Woodstock revisited: where have all the flowers gone?
It was an event that defined a whole generation, said Michael J. Kramer in The Washington Post. The Woodstock festival, which took place half a century ago this month, was the high point of the 1960s counterculture. And it is still celebrated “as a momentary Garden of Eden, a symbol of how capitalist greed and social ills gave way to a kind of utopian politics”.
For those of us who were there, said David Colton in USA Today, it remains as real as the moment when the skies opened as Joe
Cocker finished With a Little Help
from My Friends. The conditions for the 400,000 of us hippies who swarmed over Max Yasgur’s 600-acre farm in “ticketless anarchy” were horrible, with insufficient food, clogged portable toilets and “torrential downpours” that turned the alfalfa field into “a clingy, blob-like mud”. But miraculously, everyone got along. Huddling for warmth, people slept “together in the woods along the ‘Groovy Way’ path”, and grooved, high or not, to incredible performances by Janis Joplin, The Band, Santana, The Who, Jefferson Airplane and Sly and the Family Stone.
“I can’t describe it,” Kevin Rheden, 18 at the time, told Voice of America, “except to say that the hillside was just like a waterfall of love.” People went to call their parents to tell them they were safe, then got up at sunrise to dance on the wet hillside. “For a minute we were hopeful,” recalls David Crosby of Crosby, Stills & Nash. “For a minute we were behaving like decent human beings.” I hate to rain on anyone’s “sunlit memories”, said Anthony DeCurtis in the New York Daily News, but 50 years on, getting “back to the garden”, as Joni Mitchell hymned it in her song Woodstock, looks “far more complicated than the era’s hippie fantasies implied”. In many ways, Woodstock was the end rather than the beginning of the hippie dream, said Hillel Italie on
US News. Don’t forget that just a week before, a hippie family led by ex-convict and frustrated rock musician Charles Manson – who were equally keen advocates of drugs and free sex – had launched their own counterculture revolution by plotting the slaughter of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others. And less than four months later, said Nick Licata in CounterPunch, the idea of the rock festival as an emblem of peace and love was shattered at a concert in California. The Altamont festival was meant to be the West Coast equivalent of Woodstock: instead the crowd got violently out of control and it ended with one of the Hells Angels, who’d been acting as informal security staff, stabbing to death an 18-year-old man named Meredith Hunter.
Well I’m glad to say that the old hippies reuniting to celebrate at the 50th anniversary Woodstock concert held in upstate New York this month were just as peaceable as their 1960s forbears, said Christopher Maag in the Poughkeepsie Journal. Only this time, instead of crashing the fence to get in for free, “the crowds waited patiently to pass through metal detectors”. And instead of mud and LSD, they opted for orderly rows of lawn chairs, glasses of rosé and beds in comfy hotels. One of them, it’s true, did find the spirit to dance through the crowd, his arms weaving seductively above his head: but he rather ruined the moment by yelling, “I can show you my Medicare card!” Yet it would be stretching the point to think the Woodstock generation is still defined by grandiose Woodstock ideals, said Alissa Wilkinson on Vox. The intervening decades have seen that same group of baby boomer Americans, who saw themselves as non-acquisitive, anti-war communitarians filled with hope for the future, become advocates of gun rights and strong borders. Trump would never have been elected if the baby boomers hadn’t been so keen on him. Joan Baez called Woodstock “a joy festival”. But from where we stand today, “that joy was short-lived”.