Woodstock: 50 years later, what did it mean?
Woodstock “was the high point of the 1960s counterculture,” said David Colton in USA Today, and for those of us who were there, it “remains as real” as the moment when the skies opened as Joe Cocker finished “With a Little Help From My Friends.” The conditions for the 400,000 of us hippies who swarmed over Max Yasgur’s 600-acre farm in “ticketless anarchy” were horrible, with insufficient food, clogged portable toilets, and three torrential downpours that turned the alfalfa field into “a clingy, blob-like mud.” Miraculously, everyone got along. Huddling for warmth, people slept “together in the woods along the ‘Groovy Way’ path, whether in relationships or not,” and grooved—high or not—to incredible performances by Janis Joplin, the Band, Santana, the Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Sly and the Family Stone. “The crowd, the people, us, it turned out, was to be the story—sharing, dancing, chanting, skinny-dipping, surviving.”
I don’t want to rain on anyone’s “sunlit memories,” said Anthony DeCurtis in the New York Daily News. But 50 years on, it’s pretty clear that “getting back to the garden,” as Joni Mitchell wrote in her song “Woodstock,” was always going to be “far more complicated than the era’s hippie fantasies implied.” It seems we’ve had nothing but trouble since those magical four days: endless war, division, greed, terrorism, and tumult. Woodstock wasn’t a movement, said Gene Seymour in CNN.com. It was a threeday miracle of peace, love, fun, and great music. Let’s recognize Woodstock for what it was: “a series of accidents that somehow coalesced into something that may never be duplicated.”
You should have been there—at Woodstock 2019, said Christopher Maag in the Poughkeepsie Journal. This year’s 50th anniversary concert in Bethel, N.Y., near the site of the first one, was a reunion of old hippies. Only this time, “the crowds waited patiently to pass through metal detectors” instead of crashing the fence for free. They traded the mud and LSD for orderly rows of lawn chairs and glasses of rosé. They slept at comfy hotels. One guy—Rhode Island prep cook Bruce Mallo—still found the spirit to dance through the crowd with his “arms weaving seductively” above his head. Then Mallo jokingly yelled, “I can show you my Medicare card!” A rebellious generation, it seems, has mellowed out.