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The Account-
On Thursday, August 14th, 1969, my Argentinean girlfriend, Patty Vaisman, and her two brothers, Claudio and Sergio, pulled up
in front of my house in suburban Glen Rock, New Jersey in Sergio's old
Chevy and picked me up for a trip to the Catskills. Packing
food, camping equipment, and mind-altering substances, we drove north through Bergen County on Route 17. We were headed for the
Woodstock festival in Bethel, New York, which, judging from the lineup
of performers on the bill, promised to be the best rock concert we had
ever seen. Advertised were Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Johnny Winter,
Santana, Ravi Shankar, Credence Clearwater Revival, Joe Cocker, Joni
Mitchell, The Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane, Arlo Guthrie, Joan
Baez, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young-a Who's Who of late 60's music
gods. About 30,000 people were expected to attend the three-day event.
I was a 17-year old high school student studying classical guitar at
the time, but was a rock and folk fan anyway. For the past two
years I had been delving into the hippy scene by growing my hair and
speaking the hipster patois, participating in antiwar demonstrations,
and reading the literature of the counterculture. And like most everyone else
in the new 'revolution', I was also smoking pot and dropping LSD. Not only was the music
going be good, but my friends and I were going to scrape the
stratosphere this time.
Nearing Bethel, we hit a traffic jam on Route 17B.
Evidently more people were showing up than expected. Traffic was still
moving, but slowly, and the party atmosphere was starting already.
People were riding on the hoods of the crawling cars, and bantering back
and forth in between their vehicles.
We turned right off onto a dirt road and reached Max Yasgur's
dairy farm. A gently sloping field on the property
formed a large natural amphitheater, and a stage had been constructed at the
foot of the hill. The farm had been chosen for the concert after
plans to hold it in Wallkill, NY, had fallen through due to
intense local opposition.
As we got closer to the site we heard that so many people had already
arrived that the crowd had torn down the fences enclosing the festival
grounds (in fact they were never put up to begin with). Everyone was being allowed in for free. Tickets would have
cost $18 per person for the weekend, but now we could keep our money.
We
followed the road, which turned to the right and ran in back
of the stage and then up a hill. Finding a campsite, we got out and
pitched our tents. Several of our hometown friends were going to be there, so after encamping we wandered around for the rest of the
evening and eventually located them in the crowd. We then made plans to
meet as a group the next day and watch the concert . One of them, Woody
Vermiere, had
joined the New Mexico hippy commune the Hog Farm, and I found
him strolling around in a brown woolen monk's habit, rope belt and all.
(The Hog Farmers had arrived in a psychedelically painted school bus,
Road Hog, that was the second such bus ever painted-the first was the
famous 'Further' bus of the Merry Pranksters- and was a piece of
'sixties history all by itself. To their credit, the Hog Farm was to
perform a great service to the festival by distributing free food and
calming down the many people who were having bad acid trips).
Early on Friday afternoon about a dozen of us got together and spread out some
blankets on the grass at a spot about a third of the way up the hill on
stage right and then dropped LSD. I took Orange Sunshine, a strong,
clean dose in an orange tab that was perhaps the best street acid
ever. Underground chemists in southern
California had made millions of doses, and the nation
was flooded with
it that summer. We smoked some tasty black hashish to amuse ourselves
while waiting for the acid to hit, and sat back to groove along
with Richie Havens.
In two hours we were all soaring, and everything was just fine. In
fact, it couldn't have been better - there I was with my beautiful
girlfriend and all my hometown friends, higher than a church steeple and
listening to wonderful music in the cool summer weather of the
Catskills. After all, the dirty little secret of the late '60s was
that psychedelic drugs taken in a pleasant setting could be completely
exhilarating.
