Once upon a time at Woodstock
He went to Woodstock and missed Jimi Hendrix but ended up with an unexpected souvenir
First of all, I wasn’t one of the cool Woodstock people.
I didn’t bathe naked in the pond. I didn’t vibrate with a sense of peace and oneness with my generation. I didn’t even hear most of the music. The massiveness of the crowd made me a little uneasy or, as we said then, freaked me out.
At one point, I wanted to get away by myself and ended up on the back of a Volkswagen Beetle — leaning against the sloping
backside of the little car with my feet wedged into the rear bumper — as the driver wound over Catskills back roads lined with thousands of cars parked bumper to bumper, miles from the festival site.
That gave me an unusual perspective on the vast scope of the event. It might even be a unique Woodstock experience. But it doesn’t stack up against hearing Jimi Hendrix rearrange the molecular structure of “The Star Spangled Banner” on his Stratocaster or watching Joe Cocker twitch and howl his way through “With a Little Help From (as he put it) Me Friends.”
I know. I’ve watched the videos, with some regret. I’m listening to Cocker’s performance now. It still knocks me out.
Sometimes people ask how I found out about Woodstock. It wasn’t a secret. The promoters wanted to make money so they advertised, including at least once in Kaleidescope, Milwaukee’s hippie newspaper. And in my music-crazy circle, word traveled fast. Everyone I knew knew.
At least a dozen of us went, in three groups traveling in different vehicles leaving at different times. Whatever plans we might have had to connect — I don’t remember any — dissolved as the far-larger-than-expected crowds overwhelmed the organizers and prompted them to turn Woodstock into a free festival.
But miraculously — or so it seemed; nothing was coincidence to us then — we all found each other among the hundreds of thousands of people who descended upon what until then had been a 600-acre farm.
By chance, I rode to Woodstock in relative luxury. Steve, a high-school buddy who had moved to Los Angeles a couple years earlier, had reconnected there with a childhood friend named Rob, a likable, Dylan-loving guy with an easy-going way, a shock of long dark hair and parents with a fair amount of money.
Enough money that they rented a camper, mounted it on the bed of a pickup truck, and gave Rob the keys and their blessing to trek across the country. (Later, they also paid my airfare back to Milwaukee after I showed up in California without much in the way of money and about the same in brains.)
Bound for the soon-to-be-famous little town of Bethel, New York, Rob and Steve swung through Wisconsin and loaded some of us into the camper, which as Steve points out turned into the Woodstock equivalent of a five-star hotel.
We drove straight through. Friday morning, the opening day, we tumbled out of the vehicle more or less in the area of the festival and immediately saw friends from another of our three groups. They guided us to a great camping spot about a quarter-mile from the stage. That evening, we found our other friends no more than 50 feet away from us in the swelling crowd.
The rest is a blur.
Just kidding. Contrary to the old joke (if you remember Woodstock, you weren’t there), I remember my share, though much of it is mundane — waiting in a long line at a water truck, slogging through the mud.
But I don’t recall as much as some of my old friends, who have reminded me of naked people in the trees (sounds painful), pot dealers creating a sort of marijuana strip mall in the woods, and the tent-less couple who spent a rainy night sleeping under Rob’s truck.
And I come up way short on the point of the festival, the music.
I heard Richie Havens sing “Handsome Johnny” and “Freedom” in powerful performances, and caught a few other acts. But Hendrix, The Who, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Creedence, Ten Years After — nothing. Didn’t hear one wailed vocal note, a single power chord or a bit of screeching feedback.
The weather was too wet, the mud was too slimy and the crowd was too dense. The musical highlight for me came not at the stage but one night sitting at our campsite as our friend Kenny, a talented musician, played his 12-string and sang The Band’s sad, hopeful version of Dylan’s hymn, “I Shall be Released.”
In hindsight, the whole thing was remarkable for the fact that nearly half a million people thrown together in a challenging environment organized themselves and almost universally treated each other with kindness and humanity. At the same time, there’s been a lot of romanticizing of what essentially was a three-day party.
In any event, a week or so later I ended up with an unexpected souvenir, or at least what I believe is one. Life magazine published a big spread on Woodstock, which already was on its way to becoming a cultural touchstone. The issue was filled with terrific photographs, including one showing several sopping festival-goers huddling under a piece of plywood in the rain.
Second from the right is a short guy. He’s looking through dark-framed glasses, has a bit of scruffy beard and is wearing a black cowboy hat. I don’t remember standing there, but I’m pretty sure it’s me. I’m short, I wore glasses like that, I had a beard like that, and at the time I had a black cowboy hat that I think I took to Woodstock. Besides, I recognize the lost-boy expression.
At a house party a year later, I met a girl from Brown Deer and we ended up talking for two or three hours. There wasn’t much to recommend me at the time. I had dropped out of college and was pumping gas at a Clark station at Appleton and Capitol. But — I had been to Woodstock. Though I might not have really embraced the spirit of “three days of peace and music,” my cool card was punched.
This year we’ll celebrate our 47th anniversary.