5 long-standing Woodstock myths, debunked
Fiftyyears afterWoodstock, legends about the music festival are tightly braided with the reality of its three chaotic days. The 1969 showwas muddy enough (literally and figuratively) for many people to believe both themyths and the debunking, sometimes simultaneously. Eventhename of Woodstock doesn’t hold up to cursory fact-checking, as most people know— while the name ofWoodstock, New York, was more marketable because of the town’s association with Bob Dylan, the event happened more than 40miles away, inBethel. Here are five otherWoodstock stories that, like the brown acid, turned out to be problematic. Myth: Joni Mitchellwrote the anthem “Woodstock” about her experiences at the festival Reality: Mitchell never made it to Woodstock — she was stuck in a hotel room in New York City. She had been planning to accompany Crosby, Stills, NashandYoung to the festival, butwhen their joint managers, DavidGeffen and Elliot Roberts, saw how chaotically Woodstock was unfolding, they instructed her to stay in New York: She had an important appearance booked on “The Dick Cavett Show” taping theMonday afternoon after the festival ended, and they were worried she wouldn’t make it back in time.
“I was the girl of the family and, with great disappointment, I was the one that had to stay behind,” Mitchell told writer Dave Zimmer for his 1984 biography of Crosby, Stills andNash. She put aside her bitterness to write a song exalting the festival as a holy gathering, informed by the footage she sawon television andthe stories sheheardfrom her then-boyfriend Graham Nash. CSNY had a hit single with their version of it in1970, while Mitchell included the song on her album “Ladies of the Canyon.”
“By the time we got to Woodstockwewere half a million strong,” she sang, probably overstating the attendance by about 100,000people. “For a herdof people that large to cooperate so well, it was pretty remarkable,” she told Zimmer — the first three times she performed the song live, she burst into tears, she said, moved by the miracle she hadn’t witnessed. Myth: Theweekendwas all hippie good vibes
Reality: Whilemanypeople commented on the air of bonhomie atWoodstock— where a utopian spirit triumphed over rain, paralyzing traffic jams and not enough food — that didn’t mean that everyone held hands and sang the Youngbloods’ “GetTogether” all weekend long. With hundreds of thousands of people in close quarters, some will disagree.
Most notably, Abbie Hoffman, the anarchist and political activist, got onstage during the Who’s set, around 5:30 a.m. on Sunday morning. HighonLSD, hegrabbeda live microphone and shouted about the injusticeof JohnSinclair, the manager of the MC5 and founder of the White Panther Party, serving a 10-year prison sentence for possession of marijuana.
The guitarist Pete Townshend profanely told Hoffman to get off the stage and then got physical about it. “Feeling malevolent, I knocked Abbie aside using the headstock of my guitar. A sharp end of one ofmy stringsmust have pierced his skin because he reacted as though stung, retreating tosit cross-leggedat the side of the stage,” Townshend wrote in his 2012 autobiography “Who I Am.” “I was always absurdly territorial about our performance space.” Myth: Woodstock was a commerce-free zone
Reality: Although Woodstock’s promoters gave up on collecting tickets or money earlyonwhen it becameclear that throngs of young people would be attending the show without paying themandated $18 for a three-day pass, that didn’ t mean they were unconcerned by cash.
The festival’s origin story: JoelRosenman and JohnRoberts came into some money and placed an ad in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reading, “Youngmen with unlimited capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions,” which led them to the hippie entrepreneurs Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld. The quartet discussed opening a recording studio inWoodstock— the festival was originally intended to promote it.
On theweekend of the festival, even as the four promoters scrambled to provide food andwater for the crowd, they ran up against a reality of rock promotion: Musicians generally don’t want to perform if they don’t get paid. They had to convince a local bank to open on a Saturday night and loan them the necessary cash. The highest-paid performer was reportedly Ji mi Hendrix, who got $18,000; Blood, Sweat & Tears were paid $ 15,000; Janis Joplin, the Band and Jefferson Airplane, $7,500 each; and Santana just $750.
The Woodstock backers didn’t break even at the gate, but they made a lot of money from secondary income streams in the years after the show, like the concert film and the triple- LP soundtrack: Elevenyears after Richie Havens opened the show, Woodstock finallywent into the black, its organizers said in 2009. Myth: The “Peanuts” comic strip took inspiration fromWoodstock, not the other way around
Reality: The cartoonist Charles Schulz first introduced Snoopy’s sidekick in aMarch 1966 “Peanuts” strip, but the character was nameless until June 1970 — when Schulz called the bird “Woodstock” inaneffort to appeal to the younger generation. The name flipped the character’s intended gender; Schulz had thought of the bird as female, but decided that the Woodstock name was male.
Schulz had, however, already made an impact on the Woodstock cohort: The Grateful Dead keyboardist Ron M cKernan was widely known by the nickname “Pigpen” — his poor hygiene reminded people of the perpetual ly unkempt Peanuts character Pig-Pen. He was the Dead’s first frontman, and while he had trouble with the band’s more experimental turns, he remained a reliable blues singer until his death in 1973. At Woodstock, Pigpen had been singing a showstopping version of “Turn on Your Love Light” for more than half an hour when the Grateful De ad’ s show actually stopped— the band’s amps overloaded, which concluded the set. Myth: JimiHendrix electrified hundreds of thousands of people with his version of “The Star-Spangled Banner”
Reality: Hendrix was the closing act at Woodstock — after a series of incendiary live performances, including setting his guitar on fire at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, nobody wanted to follow him. The Jimi Hendrix Experience had broken up, so Hendrix pulled together a pickup band he called Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, and spent the weekend of Woodstock rehearsing with the band, enjoying himself and not sleeping.
Because of the festival’s delays, Hendrix didn’t take the stage until 9 a.m. onMonday, following the kitschy ’50s revivalists ShaNaNa. Bymost estimates, at least 90% of the audiencehadleft at that point, returning to their ordinary lives — and the exodus continued steadily throughout his set.
Hendrix played “The StarSpangled Banner” as part of a half-hour medley near the end of his performance, just before seguing into “Purple Haze .” He had done the American national anthem dozens of times before, but this electrifying version, threeminutesand 46 seconds, wouldn’tbecome iconic until the “Woodstock” movie was released the following year. Full of audio pyrotechnics and feedback, it became the anthem for a nation at war, and the most enduring musical moment from a festival of peace.