous. There were many outdoor festivals that summer; the location of the Woodstock festival looked like a nice rural area, & the brochures & posters implied it was well-organized.
My memories of the event have never been really clear. I smoked pot (no acid, no way)., but it wasn't like they were throwing bags of marijuana to the crowd. I think my group brought little or no pot; we wanted to make it to the concert without being arrested. Impressions of it were affected by the Woodstock movie so I'm not sure what happened specifically. Some memories stand out, but did I see the people sliding in mud? I don't think so. Most of the time I was on a blanket in the middle of the crowd, about a third of the way back from the stage as you see the crowd in the movie, near the center, an excellent location for music.
I left work early on Thursday & drove up to the festival with some guys from my band. We hit a bad traffic jam, not the total gridlock that occurred later. We were early enough to drive to the designated parking & camping area on a hill behind the stage, where we pitched a small tent, & encountered some people we knew. I don't think I saw that tent until we left late Sunday afternoon.
By later Thursday evening we had claimed our spot in the growing crowd. It was obvious we couldn't camp out on the hill & wait until Friday; people were pouring in nonstop. From then on, any information we got about the overall event as national news came from the stage announcements or radios. We knew it was gigantic & on the edge of chaos, but that's about all we knew.
What I don't remember: Eating well, using the portosans, seeing a lot of naked people, or feeling that I was surrounded by hippies. In fact, the vast majority of the people at Woodstock I saw & chatted with looked like & were college students. The real hippies, like the Wavy Gravy group, were the exceptions. I was not a hippie. I considered myself a musician, & my band mostly played college frat parties.
The Woodstock bands I most wanted to see were The Who, Jefferson Airplane, & Jimi Hendrix. Missed Hendrix, but got my money's worth from Who & Airplane, Santana, Creedence, Sly, & Joplin.
By Friday night I was annoyed & wasn't certain why I was there. The situation was becoming very uncomfortable, & the folk acts on the first day, though entertaining, weren't who I had come to see.
Looking over Saturday's schedule, I must have been wandering & sleeping late Saturday afternoon into the evening, no clear recollection of Canned Heat, Mountain, & The Dead. I wasn't a big fan of those groups anyway. I know I napped for awhile on top of an old Checker cab owned by a guy I knew from another band that played around Rutgers in New Brunswick. Saturday night's music was outrageous.
The storms on Sunday afternoon sent us & droves of others home, slowly. Of all the remaining acts, Hendrix was the one we really wanted to see, but he was the closer, who knew when that would happen? Conditions were wretched. We were dirty, famished, & exhausted by then, leaving was a unanimous decision. I had expected to be back at my job Monday morning, As it turned out, everyone at the small company where I worked was surprised when I showed up. They assumed I was trapped, the news coverage all weekend had been so alarming.
Strangest experience: At least twice I left my group to get water, scrounge for food, & look around, & found my way back through the crowd without much difficulty, once in the dark. I accomplished this by remembering our exact position in front of the stage; when I returned, I came from the back of the crowd forward, deviating as a little as possible from the selected pathway. But it was a very slow process. Not only did one have to avoid stepping on people, one did a lot of socializing & toking during these journeys. Everyone was surprisingly cool. The further back in crowd, the more through traffic they had to put up with.
I walked down a country road & filled a plastic jug with water from a pump in front of a farmhouse. I wandered through the sideshows. That's where I got something to eat, from some real hippie types serving free food, might have been Wavy Gravy's group. There were only fields of green corn. I think I managed a loaf of white bread trucked in like emergency provisions for a refugee camp.
On the balance, I did not come away from Woodstock with good feelings. I've never liked being in the middle of large crowds. Local 4th of July fireworks are at the limit of my comfort level; I've declined every opportunity to be in Times Square on New Year's Eve. Conditions at Woodstock were so horrendous that I never attended another large one stage outdoor festival, only a few multi-stage events where there's lots of open space away from the stages. I have gone to large peace marches in Washington & New York, on principle, staying at the edge of the crowd during the rally portions.
