By the Time We Got to Woodstock …

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I first heard of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival about a month before it happened, when I was hanging out at an alternative radical office in San Francisco and seeing newspapers from the underground press of 1969. Along with the usual political and cultural articles, and ads promoting “head shops” and other businesses of political appeal to the hippie and radical communities, was an engaging listing of quite a few major rock and folk-music acts scheduled to perform at a three-day series of concerts. I briefly was tempted to go, until I realized that as a kid just about to turn 16 in a city on the opposite end of the country from where it was supposed to take place, there was no practical way for me to get there or to survive alone that far from home.

A lot of people did make that journey, though, and I saw quite a few of them on film in a documentary PBS-TV aired August 6, 2019. I found myself responding to the sheer beauty of the people in these pictures, and having a pang of regret that all those young, beautiful men and women showcasing their bodies for the camera are now, if still alive, my age or older and their looks have probably declined as much as mine have. “Woodstock” has become a touchstone of the history of the 1960’s, mythologized in shows like this one as a sort of perfect, albeit temporary, community in which people came together, survived unspeakably awful conditions and, at least for a few days, lived together in the spirit of “peace, love and music” promised by the event’s iconic poster and logo: a dove perched on the neck of a guitar.

I’m eccentric enough — and always have been — that my response to Woodstock and the counter-cultural ferment around it was a bit unusual then and remained so still. I remember the late 1960’s as a time of great political and social ferment, in which I aligned myself with the Left at least partly as what had been called in the 1950’s a “red-diaper baby.” My mother was active in the civil-rights and anti-war movements — she broke up with her second husband, my stepfather, largely over political differences. We had radical publications like Ramparts and El Malcriado (the newsletter of the United Farm Workers and its founders, César Chávez, Larry Itliong and Dolores Huerta) around the house and I read them regularly.

We lived in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, but when my mom and my stepdad broke up she chose to move us into Marin City. Marin City was an almost exclusively African-American enclave built into a sort of natural dish-shaped crater between Sausalito and the Golden Gate Bridge. It had been created in the 1940’s to house Black workers building ships for World War II, and when I grew up there in the late 1960’s it was dominated by four or five giant housing projects that even then already had a reputation as unsafe environments haunted by drugs and crime. Mom’s interesting but ultimately unsuccessful experiment in personal integration just encouraged my introversion; having little in common with the people around me (and not just because almost all of them were Black), I withdrew that much more into myself and the books and magazines I read incessantly.

San Francisco was just down Highway 101 and the Golden Gate Bridge from where I lived, but I rarely got down there unless my mother drove me. As a member of the counterculture herself, she took me to a surprising number of musical events, including the 1966 Berkeley Folk Festival at which I saw the first incarnation of the greatest 1960’s San Francisco rock band, the Jefferson Airplane. I remember one day when the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead alternated sets at a free concert in Golden Gate Park, but because it was a school day I didn’t see any of it except the last set by the Airplane, including their then-new lead singer, Grace Slick, performing “White Rabbit.”

But at the same time I was discovering the new rock ’n’ roll, I was also reaching back into music history and discovering the jazz of the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s. Part of that came from my mother, who still had a lot of the 78 rpm records she’d grown up with. I remember hearing Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording “Strange Fruit” on my mom’s original Commodore 78 and realizing with a start that it was a social-protest song denouncing lynching. (We 1960’s kids thought Bob Dylan had invented social-protest music, though we had a dim awareness that a couple of guys named Guthrie and Seeger might have done some things along that line before him.) I remember my mom telling me she’d played that record in the 1940’s and people had told her, “They’re just kidding. Those things don’t happen. Not in America.”

In 1969 I was developing a schizoid musical taste, enjoying some current acts my mom liked (The Beatles and Bob Dylan) as well as some she didn’t (The Rolling Stones and The Doors) while simultaneously reaching backwards into the musical archives. Part of it was encouraged by a high-school English teacher who was also a semi-professional jazz pianist. Tasked by the official curriculum with teaching F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, he took Fitzgerald’s reputation as chronicler of “the Jazz Age” (a phrase Fitzgerald coined) seriously and encouraged his class in general, and me in particular, to explore the music of Fitzgerald’s time. Inevitably I saw ironic parallels between the youth rebellion of the 1920’s and that of the 1960’s, and when we read Fitzgerald’s short story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” I loved the fact that in the middle of an era in which young men were showing their rebellion by growing their hair long, we were reading a story about an era in which young women were showing their rebellion by cutting their hair short.

