Woodstock:
A Very Little Rebellion
Alex McKnight
During the tumultuous decade of the sixties, there was an event that cannot be pinpointed
to a date alone, for the implications of its occurrence are legendary and the significance of
its impact is mostly a myth. The Woods tock Festival of '69, as it is still called after
twenty-five years, engendered much talk of revolution and very little rebellion.
In the last year of that decade, erroneously know as the "swingin' sixties," a phenomenon
occurred that remains to some observers a historical and sociological force majeur. The
Aquarian Exposition of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair (at Bethel, NY) took place
beginning August 15th. The festival turned out to be a mixture of music, marijuana, media,
and the muddled masses. This heralded celebration of the beginning of the age of Aquarius
was as much a requiem as a birthday and as much a non-event as an event. Things that we
call historical events tend to shape the future, and non-events fade quickly into oblivion.
Woodstock somehow bridged the gap, for it did not shape the fut ure, and it has not faded
into oblivion.
To set "Woodstock" in time does help us remember where we were as a society in the
pos t-Camelot and pre-Watergate era. In January of 1969, Richard Nixon (with a secret
plan to end the Vietnamese War), was inaugurated President. In July, the United States
landed a man on the moon. So, in 1969, "The Great Society" went out with a whimper,
and the last boundary of "The New Frontier" was reached.
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It was still only a year after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert
Kennedy. It was less than a year since thousands of protestors in Chicago proved the whole
world was watching. It was less than a month after Ted Kennedy, the heir-apparent to
Camelot, pleaded guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident. It was one week
after Sharon T ate and four other people were fo und murdered by the Charles Manson
"Helter Skelter" family. And, only two days after the Apollo VI lunar-landing astronauts
were met by jubilant crowds in New York City.
T o state that the original idea of W oodstock's young promoters was to make some money
on an outdoor rock festival would be an oversimplification. Kornfeld, Lang, Rosenman, and
Roberts et al. of W oodstock Ventures, Inc., were neither money-hungry entrepreneurs, nor
a socially-conscious charitable organization. However, whether from a Monday morning
conve rsion or from long-standing principles, their president summed up the firm's
afterthoughts by saying: "It was certainly worth any financial trouble we may be in." Of
course, they wanted to make money. However, they evidently believed that what happened
instead was something unique, memorable and perhaps important. Nothing tes ts man's
principles more than failure (unless it is success) especially financial failure, and
W oodstock Ventures, Inc., was left with little but a philosophical retrospective; to their
credit they had one to fall back on.
As for the half million people who attended the festival, their name very well could have
been legion. O f course most of them were young, but a substantial number were over thirty
and a few over fifty. The overwhelming majori ty were white, middle class, college-age
Americans. They came from as far as California and from every other state in the Union .
Many of them came from New York City. Their reasons for being there were similar but had
500,000 variations. Joe McDonald summed it up : "These people like to get together and
see each other to prove that they are real."
Never before or again was this collection of "big name" musical performers assembled in
one place. Although the Newport Jazz Festival annually has a litany of names to rival
W oodstock, jazz has not, in its long history, commanded the dollar support that rock did in
the one decade of the sixties. The "gold" album, so unusual in jazz, was much more
common in rock. It is probable that the Beatles sold more records in the sixties than all the
jazz performers combined, and it is possible that by the end of the eighties, they had sold
more than all the jazz performers of all time.
Rock was big business and its "pushers" made millions, but not at W oodstock. The
Woodstock record album, although successful, was more a sampler and souvenir (to those
who had not been there) than a musical masterpiece. Although the acoustics were amazing
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in Max Yasgur's alfalfa field, they were not ideal for recording. As for the movie Woodstock,
it never recouped the losses that the festival incurred. Whatever Woodstock was, it was
not a financial success.
There was another more ominous reason that this same group of performers could never
get together again. Two of Woodstock's brightest stars would be dead in a little over a year.
Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died late in 1970, within two weeks of each other. Their
passings proved to be twin harbingers of the oblivion or perhaps limbo that was to be the
seventies. Their obituaries hint of another aspect of Woodstock that cannot be
overlooked:
Hendrix, Jimi 27, American rock guitarist and vocalist whose erotic
showmanship and phenomenal virtuosity with feedback, fuzz tone and
"wah-wah" pedal made him a superstar. Of an overdose of sleeping
pills September 18 in London.
Joplin, Janis 27, American rock superstar whose meteoric career as
queen of the white blues shouters was fueled by on-stage swigs of
Southern Comfort. October 4 of an overdose of heroin in Hollywood.
The death of the king and queen of the rock-drug world left their followers stunned, but
then that state was not unusual for them. On another level, it just seemed to reinforce their
fatalistic, almost masochistic attitude, for after all as Bob Dylan wrote: "He who isn't busy
being born is busy dying."