I didn't trust hippie culture or the radical left, both of which were authoritarian beneath the surface, producing self-appointed "leaders." I didn't believe in Revolution, political or cultural. To my mind, the largest part of the cultural change had already taken place, beginning mainly with the arrival of The Beatles five years earlier. I didn't think rock music was getting better by becoming more artsy & complex. My band couldn't play music created for virtuosos or with advanced, multitrack recording techniques. My exact generation of garage band & club rockers became the simplifiers of the Seventies, the punks, New Wavers, & traditionalists. After Woodstock, in arguments over whether or not Pete Townshend of the Who should have pushed poltical activist Abbie Hoffman off stage, I sided with Townshend, no disrespect intended for Abbie. Leftists always think music is better when hitched to a cause.
Much of what I experienced at Woodstock was alien & disturbing. Some of it confirmed what I already believed. While the passivity & general good vibes of the crowd under terrible conditions was admirable, I've always wondered if the pot & absence of criminal types was more responsible than the peace & love ethos. The Altamont Festival a few weeks later had a very different vibe. Joni Mitchell's famous tribute to Woodstock was based on a view from a New York City hotel room & Graham Nash's hospitality tent account.
The Woodstock film is good because it doesn't try to make you want to be there for all three days. It shows enough of the rotten conditions. You wish you could fly in on a copter, have a look around, hear some bands, & fly out.
I chalked Woodstock up as an interesting experience, glad I went, no regrets leaving early. As I mentioned up top, sharing it with so many others took most of the novelty out of it. Even now I have nothing to add. Thousands of people who spent the weekend stuck on roads outside the festival have tales to tell; that was part of the event, & probably more fun when they pulled over & made a party of it, with their car radios & frisbees. Looking back, I would have rather attended an earlier festival at Atlantic City Racetrack that's slipped into obscurity. I still might have gone to Woodstock on impulse.
Three Days of Peace & Music
August 15, 16, 17
So said the poster, although it ended up on a farm in Bethel.
I rarely talk about being at Woodstock 40 years ago. Several reasons. I was very young. Woodstock wasn't the signature cultural experience of my youth, remembered with soft, hazy nostalgia. I had no such experience. Woodstock was unique for me. Also, hundreds of thousands were there, hundreds of thousands tried to get there, & many more claim they were there. My experiences weren't exceptional. I was part of a giant, accidental crowd gathered for the same purpose; lots of great music in one location at a bargain price. Like almost everyone else, I went to Woodstock with no idea it would be so large & famous. There were many outdoor festivals that summer; the location of the Woodstock festival looked like a nice rural area, & the brochures & posters implied it was well-organized.
My memories of the event have never been really clear. I smoked pot (no acid, no way)., but it wasn't like they were throwing bags of marijuana to the crowd. I think my group brought little or no pot; we wanted to make it to the concert without being arrested. Impressions of it were affected by the Woodstock movie so I'm not sure what happened specifically. Some memories stand out, but did I see the people sliding in mud? I don't think so. Most of the time I was on a blanket in the middle of the crowd, about a third of the way back from the stage as you see the crowd in the movie, near the center, an excellent location for music.
I left work early on Thursday & drove up to the festival with some guys from my band. We hit a bad traffic jam, not the total gridlock that occurred later. We were early enough to drive to the designated parking & camping area on a hill behind the stage, where we pitched a small tent, & encountered some people we knew. I don't think I saw that tent until we left late Sunday afternoon.
By later Thursday evening we had claimed our spot in the growing crowd. It was obvious we couldn't camp out on the hill & wait until Friday; people were pouring in nonstop. From then on, any information we got about the overall event as national news came from the stage announcements or radios. We knew it was gigantic & on the edge of chaos, but that's about all we knew.
What I don't remember: Eating well, using the portosans, seeing a lot of naked people, or feeling that I was surrounded by hippies. In fact, the vast majority of the people at Woodstock I saw & chatted with looked like & were college students. The real hippies, like the Wavy Gravy group, were the exceptions. I was not a hippie. I considered myself a musician, & my band mostly played college frat parties.
The Woodstock bands I most wanted to see were The Who, Jefferson Airplane, & Jimi Hendrix. Missed Hendrix, but got my money's worth from Who & Airplane, Santana, Creedence, Sly, & Joplin.
By Friday night I was annoyed & wasn't certain why I was there. The situation was becoming very uncomfortable, & the folk acts on the first day, though entertaining, weren't who I had come to see.
