The Enduring Appeal of Woodstock
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sunday features SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2009 From left: People at New York City’s Port Authority bus station on their way to the Woodstock Music Festival on Friday. A crowd gathers around a fire during the original Woodstock Music Festival in August of 1969. Joe Cocker performs on the final day of the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival. PHOTOS: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE The enduring appeal of Woodstock After the buzz wore off, the utopian communal aura of a Woodstock Nation gave way, almost immediately, to the reality of a Woodstock Market BY JON PARELES appeared at Woodstock — including Still, Woodstock gave virtually NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK Jefferson Starship (playing Jefferson Air- everyone involved — ticket holders, aby boomers won’t let go of plane songs), Levon Helm from the Band, gatecrashers, musicians, doctors, the the Woodstock Festival. Why Tom Constanten from the Grateful Dead, police — a sense of shared humanity should we? It’s one of the few Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Coun- and cooperation. defining events of the late 1960s try Joe McDonald. It arrived at Bethel Trying to get through the weekend, Bthat had a clear happy ending. Woods precisely yesterday (Aug. 15). people played nice with one another, On Aug. 15 to Aug. 17, 1969, hundreds Unlike previous anniversaries in which was only sensible. Musicians of thousands of people, me among 1994 and 1999, however, there’s no big performed for the biggest audience of them, gathered in a lovely natural festival this year bearing the Woodstock their lives. Townspeople and the National amphitheater in Bethel (not Woodstock), name — reflecting, perhaps, the dismal Guard pitched in to keep people fed and New York. We listened to some of the memories of Woodstock ’99 in Rome, healthy. No one, the New York Times best rock musicians of the era, enjoyed New York, where a hot, pent-up audi- reported, called the cops “pigs.” other legal and illegal pleasures, endured ence, angry at high vendor prices, set One lunatic with a gun could have rain and mud and exhaustion and hunger fires and looted and vandalized the site. changed everything. The Altamont Fes- pangs, felt like a giant community and While the original Woodstock showed tival, marred all day by violence, took dispersed, all without catastrophe. how much discomfort an audience place only four months later. Miracu- A year after the riots at the would put up with for the sake of shar- lously, at Woodstock, there was none. Democratic convention in Chicago, ing an event — something promoters Seemingly within minutes after it expectations about large gatherings of were happy to learn — Woodstock ’99 ended, Woodstock was the stuff of legend: young people were so low that this was breached the limit of fan exploitation. a spirit, a nation, an ideal, amorphous but considered a surprise. Although the Yet the original Woodstock still vivid, with an Oscar-winning documentary festival didn’t go exactly as planned, it film, the 1970 Woodstock, to prove it was, as advertised, three days of peace wasn’t all a hallucination. (The film was and music. That made Woodstock an also an early lesson in how profitable idyll, particularly in retrospect, even ancillary rights could be; the festival itself though it was declared a state disaster lost money, but the film recouped it many area at the time. times over.) “Not withstanding their personality, Sheer size made Woodstock conse- their dress and their ideas, they were quential. It was huge. The Beatles had and they are the most courteous, played to 55,000 people at Shea Stadium; considerate and well-behaved group of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival spread kids I have ever been in contact with in about 71,000 people over four days. Had my 24 years of police work,” Lou Yank, Woodstock drawn the 100,000 to 150,000 the chief of police in nearby Monticello, people that its promoters planned for, it told the New York Times. would simply have been one in a string of Yet for all the benign memories, big rock festivals dating back to Monterey Woodstock also set in motion other, Pop in 1967, which had an estimated total more crass impulses. While its of 200,000 people over three days. immediate aftermath was amazement After Woodstock gave up on collecting and relief, the festival’s full legacy had tickets — abandoning flimsy fences as much to do with excess as with and declaring itself a free festival — it idealism. As the decades roll by, the grew to what was variously estimated festival seems more than ever like a as 300,000 or 400,000 people, more than fluke: a moment of muddy, disheveled, Jimi Hendrix performs at the Woodstock Music Festival in double the attendance of previous rock incredulous grace. It was as much an Bethel, New York, on Aug. 18, 1969. