50 years on, memories still glow
BOULDER» The old joke goes that if you claim to remember the 1960s, you probably weren’t there. But even for those who plunged into its excesses headfirst, there’s no forgetting the seminal event 50 years ago this month that in one word summons a place, a time and even a new way of looking at life.
Woodstock.
Officially billed as the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair, and staged on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y. — not Woodstock, some 40 miles to the northeast — what started as a music festival evolved into a generation-defining gathering of the tribes that manifested as something vastly more enduring than the sum of its parts.
Yes, there was Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, The Band, Ten Years After, Joan Baez, John Sebastian, and Crosby, Stills Nash & Young (Young joined in after CSN’S first six songs) and so many more. There was also unchecked idealism, heavy rain, bad brown acid, virtually no security and insufficient sanitation.
And not only to those whose perceptions were radically adjusted by psychotropic drugs, the alchemy of the factors at play Aug. 15 to the early morning hours of Aug. 18, 1969, forged those ingredients into a cultural benchmark that half a century later is a vivid reminder — much like the first humans walking on the moon one month before — of an America where miracles were still possible.
Or so it seemed.
Bruce Kirschner of Louisville was there. Living at the time on Long Island in Westbury, N.Y., he was a just-turned-16 fan of what they still called “underground music,” and he sold his proud military veteran father on approving his trip upstate with his young friends by pitching it as a camping trip.
“My dad’s unit was the first unit to land on Normandy Beach on D-day. I said, ‘Dad, I’m going camping.’ And I said, ‘By the way, there’s going to be music there.’ And he said, ‘Do your friends need any equipment?’ He was like a quartermaster, issuing equipment to my friends.”
Having been a Boy Scout, Kirschner said, “Camping out was no big deal. I think we used our Boy Scout knapsacks, and we had Sterno stoves and were going to be eating
Dinty Moore beef stew out of the can.”
A New York Times article published Aug. 15, headlined “346 Policemen Quit Music Festival,” led with the “latest problem” for the event being the sudden loss of all the off-duty officers who had been hired as “ushers.” The piece ended with a vignette concerning a troop of 16-year-olds waiting for their bus at the New York City Port Authority terminal. That was Kirschner’s group.
“I know there will be drugs everywhere, and I wonder what it will be like,” one 16-year-old is quoted as saying, whom Kirschner said was his friend, Steve Sobel. “I’ve never been away from home before. I wonder what will happen to all of us.”
A perfect moment
For Kenny Weissberg, who would go on to have a career in music, including serving as the Daily Camera’s first rock critic from 1976 to 1980, Woodstock wasn’t even the first massive rock concert of the summer.
Weissberg, now 71, had spent the earlier part of the summer in Europe and was lucky enough to be at the free concert by the Rolling Stones in London’s Hyde Park on July 5 of that year, which drew a crowd estimated between 250,000 and half a million.
When he got back home to South Orange, N.J., Weissberg almost forgot the two tickets he’d bought through the mail weeks before for Woodstock — $6 in advance — and tossed in a drawer.
Through a friend he knew whose grandmother owned Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel, he and his girlfriend landed sweet digs at a bed and breakfast about 7 miles from the concert site, giving them a dry and comfortable spot to sleep and recoup between the first two days of the extravaganza, as well as a back-roads option for avoiding the infamous bumper-to-bumper scene on the New York State Thruway.
“I didn’t know there were going to be half a million people,” Weissberg said. “I felt like I had a pampered Woodstock experience. We were there for two solid days and saw every act on Friday and Saturday, and we were drenched and caked in mud — but we didn’t have to sleep in mud. We could take showers. I had a pampered Woodstock experience.”
Weissberg and his companion, their perceptions enhanced by a mescaline diet, didn’t stick around for Sunday’s program. But he will never forget the Saturday sequence of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone and The Who, documented — along with his many other music adventures at Woodstock and elsewhere — in his 2006 memoir “Off My Rocker.”
“The Who singing ‘Tommy’ as the sun was rising at 5 on Sunday morning, and right at the part in the rock opera where Tommy regains his vision and the sun was coming up and I was tripping on mescaline, I don’t know that I have ever had as perfect a moment of music in my life,” Weissberg said. “I said to myself after Woodstock, I was going to pursue music as a career — as I did.”