Looking over Saturday's schedule, I must have been wandering & sleeping late Saturday afternoon into the evening, no clear recollection of Canned Heat, Mountain, & The Dead. I wasn't a big fan of those groups anyway. I know I napped for awhile on top of an old Checker cab owned by a guy I knew from another band that played around Rutgers in New Brunswick. Saturday night's music was outrageous.
The storms on Sunday afternoon sent us & droves of others home, slowly. Of all the remaining acts, Hendrix was the one we really wanted to see, but he was the closer, who knew when that would happen? Conditions were wretched. We were dirty, famished, & exhausted by then, leaving was a unanimous decision. I had expected to be back at my job Monday morning, As it turned out, everyone at the small company where I worked was surprised when I showed up. They assumed I was trapped, the news coverage all weekend had been so alarming.
Strangest experience: At least twice I left my group to get water, scrounge for food, & look around, & found my way back through the crowd without much difficulty, once in the dark. I accomplished this by remembering our exact position in front of the stage; when I returned, I came from the back of the crowd forward, deviating as a little as possible from the selected pathway. But it was a very slow process. Not only did one have to avoid stepping on people, one did a lot of socializing & toking during these journeys. Everyone was surprisingly cool. The further back in crowd, the more through traffic they had to put up with.
I walked down a country road & filled a plastic jug with water from a pump in front of a farmhouse. I wandered through the sideshows. That's where I got something to eat, from some real hippie types serving free food, might have been Wavy Gravy's group. There were only fields of green corn. I think I managed a loaf of white bread trucked in like emergency provisions for a refugee camp.
On the balance, I did not come away from Woodstock with good feelings. I've never liked being in the middle of large crowds. Local 4th of July fireworks are at the limit of my comfort level; I've declined every opportunity to be in Times Square on New Year's Eve. Conditions at Woodstock were so horrendous that I never attended another large one stage outdoor festival, only a few multi-stage events where there's lots of open space away from the stages. I have gone to large peace marches in Washington & New York, on principle, staying at the edge of the crowd during the rally portions.
I didn't trust hippie culture or the radical left, both of which were authoritarian beneath the surface, producing self-appointed "leaders." I didn't believe in Revolution, political or cultural. To my mind, the largest part of the cultural change had already taken place, beginning mainly with the arrival of The Beatles five years earlier. I didn't think rock music was getting better by becoming more artsy & complex. My band couldn't play music created for virtuosos or with advanced, multitrack recording techniques. My exact generation of garage band & club rockers became the simplifiers of the Seventies, the punks, New Wavers, & traditionalists. After Woodstock, in arguments over whether or not Pete Townshend of the Who should have pushed poltical activist Abbie Hoffman off stage, I sided with Townshend, no disrespect intended for Abbie. Leftists always think music is better when hitched to a cause.
Much of what I experienced at Woodstock was alien & disturbing. Some of it confirmed what I already believed. While the passivity & general good vibes of the crowd under terrible conditions was admirable, I've always wondered if the pot & absence of criminal types was more responsible than the peace & love ethos. The Altamont Festival a few weeks later had a very different vibe. Joni Mitchell's famous tribute to Woodstock was based on a view from a New York City hotel room & Graham Nash's hospitality tent account.
The Woodstock film is good because it doesn't try to make you want to be there for all three days. It shows enough of the rotten conditions. You wish you could fly in on a copter, have a look around, hear some bands, & fly out.
I chalked Woodstock up as an interesting experience, glad I went, no regrets leaving early. As I mentioned up top, sharing it with so many others took most of the novelty out of it. Even now I have nothing to add. Thousands of people who spent the weekend stuck on roads outside the festival have tales to tell; that was part of the event, & probably more fun when they pulled over & made a party of it, with their car radios & frisbees. Looking back, I would have rather attended an earlier festival at Atlantic City Racetrack that's slipped into obscurity. I still might have gone to Woodstock on impulse.
Labels: culture, growing up, music
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I think it is really unique that you were actually at Woodstock. Being only 17, not a drug user (that would come much later) and living in Los Angeles, pretty much made it impossible for me to be there.
However, because of being raised in a music family, most of the entertainers were known to me, and I have enjoyed viewing the movie about the event, many times.
