🌈🍄☮Woodstock—Music & Mud

Being one of 450,000 gives you perspective My personal journey to Woodstock 1969.

It was a tumultuous time in 1969. Two generations slugging it out. One refusing to give in, the other refusing to give up. It was the culmination of a decade that saw JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Malcom X murdered before our eyes.

And we crawled into 1970 with the May 4 massacre at  Kent State where the killing of four and wounding of nine unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard right on the university campus. Ironically, during a peace rally opposing the expanding involvement of the Vietnam War into Cambodia by United States military forces as well as to protest the National Guard on campus. The ones who shot them.

The 60s started out well with the San Francisco flower children mobilized for a collective, consciousness-raising experience for the Boomer generation. I was one of them. I was sold on the message. I actually made it out to Haight-Ashbury in San Fran to check it out.

Long-hair hippies replete with tie-dyed shirts, bell-bottoms, sandals and love beads playing guitars were the fad, grooving on what is now called Classic Rock, and I followed along. Pot smoking, though illegal, was big, and I toked up just like all my buddies while hiding out from the local fuzz.

The 60s moved along through the Beatle craze as I finished college with a degree in education, and moved on to teach at Perth Amboy High School in NJ.

Things weren’t going well there either where things turned ugly as students were dropping over in the cafeteria on downers and bad acid trips. Qualudes and Secobarbital (reds) were the rage. Not to mention we were experiencing a black student revolt.

lt was a result of the Watts riots in Los Angeles that instigated the Newark riots in 1967. The unrest, which started on the night of July 12, 1967, and ended on July 17, came during a period when racial tensions were exploding into violent conflagrations across the country: Harlem, Detroit and nearby New Jersey communities, including Plainfield and Newark. The effect lingered and scared school administrators definitely through the ‘68-’69school year.

As the kids went wild, the administration hid out, leaving we lowly teachers to handle the problems.

So when the Woodstock Festival came along, it was a welcome escape from the social sewage we were sloshing through. Woodstock Music and Art Fair, which everyone knows as just Woodstock was August 15 to 17, 1969 with an extra day on the 18th unanncounced on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York. It was 40 miles southwest of the town of the actual Woodstock, which refused to permit the show.

I had purchased 2 tickets in advance for $18 ($120 today) for my brother, Tom and I. He and I along with a friend (who will remain nameless) decided to join the party. We heard everybody and his brother and sister would be performing.

Tom was in the Navy, and I had to pick him up in Philadelphia at the Navy Yard, while my friend took his van, the pot and a few female friends and would head up separately. We would take the canvas tent we were to camp in in my trunk since he was getting crowded. He did have enough room for the tent poles, though.

We agree to meet at the exit on the New York Thruway that led to Bethel and follow each other in. Little did we know that the concert was going to attract more than 460,000  rock crazed attendees like ourselves. When we got to the exit it was impossible to stop because there was nowhere to stop.

We were lined up behind hundreds of cars inching their way in…and it got worse. The jam was so bad that after an hour or so at full stop, we parked on the side of the road a mile-and-half out, took the tent and walked the rest of the way on a hot summer day, Tom and I taking turns carrying the 50 pound tent.

As we traveled up the road, everyone was in an upbeat  mood. You could smell the pot in the air and the residents had stands along side the road handing out lemonade and selling food. There was a lot of positive enthusiasm about the event that was about to unfold.

When we finally arrived at the stage site we were stunned. So many people. How were we going to find our pal “J” who had the tent poles, pot and girls. As we futilely searched for him and his van the stage crew set up the first act, Richie Havens.

Finding our supposed friend was a needle in a haystack

As we searched, we came across a bulletin board with a few hundred scribbled messages of others looking for others. We checked it out, but no “J”. We left him a message and went to find a place on the hill to sit underneath the hot sun.

We plopped down about thirty yards or so from the stage. If it were a baseball field, we would have been on the first base side, just behind the second baseman. Good seats.

Sri Swami Satchidananda opened the Festival addressing a the massive crowd and giving a benediction. Joints were passed around, lucky for us, because our good buddy had everything and everybody with him. People as far as the eye could see. It was obvious this was something special.

Then an announcement. People had broken down the fence and they were pouring in, so they just announced “This concert is now free.” Damn, I paid for the tickets!

Richie Havens finally got ready and kicked in.  As the festival’s first performer, he saved the day with an unplanned extended performance of nearly three-and-a-half hours. We found out later he was asked to keep playing, because a lot of the groups artists scheduled to perform after him were delayed in reaching the festival with highways at a virtual standstill. They had to start using helicopters.

He was called back for several encores. Having run out of tunes, he improvised a song based on the old spiritual Motherless Child that became Freedom.  We sat for most of the day listening to the bands, getting up occasionally to check the message board and get some drinks and food. Even though it was murder to get there, it was more than worth it, and I especially enjoyed the time I spent with my brother in the sunshine and music.

Here’s the first day’s line up. Most of them today’s crowd wouldn’t know them, but they were pretty popular at the time.