A hearse and a goat
Merri Trotter of Longmont cruised to Woodstock in a 1949 hearse outfitted with burgundy velvet curtains. She arrived from her family’s summer getaway in Monticello, N.Y., with a male friend and female companion.
Trotter, who was a Bronx resident and graduate of a two-year art school program, said one of her friends had bought tickets. But she remembers climbing a fence to get in to what was quickly declared a free concert.
Set up on a blanket with her friends in the ocean of shaggy humanity, Trotter said she steered clear of the brown acid and just about everything else that was going around.
“We were little goodie two-shoes,” she said. “We didn’t trust anybody else, so we had our own food, etc. I am crazy to begin with. So we were pretty straight, aside from, well, there was so much (marijuana) in the air.
“I remember being so exhausted, that we slept a lot or we dozed off a lot. When Santana came on, we went nuts, and I’ve been going nuts, ever since. Every time he comes (to Colorado) we have to go see him.”
Trotter said Woodstock’s import did not register with her at the time.
“We did not have a clue,” she said. “And no one had a clue about the amount of people that actually showed up. … I do remember a guy with a goat.”
“Cream pie” security
Boulder’s Tamara Lester had just graduated from high school and was working in an art gallery in her hometown of Middletown, N.Y. Her shop was selling tickets and posters for the event.
Lester recalls that after organizers tried and failed to stage the festival in Woodstock or Saugerties, they had settled briefly on nearby Wallkill.
“All the original posters, all the original tickets said Wallkill. But when the town fathers realized what this was going to be, they shut ’em down, about three weeks before the concert,” Lester said.
“They had to scramble and find a place. They enlisted all my friends to come and help with fencing and building the stage and setting everything up” at Yasgur’s farm.
There was “no question” she and her friends would all be going, and go they did, crammed into a VW bus owned by a friend of her brother, Alan.
“We went up the day before or a couple of days before. Anything was going to happen. We set up on the other side of the hill, where the Hog Farmers were set up, and the Grateful Dead had their buses along with all the Hog Farm people,” she said, referring to the hippie collective hired to provide security. Legendary Hog Farmer Hugh Romney, a.k.a. Wavy Gravy, said security would be administered by his “Please Force” using only “cream pies and seltzer bottles.”
“There was a second stage there, the free stage that had local musicians and other musicians from all the other groups playing nonstop on the other side of the hill near where the pond was,” she said, noting that the Dead — whose Saturday set from the main stage was not among their best, even by the bands’s own admission — played the second stage frequently through the weekend.
“The Hog Farm people provided food to everybody and they cooked the whole time,” she said. “It was next to the free stage. I spent a lot of time over there, because it wasn’t as crowded, and it was more personable, with people that we knew. We spent a lot of time walking back and forth” from the main concert area.
“I lost my really good, handmade leather sandals in the mud,” she said. “They’re part of the ground, now.”
No frowns
Lou Lyon and Doug Vandeven, a married couple who live in northwest Boulder, were both at Woodstock — unknown to one another at that time. They wouldn’t meet for another 11 years, by which time both were in Colorado.
Lyon, now 69, was a student at the University of Colorado, but back home in Darien, Conn., for the summer, she headed off to the festival with friends from high school.
“Basically, what I remember was a nightmare on the highway. And we just left our car and walked in. And it was very wet. It was a very wet time,” said Lyon, who stayed for the duration.
“I was actually only supposed to go for one day, because I had a midnight curfew, but of course it was all over the news,” which she felt was probably sufficient notice to her parents that she was in an unusual situation and wouldn’t be home at the appointed hour — or day.
Lyon recalls being wowed by Joplin, her idol. Asked whether she was sober for the festivities, she said “no.” Three times.
“There was a lot of marijuana,” she said. “I mean, c’mon. This was ’69. There were drugs. I would say, a lot of marijuana.”
Vandeven headed down from Fayetteville, N.Y., near Syracuse, driving with three friends in the unofficial car of the Woodstock festival, a VW van.
“None of us had tickets, but we picked up a hitchhiker on the thruway, who had an artist’s pass to drive to the stage,” he said.
They parked their van near the top of the festival’s amphitheater, moving down toward the stage at times then retreating to that spot for food breaks. He did not have many memories to share of the music.
“I remember it raining, and we were under a 48foot trailer when Ravi Shankar was up there playing the sitar, which was kind of surreal. But I don’t really remember too much more about that,” he said.