Anyone who plays down the drug aspect of Woodstock either was not there or is trying to
idealize the experience for some reason. Drugs were an integral part of that weekend. There
are no accurate statistics, but an educated guess would be that over ninety percent of those
present took some kind of drug. Everything from "pot" to "acid" and "coke" to "junk" was
available. If music was the language and free love the expression of Woodstock, then
marijuana was the sustenance. Marijuana was sold, shared, and it permeated the
atmosphere to the point where breathing in could make you "high." However, there was a
difference in the psychological effect of smoking grass en masse. For some, it meant smoking
with the absence of guilt for the first time. For others, it precipitated moving up to heavier
drugs, perhaps to regain that clandestine effect that smoking dope with a small circle of
friends had meant. For some, if no one was saying "thou shalt not," the thrill was gone.
Over the three day period, there were 800 cases of drug abuse treated and one death
attributed to an overdose. Between the Hog Farm people and Doctor William Abruzzi,
things were kept under control ... but barely.
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The potential political and sociological impact of that weekend were exaggerated in some
quarters. Immediately, it should have been recognized that in no way was Woodstock a
microcosm of the society as a whole. For a virtual moment in time, a large number of people
proved that an alternative lifestyle could be only as harmful as the predominating lifestyle
was already. Statistics showed less crime per thousand people than in an American city of
the same size, but then half the things that are considered crimes in society were O.K. at
Woodstock. Also, there was less death and sickness per capita, but then the average age was
fifteen years younger than the country at large. As it was happening, Woodstock proved
little more than there were a great many people who did not know enough to come in out
of the rain.
Political and sociological impact is largely created by the media, and somehow the media
did not really exploit Woodstock as they might have. A few newspapers had reporters
there. Life Magazine was on the spot. At least, at the beginning, television and radio were
strangely absent. By the time they got there on Saturday afternoon, they could not find the
" pulse" and tried in vain to capture in words the elusive "spirit of Aquarius." The media
moguls had underestimated, by at least five-fold, the size of the crowd and completely
underestimate the interest of the public. When the electronic-media finally reported, it was
a confusing and exaggerated picture they projected. Allusions that ranged from "A Garden
of Eden" to "Armageddon" were broadcast. Contradictory articles appeared in the same
newspaper. In the Sunday New York Times, one article was headlined "Thousands of Drug
Overdoses Reported," and another read, "Virtually No Drug Problems at Woodstock." As
a result, the public had to wait until the smoke cleared and the music stopped.
One of the accepted ways of finding out what happened somewhere is to ask an
eye-witness, and in this case, to ask in the context of musical performances. The musicians
were, after all, the interpreters of the "language of Woodstock" and their audience the only
reliable witnesses. The following is a collection of eye witness reports:
The keynote performer was Richie Havens, he of the raspy tones and
the strident beat. His toothless smile, rose colored glasses and
turtleneck sweater were costume to both his princely figure and the
resident frog in his throat. The "hype" in the program (itself called 3
days of peace and music) listed him simply, next to a poem attributed
to the man himself:
paint the frescoed images by way of harsh black grandeur and
sliding harkening will'o worlds to further parts of haven
His message was clear though his diction wasn't always. He sang of a
promised land and offered the hungry a feast for the ears and eyes. But,
while he sang of "freedom," thousands were still arriving, tens of
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thousands milled about and a hundred thousand were caught in traffic
somewhere in the vicini ty of White Lake. Tim H ardin, Bert Sommer,
Incredible String Band, Swee twa ter and the loquacious Arlo Guthrie
essentially acted as a musical welcome-wagon during the next five
hours, as another hundred thousand people showed up.
It was not until darkness set in and Ravi Shankar and the Joshua Light
Show combined to work their magic that there was any semblance of
order. By that time, the swee t smell of mariju ana and the good "vibes"
of love had transformed the crowd into an audience and the
countryside into a city. Finally at 3:00 a. m., Joan Baez, accompanied by
the relentless beat of raindrops, cried out of "injustice to David" as her
dolce tones echoed through the hills and over the meadows. Day one
had ended peacefully and in total contras t to the way it had begun.
Saturday morning, someone already had revised a home made sign just
down the road from the alfalfa field . It read: "2 days of peace & music."
The rain had turned the mud into a quagmire and the quagmire
became one of the world 's largest playgrounds. And, still it came down!
The early performances were postponed, as electric short circuits were
repaired and prevented. Then, two hours later, the rain stopped and
the celebration resumed its original form.