Day 1 Collage

DAY 1

• Richie Havens

• Sweetwater

• Bert Sommer

• Tim Hardin

• Ravi Shankar

• Melanie

• Arlo Guthrie

• Joan Baez

• Janis Joplin  - She actually played the night of Saturday to Sunday at about 2:00AM. 

• Sly and The Family Stone – Finally got on very late on Saturday evening, or rather Sunday morning, 3:30 am

By the time darkness settle in, Arlo Guthrie announced that the New York Thruway was closed, although the director of the Woodstock Museum said that this closure never occurred. I have a little clip of it here.

It started to drizzle as the scheduled last act, Joan Baez, began to sing.  Tom and I took the tent and plopped down somewhere behind the stage, laid down on it and pulled it over us as a cover, listening to her. But the day wasn’t over. She was followed by Janis Joplin and Sly and the Family Stone far into the night. We didn’t get to see them, but we heard them—very un-stoned by the way.  It rained on us all night.

When we got up around 8 am or so, we pushed back the canvas tent we used as a cover and water flowed out. It was a little cool and steam rolled off of us. No Best Western Inn for sure, and no free breakfast. Again we wandered around looking for our pal to no avail.

Around noon Quill, the first act, fired up. I don’t remember what we were doing at that point, just wandering and listening, plodding along in the mud, still searching. It was pretty disgusting.

To add to the problems and difficulty in dealing with the large crowds, the rain had caused muddy roads and fields. The facilities were not equipped to provide sanitation or first aid for all of us. Thousands of our straggly fellow hippies found themselves in a struggle against bad weather, food shortages, and poor sanitation, not to mention the bad acid that was being passed around.

DAY 2

DAY 2

• Quill

• Country Joe McDonald

• Santana

•   John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful

• The Keef Hartley Band

• The Incredible String Band

• Canned Heat

• Mountain

• The Grateful Dead

• Creedence Clearwater Revival

By Saturday evening, we had had it. The music was outstanding, but we had survived a horrible night, walking around in the mud hoping to find our elusive friend. Sometime Sunday afternoon, we trudged back to my car to head home.

We missed most of the bands that day. The sad part was Sunday was the day all the really heavy hitters were playing. Check the list to see what I’m talking about. 

We got to the car, which was my new, 1968, gold, Ford Mustang with a black, vinyl top. Very cool looking car. We hopped in, and I tried to fire it up. The battery was dead. I left my parking lights on. At that point, Tom was worried about getting back to the base and decided he would hitch-hike back (we did that in those days).

I took the battery out and lugged it back the mile-and-a-half to Bethel to see if I could get a charge. The attendant try to charge it, but it wouldn’t take. Stone-cold dead. I’d need to buy a new battery. However, he was out because of the demand, and he wouldn’t have any until the next day.

So I hung around for the rest of the day, not going back to the concert, which I should have done. If you saw the movie about the concert, it was exactly the small town depicted. You could hear the bands from there. The speakers were unbelievably large.

Lots of hippies mulling around, smoking pot, mothers with babies, everyone pretty chill taking in the small town atmosphere. I slept in the car that night, went back the next day and bought the battery and headed home alone. Here’s what I missed.         

Day 3 Collage

• Jefferson Airplane

• Joe Cocker

• Country Joe and The Fish

• Ten Years After

• The Band

• Johnny Winter

We found out later, since they couldn’t get all the acts in on Day 3, the scheduled an unnanounced day 4 on August 18th. We missed the iconic Jimi Hendrix version of The Star Spangled Banner. It’s included in the video below.

Day 4

• Blood Sweat & Tears

• The Paul Butterfield Blues Band

• Sha Na Na

• Jimi Hendrix

As for our loyal friend, we never found him. When we all got home, he said he and the girls just camped out in the van, got stoned never bothering to look for us. Like who needs enemies, right?

If you take a look at all those hundreds-of-thousands of young people in the crowd, it’s hard to believe that almost all of us are over 70 or 80 years old now. Now, in 2024, probably a quarter of them are already gone to that big music festival in the sky, and the crowd will thin out pretty quickly from this point.

The amazing part about the festival is that almost half a million people coalesced in one place, at one time for one event. We were a collective consciousness, like a bee hive, all connected by a common outlook on life. Peace, love, music, etc. Not one reported fight. Even the cops liked us. I doubt it will ever happen again. We had no doubt about it being an historical event

If you are familiar with the Greek philosopher Plato, he believed that reality is divided into two parts: the ideal (prototypes) and the phenomena. The ideal is the perfect reality that exists outside of space and time. There is only one real one. Everything else is a shadow of it (phenomena). Woodstock was the real ideal, everything else that follows is a weak echo. We got to live Plato’s concert . … and I was there.

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NOTE:  I was going to write this in August during the anniversary month, but my grand daughter had a school project, and she chose the Woodstock concert, so I write this for her. (Not to worry, she’s almost 17 and can handle it.)

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If you want a detailed history this is a good article from Pollstar.com

https://news.pollstar.com/2019/08/16/the-brown-acid-was-wonderful-a-woodstock-1969-oral-history/

I took the video collages from https://nottelmannmusic.com/looking-back-at-woodstock-day-1-august-15-1969/  Also, great details of the performances.

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