Woodstock generation looks back from varied vantage points
NEW YORK — It was the weekend that shaped the image of a “Woodstock Generation.” And that image would echo, appeal and provoke for generations to come.
To many who went or wished they did, the pivotal festival of “peace and music” 50 years ago remains an inspiring moment of counterculture community and youthful freethinking.
“We went for the music and found something so much more and so much more important — camaraderie,” said Karen Breda, who was 17 when she went to Woodstock. She recalls feeling part of “a generation that felt like nothing could stop us. Peace. Love. The whole thing.”
Some other Americans saw Woodstock as an outrageous display of indulgence and insouciance in a time of war. And some didn’t look to Woodstock to celebrate their own sense of music and identity.
“There was no one baby boomer generation. There was no one approach to what Woodstock meant,” said David Farber, a University of Kansas professor of American history. But Woodstock became an “aspirational vision of what countercultural youth thought they could achieve in the United States.”
Breda didn’t go to Woodstock looking for a societal vision. She was fresh out of high school and liked rock concerts, and the three-day lineup was packed with acts including The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
After lying to her parents about her destination, Breda arrived from Boston to find a mind-boggling mass of people, tents, blankets, pot smoke, patchouli and underpreparedness.
Organizers had sold 186,000 tickets; ultimately an estimated 400,000 people showed up for the festival on farmland in Bethel, N.Y., about 80 miles northwest of New York City.
Space, water and toilets were in short supply. Security was thin. Rain and mud abounded. Breda and her friends slept in their car after getting separated from another vehicle carrying their camping supplies. It was a trek to get near the stage.
But what she remembers most was happening in the crowd — concertgoers meeting each other, sharing what they had, playing guitars together.
At a time of bitter protests over the Vietnam War, Woodstock “seemed to transcend the anger that clearly a lot of people were feeling. It was about being together. It was about helping out someone that needed something,” said Breda, now a nursing professor at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. “The music spoke for us.”