Was he sober? He echoed his future wife, “No. Nobody was sober.”
Vandeven remembers leaving before the final day — and hitting someone’s Triumph TR 6 on the way to New York City, bashing into the other driver’s bumper. That was not enough to dispel the Woodstock afterglow.
“It was probably the most astounding venue,” said Vandeven, who would go on to have careers in manufacturing and criminal justice. “A quarter of a million kids went to it, without there being a single sign of trouble. I didn’t see so muchasafrown.”
“I had a mind shift”
Kirschner’s buddy’s question about “what will happen to all of us” were of course answered in myriad ways for the hundreds of thousands who attended and for the generation the event came to symbolize.
In the short-term context, for Kirschner it was a blast. He said the seeds for serving a higher purpose took root there.
“By my third night at Woodstock, I had lost my friends. I was alone, and somebody passed me a flyer and the flyer said that New York state Governor (Nelson) Rockefeller had declared the Woodstock concert area a state disaster area,” he said. “I thought somebody had made this up. But this was a real flyer, and it really ticked me off, because for me, this was no disaster, here. This was wonderful.”
It sparked a skepticism, he said, toward the current government but also inspired a desire to try to be an agent for change.
“I believe it was at that moment I had a mind shift, and I decided I was going to dedicate myself to public service and making government better,” said Kirschner, who would go on to a 34-year federal government career in U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Office of Personnel Management administration, which included the development and management of training for future government leaders.
“I certainly fulfilled my promise to myself, in doing that. I proved to myself that I could make a difference, and leave government better than I found it and have a positive effect on American citizens,” he said. “That shift really started at Woodstock.”
For Weissberg, too, there was a transformation.
“Originally, I was going to go to law school. I was a sociology major, and I was going to get a law degree. That’s what my parents were hoping,” he said. “After I finished college, I bummed around the country for a year and ended up in Boulder in July 1971, and soon I was doing morning drive at KRNW-FM, in Boulder, which in 1977 became KBCO.”
His career also would come to include not just his stint at the Camera but the producer-talent buyer for Humphrey’s Concerts by the bay in San Diego from 1984 to 2006. Like other Woodstock veterans, Weissberg believes it was a moment in time that could not be repeated today (efforts to stage a Woodstock 50 anniversary festival crumbled at the end of July).
“I just think there was a sense of optimism back then, even though we were dealing with Vietnam, and it was a crazy time. There was more a sense of optimism than we are dealing with, now,” Weissberg said. “I left the music biz because of the greed in ’06. I saw it becoming so greedy, and now you have Live Nation selling tickets to scalpers, and Metallica is selling their own seats to scalpers. … Music is no longer a fan oriented-industry. I don’t feel it could happen again.”
As film director Quentin Tarantino and others have served ample recent reminder, the summer marks the anniversary of a far darker event: 50 years since the infamous murders masterminded by Charles Manson. Although the brutal slayings occurred one week before Woodstock, Manson’s arrest would not follow until Oct. 1. But when it came, it suddenly made many, however unfairly, look more warily on some of the aspects of what was broad-brushed as “the counterculture.”
Then came the disaster at the Altamont Speedway in northern California on Dec. 6, 1969, where Hells Angels killed a concertgoer while the Rolling Stones were performing and three others also died in accidents. And while Jimi Hendrix ended Woodstock with his ferociously psychedelic reimagining of “The Star Spangled Banner,” Richard Nixon was still ensconced in the White House, with his landslide re-election, his resignation in disgrace, and the enduring unease about the integrity and fragility of our democratic system still to come. Hendrix and Joplin would be dead little more than a year later.
In a 2019, when the very notion of community is threatened seemingly daily by mass shootings, racist invective and endless debate over who can remain in America and who must leave, the dream of an Aquarian age feels increasingly like only that — a vision that quickly dissipates in the sober light of day.
Lester said her drug of choice at Woodstock was mescaline, and that ingesting it in that heady environment helped unlock her mind “to seeing the bigger picture what could be. And I think that’s one of the things so many people took out of that experience: what we could do as a movement and as a positive force in the world and our country.”
For her, that meant heading into a 45-year career in nursing — she now works at Weight Loss MD Boulder as a hormone and weight loss specialist — which she said “goes along with my path of making the world a better place.”