Nostalgia rules as Woodstock turns 50
A freewheeling weekend of indulgence. A New York farm transformed by idealistic youths into a mid-size city. A celebration of rock music and utopian ideals.
Woodstock was many things, but one thing is clear – it is revered by many as the cultural touchstone of a generation.
The 1969 festival of peace, love and music marks its 50th anniversary this weekend, triggering a wave of nostalgia for an era when rock was for the young, tie-dye was cool, long hair was a statement, and kids said “groovy” without irony.
It is estimated that 400,000 to half-a-million people descended on Max Yasgur’s alfalfa fields in upstate New York that August 15-18, embarking on a trip of a party that saw icons like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Santana jam as increasingly filthy festival-goers danced, stripped and dropped acid in torrential rain.
At the outset, organisers were charging $18 (about R276) a ticket for revellers to attend the event, which featured now legendary rock bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
John Roberts and Joel Rosenman bankrolled the festival, which they dreamed up with fellow 20-somethings Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld as a business opportunity to promote a would-be recording studio in upstate New York.
But as news of the bucolic rock concert spread, a crush of eager attendees bottle-necked country roads winding to the festival site in White Lake, a hamlet of the small town of Bethel, about 100km southwest of the namesake town of Woodstock.
The overwhelmed masterminds had little choice but to declare that Woodstock would be, like the love, free.
As the music began, rains swept in, food ran out and helicopters whirred overhead – sometimes delivering musicians, other times supplies.
Despite the mud and warnings of bad acid, the myth of Woodstock lives on – the festival is venerated as a beacon of hope that emerged out of the tumultuous 1960s, rife with assassinations and riots as the Vietnam War raged.
Sri Swami Satchidananda, a yoga master from India, opened the festival with an address urging compassion, a moment seen as embodying the non-violent culture Woodstock aimed to represent.
“I am overwhelmed with joy to see the entire youth of America gathered here in the name of the fine art of music,” the slight, bearded man, sitting cross-legged before the massive crowd said, leading the concertgoers in chants of “om”.
Later on, Country Joe McDonald of the psychedelic rock band Country Joe & the Fish famously led them in chants of “f**k”, before playing the antiwar protest song I-Feel-LikeI’m-Fixin-to-Die Rag. By the time Hendrix tore through his electrified, abstract rendition of The Star-Spangled
Banner, now considered iconic, the masses were heading back to the real world, just beginning to sear their collective myth into the history books.
Danny Goldberg, a longtime music industry insider who covered the festival for Billboard as a starry-eyed 19-yearold, fondly remembers the weekend as “a lot of people with smiles on their faces”.
“I was taken almost immediately with this sweetness – the idyllic notion of the hippie brother and sisterhood that rarely manifests itself, even then,” he said in an interview.
“But it was quite palpable at Woodstock, from the minute I got there until the minute I left,” Goldberg said.
The adage holds that if you can remember Woodstock, you were not really there – and many precise details of the weekend are hostage to the drug-addled and ever-ageing recollections of attendees and even the organisers themselves.
Rumours persist but mystery endures whether any babies were born at Woodstock.
Sleuthing over the decades has fallen short, and no-one has come forward as offspring born onsite – though it is likely some were conceived there.
Reports from the time say a tractor cleaning debris accidentally ran over one person in a sleeping bag, while at least one person is said to have died from a drug overdose.
Like a critically panned movie-turned cult film, in the days after the festival, mainstream news outlets were largely dismissive.
“The dreams of marijuana and rock music that drew 300,000 fans and hippies to the Catskills had little more sanity than the impulses that drive the lemmings to march to their deaths in the sea,” read an editorial published in The New York Times. But Annie Birch, who caravanned in with a group of friends at age 20, remembers the festival as “so peaceful, given all that mass of humanity”.
“All those bands became iconic. It was just like ‘wow, let’s get together in a big way’.
“It was legendary.” –