The Story and the Legend

After seeing that one ad in an underground newspaper, the next time I heard about Woodstock was while it was happening. Like most mainstream papers around the country, the San Francisco Chronicle front-paged the news reports of the festival, focusing on the unspeakable conditions: the rain, the mud, the overall disorder that had turned what was supposed to be a money-making capitalist venture into a mess, and above all the sheer number of people who’d shown up. Part of the mythology of Woodstock was that 500,000 people showed up; more sober, fact-based estimates of the crowd put it at 350,000, but that was still about seven times more than the organizers had expected.

Woodstock was the brainchild of four young men in New York City: John Rosenman, John Roberts, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld. Rosenman was a worker in the financial services industry who had suddenly inherited $250,000 from the estate of his mother at a time when that was real money. He and Roberts were sufficiently aware of the growing popularity of rock music that they decided building a recording studio where rock bands could work would be a sound investment. They opened MediaSound Studios in New York City and then decided to build a branch studio in upstate New York, where band members could live and relax in a comfortable rural environment while going through the increasingly complex process of recording state-of-the-art music.

They decided to build their second studio in Woodstock, New York, a small community known for decades as an artists’ hangout. Woodstock was already a legendary name in rock history because it was the home of Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s manager. Grossman’s estate included a barn nicknamed “Big Pink” where Dylan had gone to recover after a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1966. He and his backing group, an ensemble of four Canadians and one Arkansan collectively known as “The Band,” hung out there in 1967 and recorded the so-called “Basement Tapes,” rough-hewn performances that started to dribble out in 1970 on officially unauthorized bootleg LP’s. (A lot of people, including me, later suspected that Dylan himself was putting out these bootlegs because he wanted to make available performances his official record company, Columbia, didn’t think were technically well recorded enough for release.)

Rosenman and Roberts brought along two partners, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld, to organize what they originally planned as a small-scale concert featuring Dylan, The Band and other rock talents who occasionally hang out in Woodstock to celebrate the opening of the Woodstock studio when it was finished. The idea soon snowballed into a giant concert in its own right, to be held in a pastoral environment instead of the fairgrounds and racetracks that had hosted previous attempts at rock festivals. (Lang and Kornfeld had previously promoted one in Miami that had been rained out on the second day, though it inspired their headliner, Jimi Hendrix, to write the song “Rainy Day, Dream Away.”)

The original plan for the location was a rather dowdy-looking farm outside Wallkill, a neighboring town to Woodstock, but the Wallkill City Council, horrified by the size of the event and the countercultural hippie audience it was likely to draw, passed an ordinance forbidding gatherings of more than 5,000 people within city limits. The four promoters flew by helicopter over the area and spotted several large patches of land. The owner who was willing to rent to them was Max Yasgur, owner of a dairy farm and milk business in Bethel, New York. Yasgur was a lifelong Republican but enough of a libertarian he thought the Woodstock promoters had been unfairly treated by Wallkill; he cut a deal to rent his farm for the festival.

Unfortunately, the deal had taken so long that the promoters didn’t have time to set up the site adequately. They weren’t able to get an established food-service firm to cater the event and feed its attendees, so they hired a three-person hippie enterprise called Food for Love. Deciding that traditional security people in police-style uniforms would only intimidate the crowd, they made a deal with the Hog Farm Collective, a local commune headed by a charismatic man whose real name was Hugh Romney but who called himself “Wavy Gravy” (and whose missing front teeth themselves became an iconic image of Woodstock), to secure the site and stop people from making trouble by talking themselves out of it. The promoters had been aware that providing restroom facilities would be an issue — one had even prepared by visiting Yankee Stadium, standing outside the restrooms, and not only counting how many people used them but timing them to see how long they took — but they realized they couldn’t provide anywhere near enough port-a-potties to meet the demand, so they did the best they could.

Woodstock so caught the imaginations of members of the counter-culture that as early as a week before the festival, the roads into Bethel were jammed with people heading there. Cars couldn’t get within miles of the site, so the people who had driven there gave up and walked the rest of the way. As one of the promoters told the makers of the PBS documentary, with just four days to go before the festival they realized they didn’t have time to build both a stage for the performers and a perimeter fence to keep out people who hadn’t paid admission. (The tickets were priced at $6 per day, or a three-day pass for $18. Isn’t inflation a bitch?) They figured that if they couldn’t enforce an admission charge, they’d take a financial bath on the festival — but if they didn’t have a stage, they couldn’t present the musical acts and they would risk both a riot on scene and a later lawsuit for false advertising.

