Love and peace? It was 3 days of mud and misery!
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the most famous rock festival that ever took place. Woodstock — billed as ‘ Three Days of Love and Peace’ — started on August 15, 1969. it now seems like an event from history, which, in a way, it is. Go back 50 years from then, and the Treaty of Versailles has just been signed, bringing World War i to a close.
Woodstock set the template for every rock festival since, not least Glastonbury, which was first staged a year later in september 1970.
The myth of Woodstock has become all- powerful. it was propagated by a feature film, released the following year, and a soundtrack album, both of which showed all the best bits, and left out the rest. They generated $100 million each.
The market for Woodstock memorabilia grows bigger with every year. Woodstock’ s 25 th anniversary was commemorated with a four- disc set, and a six-disc set was issued in 2009. Now, to tie in with the 50th anniversary, a set of 38 CDs costing $800 (£ 657) has been released. it is 36 hours long.
On the original site of Woodstock, a museum which cost $ 100 million houses a permanent exhibition dedicated to The Festival Experience, including a 270- degree ‘ visual landscape’, allowing visitors to imagine themselves there.
But how accurate is the Woodstock myth? The bare facts tell a tale rather different from the received version.
For instance, while Glastonbury provides one loo for every 32 people, at Woodstock there was just one loo for every 800 people. That problem might have been lessened, to some extent, by the fact that there was virtually no food or drink on offer.
By the third day, the government had declared the site an official disaster area, and the National Guard were lowering food and drink from helicopters. Over the course of the three days, 6,000 festival-goers were treated by doctors, with 50 extra doctors flown in to meet the demand.
What of the music? With seven different cameras and sophisticated recording equipment, the film and soundtrack album managed to fashion something presentable out of the three days but, by and large, the performers
told a different tale. Pete Townshend of The Who remembered: ‘ All these hippies wandering about thinking the world was going to be different from that day on ... What they thought was an alternative society was basically a field full of 6ft-deep mud laced with LsD. if that was the world they wanted to live in, then f*** the lot of them.’
Neil Young remembered it as ‘awful. No one was into the music’. Rick Danko of The Band thought their set was ‘terrible’. Mickey hall of The Grateful Dead thought it ‘the worst we ever played’.
Nor were the electrical connections all they might have been. The Grateful Dead’s rhythm guitarist, Bob Weir, remembers ‘ a great blue spark about the size of a baseball . . . i got lifted off my feet and sent back about eight or ten feet’.
Of course, Joni Mitchell gave a rosier view in her famous song, Woodstock. ‘ By the time we got to Woodstock,’ she sang, ‘we were half a million strong. And everywhere there was song and celebration . . .We are stardust, we are golden . . .’
What the song fails to mention is that Joni Mitchell failed to turn up. she had been booked to play, but while she was waiting for her flight at La Guardia airport, her manager David Geffen read a headline in the New York Times — ‘400,000 People sitting in Mud’ — and decided to cancel. ‘i thought, no way am i going to Woodstock. And Joni and i went back to my apartment on Central Park south and we watched it on television. she wrote the song Woodstock in my apartment on 59th street.’
AWEEk ago, a 50th anniversary Woodstock Festival was cancelled, following ‘unforeseen setbacks’. in fact, Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus and santana had foreseen them, and had already dropped out.
John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, one of the survivors of the first Woodstock festival, had also been due to appear even though, in an account he gave ten years ago, he remembered looking out from the stage onto an audience that was singularly unresponsive.
‘i was searching to see if anybody was awake, because there were a half million people asleep,’ he said. ‘it was sort of like a painting of a Dante scene, just bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud.’