The combination of sun and dope proved to have an hysterical effect,
as Saturday became both a pagan rite and a Turkish delight. The
performing groups were transformed along with the crowd, and there
was a unique concord ex tant that, before that day, existed only in the
minds of promoters. The list of performers for Saturday according to
the program was:
Canned Heat
Credence Clearwater Revival
Grateful Dead
Keef Hartley
Janis Joplin
Jefferson Airplane
Mountain
Quill
Santana Blues Band
Sly and the Family Stone
The Who
No one slept that night! But, some guy was run over by a tractor.
Sunday was different, although the sign maker remembered to change
his tattered sign to "1 Vz days of peace & music." (1 Yz days because the
fes tival had to be extended until Monday due to the rain and the
damage it did.) The mood wasn't as hilarious; maybe everyone was just
worn out. Many people were milling about as if they were drunk.
Others were looking for the people they came with, or for the rides
they would need the next afternoon.
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Much of the talk was about the previous two days: "Remember those
'cats' who climbed the light stanchion ?" "What about those chicks
skinny dipping?" "Man, wasn't Sly and those other dudes heav-ee?"
"Anybody got any shit left ?" The fact that some big names wouldn't be
heard until Monday didn't seem to bother many people. Sunday's stars
were:
The Band
Blood Sweat and T ears
Joe Cocker
Country Joe and the Fish
Crosby Stills and Nash
Iron Butterfly
T en Years After
Johnny Winter
Almost everybody recovered by nightfall, thousands left that night.
Shanana played to a mixed reaction Monday morning. Then Jimi
Hendrix came on. Somehow, Hendrix's performance was at once the
climax and the ironic anti-climax of the festival. Certainly Hendrix
was the recognized king of the rock-drug culture, yet on Monday when
Jimi started playing his incredibly complex variation's on The Star
Spangled Banner, the crowd continued to thin out. Suddenly, they
seemed to realize it was time to get back to the world and that this
unique rite of passage had heard its recessional. If anything happened
after that, nobody remembers what. For all intents and purposes,
Woodstock was over with the playing of the National Anthem.
However, W oodstock did represent a break through in one area of the power structure. In
the sixties, a number of celebrities did use their position to speak out against the
government. Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, Joan Baez, and virtually the whole rock culture
community were outspoken protestors against the Vietnamese W ar. Their voices helped
influence young people and contributed in making Vietnam the mos t unpopular war in a
hundred years.
W oodstock and its ilk meant little to the res t of the "power elite." The government, under
President Richard Nixon, kept ordering more bombing. The military kept pressing for a
"win strategy." The industrial complex opted, as it always does, for guns over butter.
Educational institutions and the media continued to reinforce hegemonic values including
war. The majority of citizens remained unmoved though bemused. Those few that marched
to a different drummer and carried their flags in the distress position were tolerated as long
as their anthems was still only a variation of The Star Spangled Banner.
The "revolution" is the most forgotten aspect of W oodstock. That message never got out
to the masses, partly because it was also forgotten by the people who were there.
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Revolutionary talk pervaded during the festival and a few people really believed that a
revolution was in the offing:
I told my brother and my wife once the first time we all took acid,
sitting out in the car in front of 4825 and before we took the trip by car
all the way to Chicago to hear "Trane" still full of the acid, that we
could see the day after the post-western revolution when the language
would work again strictly as a function of the body, its glow and
gesture, that after enough of us had eaten the acid we could then speak
through our cells as our cells, that the language would be stripped of all
negative force, and the new poetry would burn itself down.
-John Sinclair, White Panther Party
The revolution is about coming together in a struggle for change. It is
about the destruction of a system based on bosses and competition and
the building of an new community based on people and cooperation.
That old system is dying all around us and we joyously come out in the
streets and dance on its grave. With our free stores, liberated buildings,
communes, people's parks, dope, free bodies, and our music, we'll build
our society in the vacant lots of the old and we'll do it by any means
necessary.
-Abbie Hoffman, Yippies
Over time, the rationale for that weekend in '69 has become as obscure as its cultural
significance. For many of us who were there, we were sure that we were making some kind
of political statement. Whether that political statement was revolutionary or not depends
on one's perspective. There are always a few radicals who interpret every protest as a
rebellion. The "Yippies's" promised "revolution" has not come yet, despite the fact that
there were more counterculturists assembled at Woodstock than in Paris during the
twenties. Many that were at Woodstock also marched on Washington a month later in a
more militant demonstration of the younger generation's objection to the Vietnam War.
Bethel, New York, may well fade, as has Breed's Hill, into the annals of historical trivia.
The festival will always be remembered as Woodstock, and its progeny as the Woodstock
Nation. As for its real impact on society, that may have ended August 18, 1969. After all, it
promised only three days of peace and music!
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