USA TODAY International Edition
Are the good vibes gone?
“Woodstock took place during a time when the ’ 60s were starting to sour into the more violent and fractured ’ 60s. It kind of represented a last, best hope for some of the idealism for that generation.”
David Greenberg Rutgers University professor of history and journalism
BETHEL, N. Y. – On summer afternoons when the golden sun pushes its long shadows through the maple trees along a twisting farm road, Larry Steinhardt stops to sit at a picnic table that overlooks a grassy slope that was once an alfalfa field.
The table is a few yards from a patch of soft grass where Steinhardt arrived with 13 friends in August 1969 for the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival.
Steinhardt, 76, moved to a home a mile from the Woodstock site two decades ago after retiring from his union laborer’s job on the docks in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
He said he drops by the rolling fields where a world- class lineup of rock stars performed as often as he can. Surveying the site on a recent afternoon, Steinhardt wore a leather cowboy hat that looked like a relic from the 1960s and a Woodstock
T- shirt. The spot, he said, brings back happy memories.
“It was peace, love and music,” Steinhardt said, quickly adding that he has no illu
sions that those good vibes will resurrect themselves in the coming week as America celebrates Woodstock’s 50th anniversary. “Back in 1969, there were no problems. Nowadays, with what you hear going around, I’m afraid of what might happen. A shooting? Terrorists?”
A quieter commemoration
After months of legal and financial wrangling, a group of promoters including Michael Lang, who helped stage the Woodstock festival in 1969, dropped plans for a 50th anniversary event that was to take place nearly 150 miles northwest of Bethel in Watkins Glen, New York. That event – along with a smaller fest in Maryland that also was canceled – was to feature an array of artists who were not even born when the original concert took place.
The rolling hills and farm fields that hosted the Woodstock festival Aug. 1518, 1969, are home to the Bethel Woods Museum and Center for the Arts. In the coming days, the center plans to host several stars from the 1969 event: Arlo Guthrie, John Fogerty and Carlos Santana. A directors’ cut of the Academy Award- winning documentary that captured the spirit and chaos of the original event, “Woodstock,” will be screened at the site.
Police said they do not expect anything near the crush of more than 400,000 people who descended on the original Woodstock festival. Plus, in the wake of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, authorities announced this week that they were adding patrols and checkpoints to prevent the gridlock that paralyzed Bethel and surrounding Sullivan County communities in 1969.
Truth is, it was no picnic
While still regarded as an emotional touchstone of the 1960s generation and a highlight in rock ’ n’ roll history, the reality of Woodstock was that it was nearly a disaster.
Throngs of people overwhelmed basic services in rural Sullivan County. Water was scarce. So were food and sleeping accommodations. Portable toilets at the festival site backed up. Roads – including Route 17 – were jammed for miles, blocking ambulances, police and other first responders.
At the festival site itself, an alfalfa field owned by local farmer Max Yasgur, mountains of garbage rotted in the August humidity. After thunderstorms dumped several inches of rain, the field became a mud pit. Concertgoers ended up bathing in a nearby pond – but then were told to stop because they were contaminating one of the few sources of drinking water for the festival.
Local farmers and residents of nearby bungalow colonies brought in food. National Guard helicopters ferried people with medical problems – including drug overdoses – to hospitals.
Three people died: two from drug overdoses and one who was asleep on the trash- strewn field when a tractor pulling a garbage cart ran over him, according to a report by the New York State Department of Health.
Today, such details seem mere footnotes to the image of Woodstock as a moment when the idealism of the 1960s played out on a rural farm field with a soundtrack of legendary music performances by rock icons.
The truth is somewhere in between. Steinhardt said he can’t remember much about the music – in part because he could not get close enough to the stage to see who was performing.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “I don’t know who was playing.”
As he recalls the story now, Steinhardt arrived with a group of friends from Queens who had driven nearly 12 hours over back roads to reach the edge of the festival site. But Steinhardt was dog- tired and, he said, somewhat hung over. As he drove one of the two cars north to Bethel with his friends, he said he sipped from a bottle of ouzo.