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE festivals. That number would have been endpoint as a beginning, a holiday considerably higher if traffic problems of naivete and dumb luck before the hadn’t turned some away; many people realities of capitalism resumed. walked for kilometers to the site. Woodstock’s young, left-of-center When the hippie subculture surfaced crowd — nice kids, including students, en masse at Woodstock, two years after artists, workers and politicos, as well as the Summer of Love, it was still largely full-fledged LSD-popping hippies — was self-invented and isolated. There were quickly recognized as a potential army of Seemingly“ within pockets of freaks in cities and handfuls consumers that mainstream merchants of them in smaller towns, nearly all would not underestimate again. There minutes after it ended, feeling like outsiders. For many people was more to sell them than rolling at the festival, just seeing and joining papers and LPs. Woodstock was the that gigantic crowd was more of a With the 40th anniversary of revelation than anything that happened Woodstock looming — so soon? — the stuff of legend: a onstage. It proved that they were not commemorative machinery is clanking some negligible minority but members of into place, and the nostalgia is strong. spirit, a nation, an a larger culture — or, to use that sweetly There’s a Woodstock Festival museum dated term, a counterculture. now at the Bethel Woods Center for the ideal, amorphous but At Woodstock hippiedom simulta- Arts and a recently built concert hall at neously reached its public peak and Peter Franklin, an actor, and Susanna Barta wait at the New York City Port Authority Bus Terminal for a bus to the Woodstock Rock Festival on Friday. This what was the concert site, Max Yasgur’s vivid ... opened itself to imitation and trivializa- month marks the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE farm (though the original Woodstock tion — one more glimmer of rebellion to hillside has been left undeveloped). has a rosy glow. It was finite and all be deflated into a style statement. A new, much expanded anthology smiles — far different from the Vietnam For true believers Woodstock was songs, like Richie Havens’ Handsome gave way, almost immediately, to festivals changed the scale of rock of music recorded at the 1969 festival War, the racial tensions and the much- about cooperation and mutual aid, and Johnny and McDonald’s I-Feel-Like- the reality of a Woodstock Market: a concerts. Bands eagerly moved up to has been issued: the six-CD Woodstock discussed generation gap of the same about making love, not war. (At a time I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag. Joan Baez spoke demographic target group about to have arenas from theaters; a week before 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur’s Farm era. Woodstock became free in both when Vietnam had divided America into about her husband, in jail for draft its dreams stripped of radical purpose Woodstock, for example, two of its acts, (Rhino). Complete Woodstock perfor- senses of the word: free as in liberated hawks and doves, that was a peace dove dodging, and sang We Shall Overcome. and turned into commodities. A wider the Jefferson Airplane and Joe Cocker, mances by Sly and the Family Stone, (from drug laws and dress codes) and sitting on the guitar in the festival logo.) There was also, in much of the music, audience realized it was possible to shared a bill at the Fillmore East, which Santana, Janis Joplin and others have free as in gratis, not collecting tickets But Woodstock was also a whole lot of that particular late-1960s aura of enjoy the music, drugs and fun without had all of 2,700 seats. Music soon been released by Sony Legacy. Cable and handing out, as Wavy Gravy said, people getting stoned at a rock concert, imminent doom or enlightenment, in the ideological trappings. expanded, or bloated, to fill its newfound and public television channels have “breakfast in bed for 400,000.” which was much easier than working to songs like Wooden Ships (performed Soon enough everyone was a quasi- arenas. The early 1970s were the era of their Woodstock specials scheduled, and A cynic might see the festival as a change the world. by both Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, hippie; long hair on men no longer noodling jams and 10-minute drum solos there’s yet another batch of commemora- prime example of how coddled the baby Politicos like Abbie Hoffman, who is Stills, Nash and Young) and the Who’s signaled anything about what they stood that would have to be torpedoed, a few tive books, including The Road to Wood- boomers were in an economy of abun- widely credited with coining the phrase Amazing Journey.