I am not averse to large crowds, as much as I grew up cabaret style, and so, as a result, I prefer to see shows or hear bands or other things, in small venues, not large ones. I did, however, fork over big bucks to see The Boss, Stones and the Gunners back in the 80's when they were all doing concerts in Los Angeles. In fact, saw the Stones twice, not same concert of course, but they did do two tours almost back to back where they played the Collesium.
I preferred the Troubadour, Whiskey, Roxy and other venues, especially back when you could still see good concerts at the Forum (about 16,000 seats to 18,000 depending on how you laid out the floor). Saw Bowie there. Hell, through most of the 60's I saw just about every r&b goup that existed at the old Long Beach Arena! (Smokey, Four Tops, Joe Tex, etc.) But saw Temps with Little Stevie as opener, here in L.A., either at the Hollywood Bowl or the Greek (yeah, my memory is that bad!)
Point is I like small venues. (speaking of point, I saw Pointer Sisters at Universal Ampitheater).
I do remember meeting bands like Buffalo Springfield, Hermans Hermits and Sonny & Cher when they would perform on a TV show a friend of the family was producing, although, I can't remember if it was Shindig or Hullabaloo or one of those others that popped up back in the day.
And, because my uncle, on his days off, would love to go to Disneyland and play with the regular band performing in Dixieland, we'd kids would all pile into the Pontiac station wagon (which he used to transport his drums to local gigs) and go with him. Back then, it was A through E tickets (laughing at memories). We'd all just get a pass that would allow us to go to the head of the line. I can't tell you how many times I've been to Disneyland! It was cool when I was a teenager because I could go listen to some of the venues were the rock and roll and r&b bands were playing. Got autographs of Jr. Walker and all the Allstars at Disneyland!
Of course, for reasons that I don't wish to go into, I no longer have said autographs.
Anyway, I have digressed. For my two cents worth, I think it's cool you got to be at Woodstock.
However, because of being raised in a music family, most of the entertainers were known to me, and I have enjoyed viewing the movie about the event, many times.
I am not averse to large crowds, as much as I grew up cabaret style, and so, as a result, I prefer to see shows or hear bands or other things, in small venues, not large ones. I did, however, fork over big bucks to see The Boss, Stones and the Gunners back in the 80's when they were all doing concerts in Los Angeles. In fact, saw the Stones twice, not same concert of course, but they did do two tours almost back to back where they played the Collesium.
I preferred the Troubadour, Whiskey, Roxy and other venues, especially back when you could still see good concerts at the Forum (about 16,000 seats to 18,000 depending on how you laid out the floor). Saw Bowie there. Hell, through most of the 60's I saw just about every r&b goup that existed at the old Long Beach Arena! (Smokey, Four Tops, Joe Tex, etc.) But saw Temps with Little Stevie as opener, here in L.A., either at the Hollywood Bowl or the Greek (yeah, my memory is that bad!)
Point is I like small venues. (speaking of point, I saw Pointer Sisters at Universal Ampitheater).
I do remember meeting bands like Buffalo Springfield, Hermans Hermits and Sonny & Cher when they would perform on a TV show a friend of the family was producing, although, I can't remember if it was Shindig or Hullabaloo or one of those others that popped up back in the day.
And, because my uncle, on his days off, would love to go to Disneyland and play with the regular band performing in Dixieland, we'd kids would all pile into the Pontiac station wagon (which he used to transport his drums to local gigs) and go with him. Back then, it was A through E tickets (laughing at memories). We'd all just get a pass that would allow us to go to the head of the line. I can't tell you how many times I've been to Disneyland! It was cool when I was a teenager because I could go listen to some of the venues were the rock and roll and r&b bands were playing. Got autographs of Jr. Walker and all the Allstars at Disneyland!
Of course, for reasons that I don't wish to go into, I no longer have said autographs.
Anyway, I have digressed. For my two cents worth, I think it's cool you got to be at Woodstock.
The single most influential concert I saw in the Sixties was a 1967 appearance by The Doors in Asbury Park. They were booked for one show on short notice, boardwalk Convention Hall was only half-filled, they expanded my concept of what a rock band could be. I'd never seen anyone like Jim Morrison, or heard three rock instrumentalists tuned into each other like a jazz trio but not playing jazz. Since The Doors at that point were essentially a club band, their sound was perfect for the small venues I played.
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