Richie Havens opened the show, hitting a note of
intensity with his improvised rendition of "Freedom." Sometime after
that a Hindu monk, Swami Satchidananda, delivered an invocation in
which he extolled the concert as a holy
gathering in his melodious Indian accent. I listened to him and thought
that it was bullshit. This was going to be a huge drug party, pure
and simple, and to masquerade it as a spiritual gathering seemed phony
to me. I had been reading up on Yoga and Zen, and I knew the
difference between the austere contemplative traditions of the East and what Woodstock was shaping up to be.
My attitude towards the festival was
destined to change, because although Woodstock certainly was the
psychedelic spree of all time, it turned out to be much more than that.
As we sat enjoying the music and taking drags off of the joints and
swigs from the wine bottles that kept coming around, the crowd
continued to swell. More and more longhairs kept arriving-I couldn't
believe how widespread the whole hippy thing had gotten as evidenced by
the size and appearance of the crowd. There were guys in tie-dyed shirts
and bellbottom trousers, girls in jeans or granny dresses with long hair parted
down the middle, and they all looked under 30.
The afternoon wore on, and it became obvious that something
completely unexpected had happened. Although the exact size of the crowd
was unknown, it was reckoned to be at least in the six figures by the
people on the stage as opposed to the tens of thousands that were
supposed to have shown up. Later we learned it had been around half a
million-the third largest city in New York State had sprung up like a
mushroom. What we didn't know was that there were only 12 police
officers in the area at the time, and that the squares who were running
the state government were quite concerned about the potential for
disasters. Route 17 and even the New York State Thruway were now closed because of the huge traffic jam
caused by the thousands still attempting to reach Bethel,
and it was no longer possible to get in or out of the festival by
car.
This was the first revelation of Woodstock-the sheer size that the
counterculture had grown to. Every town had its hippies, but now
enormous numbers of us had massed in one area. Friday afternoon brought
home to everyone there how broad-based the movement really had become.
By this time I was 'peaking,' as they used to say, and
the scene before me
looked like I was seeing it through a fisheye lens. Arlo Guthrie took
the stage high on acid
and launched into an insane monologue having something to do with the
Pharaoh-what was he talking about? (In
February 2007 someone emailed me explaining that Arlo's shtick was
really about Moses and manna from heaven. The manna was pot brownies,
and the intoxicated Israelites walked over the Red Sea, which never
parted.)
Joan Baez followed to deliver a set of more down-to-earth folk
music. And
so it went till the wee hours.
As you might imagine, my recollections of those three
days are somewhat hazy (didn't comedian Robin Williams say that if you
remember the late sixties, you probably weren't there?). I saw almost
every act and can remember the music well, but as to the order in which
the bands appeared, when and what I ate, and how much I slept, I can't recall. One thing that I remember
was that the crowd was so large that trips to the portable toilets
always required an endless stream of
apologies as I accidentally stepped on peoples' feet and legs.
| Musically, my favorite artists were The Who, Creedence Clearwater
Revival, Carlos Santana, Janis Joplin, The Jefferson Airplane, and of course Jimi Hendrix,
the undisputed heavyweight guitar champ of the time. But more on him
later. The Who played their entire rock opera Tommy-an impressive feat of
memorization. Creedence rocked with swaggering grooves, Santana charmed
with Latin rhythms and Carlos's serpentine guitar lines, and The
Airplane radiated raw exuberance. But these are only the standouts-I
think it's safe to say that Woodstock had the greatest lineup of
performers in the history of rock. Problems arose. The announcer on
the stage (at first it was Hog Farmer Hugh Romney, a.k.a. Wavy
Gravy, then some other guy) kept telling everyone to avoid the brown
acid-it was supposedly giving people bad trips. The Hog Farm's tent
was getting flooded with acid freakout cases, and there were few
facilities to deal with the medical emergencies of a spontaneously
formed city of 500,000. |
Janis Joplin |
As I understand, the police were not arresting anyone
for any reason out of fears that a riot would have been impossible
to control (however, other sources state there were some drug busts).