At least one recollection of the festival atmosphere is clear, though: “It was a mess. The whole place was a mess.”
A moment in time
That sort of memory by Steinhardt differs dramatically, of course, with the widely held – perhaps inflated – belief that the festival was a nexus of communal spirit and peaceful goodwill.
In some ways, it reflects the mythvs.- reality historians confront when they delve into any aspect of the 1960s.
David Greenberg, a Rutgers University professor of history and journalism, argues that Woodstock took place as utopian hopes of the 1960s fizzled amid the Vietnam War and increasing racial tensions in the United States.
Still, Greenberg said, Woodstock, with its focus on communal living and a spirit of love, also came to symbolize “a concrete, palpable manifestation of what a better society could look like.”
“Woodstock took place during a time when the ’ 60s were starting to sour into the more violent and fractured ’ 60s,” Greenberg said. “It kind of represented a last, best hope for some of the idealism for that generation.”
The festival came on the heels of one of the most tumultuous years in American history. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated in the spring of 1968. Riots had erupted in dozens of American cities. Opposition to U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War expanded beyond college campuses to mass demonstrations.
The gay rights movement began when activists took to the streets in New York in June 1969 after police raided the Stonewall Inn. As heartening as that was to many progressives, a reminder of the violence still lurking in America emerged from Los Angeles only days before the Woodstock festival when a group of cultists led by Charles Manson set off on a shocking murder spree.
At the same time, the summer of 1969 was also a time of hope and inspiration. Weeks before Woodstock, the first astronauts landed on the moon.
America then and now
How does Woodstock fit into this historical potpourri?
Finding answers to that question often depends on whom you ask.
On a stretch of Route 17B, about a half- mile from the Woodstock site, Mark Moore runs a deli and souvenir shop he calls the Woodstock Oasis Country Store. Here, Moore will bake you a pizza with a peace sign made of pepperoni. He can also make a Philly cheese steak sandwich or just an ordinary hamburger.
Moore, 60, never made it to the festival; he was too young and lived more than 100 miles away in Elmira, New York. But he finds the landscape around Bethel – a Hebrew word that translates roughly to “House of God” – still evokes what he believes to be a Woodstockinspired spirit of peace and love.
That spirit, Moore said, seems so distant in today’s America.
“Everybody got along back then,” Moore said. “People didn’t get shot. People didn’t get stabbed. Put 500,000 people together today, and that’s what happens, sadly.”
Yasgur’s farm is buzzing again
Jeryl Abramson was just 13 and spending the summer in a bungalow colony on a nearby lake when Woodstock took place. But without a TV or radio, she had no idea what was about to happen – until hordes of young people started walking past her cottage.
Today, she lives on Yasgur’s farm in a home ringing with wind chimes and buzzing with preparations to welcome up to 1,200 campers who may want to spend time in Bethel next week.
Abramson has invested thousands of dollars in new water pipes, bathrooms and other amenities on her 100- acre plot that was once Yasgur’s dairy. As she sat on her porch on a recent afternoon and described the campgrounds she has named the “Yasgur Road Reunion,” she said she was expecting guests from Europe and Australia.
“We’re focused on resurrecting the spirit,” Abramson said as she hung up the phone from a caller in California asking about making a reservation.
But defining that spirit is not so easy. “There’s the reality of Woodstock,” she said. “Then there’s the variety of perceptions. Some people thought it was just three days of filth and danger. And some people came away feeling like they had an enlightened spiritual experience.”
For Abramson, who delivered free peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to hungry concertgoers in 1969, the spirit she most remembers of Woodstock is a sense of trust.
“We trusted each other to take care of each other,” she said.
This time, she hopes to feel that trust again at her campsites. But like so many who attended Woodstock in 1969, Abramson expects to be tired, too.
“The day after this ends,” she said, “I’m going to sleep.”
“Everybody got along back then. People didn’t get shot. People didn’t get stabbed. Put 500,000 people together today, and that’s what happens, sadly.”
Mark Moore, who runs the Woodstock Oasis Country Store