None of those worries touched my friends or me, though. We had a
great time listening to the music, staying high, and making new friends. And
this was the second revelation of Woodstock-the sense of brotherhood
that developed as an entire crowd of young people high on psychedelics
got acquainted with those sitting next to them or others met in randomly
in the crowd. There was a feeling of immediate friendship, and the sense
of a group mind at work. And that psychedelically inspired love that so
many of the hippies really did seem to have at Woodstock and elsewhere
is the probably the thing I miss the most about the late 60's.
I spent Saturday spaced out from the acid bombardment of the previous
night and can recall very few details other than the music and the mood
of unbroken bliss. The Grateful Dead tried to play, but were hamstrung
with technical
problems from the rain as well as having to play without stage lighting. All
I can remember was aimless riffing from the dark stage as the crew tried to fix things,
and no one bothered to explain to us what the difficulty was. As
a result, I mistakenly assumed this was the Dead's actual style of music.
In fact, I thought
they were so bad that I didn't see them again until 1983, when a guitar
student of mine put a ticket to a show in Syracuse, NY, in my hand and
gave me a ride in his car (the Dead were great, and I became a belated
fan).
The concert went on all night, and on Sunday morning the
Jefferson Airplane came on. I was walking on the dirt road behind the
stage as a very enthusiastic Grace Slick yelled, "Good morning,
people!" and as the band launched into their opener, "Somebody to
Love," the audience returned her greeting with a tremendous
roar.
That afternoon there were rain showers, and the concert
ground to a halt. I found refuge under a makeshift shelter of ponchos
and tarps that some people had improvised, and the party
rolled on. A blond guy with a bag of grass was stuffing pipes with it as
fast as he could. He filled up mine, and then another friendly fellow
cheerfully crumbled up several chunks of black hashish on top of the weed. I
lit up, passed the pipe around, and forgot about the rain.
Other folks were out in the wet weather having fun, though. By now there was mud
everywhere. People were sliding around in it laughing, and some were
naked. I remember wondering if all the mud spattered nudes were able to
find their clothes afterwards.
The show eventually resumed with Country Joe and the Fish. His famous
"Fish" cheer got turned into "Fuck":
Joe-"Give me an "F!"
Crowd (in unison)-"F!"
Joe-Give me a "U!"
Crowd-"U!"
Got it?
Then, at Joe's prompting, we all shouted out the "F" word
together. Some couples in the crowd reportedly started having sex right
on the spot.
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Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, 1969.
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Last of all was Jimi Hendrix, the best musician to
play at Woodstock. Most of the people had left on Sunday to get back
to their jobs and families, so by the next morning the crowd had
dwindled to thirty or forty thousand. Hendrix was in great form, and the
crowning moment of his set was his bizarre rendition of "The Star
Spangled Banner." I had heard that he had played it in Los Angeles
earlier that summer, but didn't know what mayhem he had made with
the tune. Recognizable passages of the anthem alternated with
feedback-generated explosions and banshee wails, and Hendrix's
dizzying guitar riffs. It was a stunning performance. Jimi finished, and Woodstock was finally over. We'd had the time
of our lives. Aglow from it all, Patty, her brothers, and I made it back
to Sergio's Chevy, broke camp, and returned to New Jersey.
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When we got home we learned the concert had been the top news
story of the weekend. And also, something most unusual was reported
about Woodstock-evidently there had been no violence observed there the entire time (one fistfight was seen, according to another report). Three
babies were born, and two deaths had
occurred-about the statistical average for a city of half a million. But
a city of that size also would have had a predictable number of violent
crimes in a three-day period, and this simply didn't happen. Which was the third
revelation of Woodstock - love had beaten the odds. The miracle of a
multitude at peace with one another had occurred, and no one who was
there will ever forget it.
Albany, NY, August 1999.
(right: My 1970 Glen Rock High yearbook photo.
That's a day-glo tie I'm wearing.)
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