So, under the supervision of “Chip” Monck — whose innovative stage, lighting and sound designs did more than any other individual to make outdoor rock concerts possible — the organizers assembled both paid crew and volunteers to work around the clock 24/7 to assemble the festival stage. Then they had another problem: the horrendous traffic jams surrounding the site made it impossible for anyone to get through, including the musicians who were supposed to perform. Though a now-forgotten band named Sweetwater was supposed to open the festival, the promoters put on African-American folksinger Richie Havens first simply because he was the only musician who’d been able to get there — and while the promoters arranged to fly in their other performers by helicopter, Havens ran through his entire repertoire and then made up a new song, “Freedom,” on the spot, basing a good chunk of it on the old Black spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”

Eventually the other acts did fly in, and they were a who’s-who of the rock world in 1969. While the very biggest names in the rock world — the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan — didn’t perform at Woodstock, the ones who did included Jimi Hendrix; Crosby, Stills and Nash (who’d completed their first album before Woodstock but had never played together live before); Jefferson Airplane; Grateful Dead; Creedence Clearwater Revival; Country Joe and the Fish; The Who; Janis Joplin; Sly and the Family Stone; The Chambers Brothers; Joe Cocker; The Band; Ten Years After; Canned Heat; the Paul Butterfield Blues Band; Sha Na Na; Arlo Guthrie; Tim Hardin; Melanie; Johnny Winter; Ravi Shankar (a performer of the classical music of his native India who’d got admitted into the rock pantheon when the Beatles’ George Harrison sponsored him and learned to play Shankar’s instrument, the sitar); and other, now-forgotten acts like Quill, Sweetwater, Mountain, the Incredible String Band, and The Grease Band.

The Legend Gets Built — and Sold

The 2019 PBS documentary Woodstock — not to be confused with the 1970 film that compiled footage of some of the performances — describes the build-up to the festival as one misfortune after another, one hair’s-breath avoidance of total disaster after another, and an event that lived fondly in counter-culture memories but also left a total mess behind in its wake. The film ends with some of the forlorn attempts to clean up the site after the festival and give poor Max Yasgur back his land as something he might conceivably raise dairy cows in again. It does not mention the mythologization of “Woodstock” that converted it into the profitable capitalist enterprise it was always intended to be.

Before the festival, the promoters had cut a deal with a filmmaker named Michael Wadleigh to shoot a movie of the festival and see if he could place it with a major studio for release. Wadleigh’s main credential was that in 1966 he had shot an hour-long black-and-white documentary about the great jazz bassist Charles Mingus whose emotional climax showed Mingus being evicted from his loft apartment in New York City, with the scores of his composition blowing away in the wind as he waited forlornly to have them picked up. Warner Bros., the legendary studio that had just been acquired by a parking-lot owner named Kinney Corporation. agreed not only to distribute the Woodstock movie but also to release some of the performances on record as a three-LP set.

This required getting the artists who’d performed at the festival to sign releases to allow their work to be included in the film. Some of them refused — notably Janis Joplin, who had thought her performance at Woodstock was terrible. In his book Beyond Normal the late Gale Whittington, who along with my friend the late Leo Laurence helped found the Gay Liberation movement in San Francisco in March 1969 (four months before the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City) and led the first demonstrations against a private employer for anti-Queer discrimination, recalled running into Janis as he was selling copies of the Berkeley Barb underground paper on the streets of San Francisco.

She was arguing with a man, accusing him of having talked her into performing at Woodstock and doing an awful set that would just ruin her career — and Whittington recalled being disillusioned at seeing that a major star he’d admired and revered was just a typical human asshole after all. But his account of Janis’s anger seemed to make sense to me: for all her free-wheeling, no-holds-barred image she was also a conscientious performer who cared about how she came off in public, and she hated her Woodstock set so much that in the original version of Wadleigh’s film she did not appear. Later, after she was dead and therefore no longer able to prevent it, Janis appeared in subsequent edits of the movie.

Warner Bros. charged between $3.50 and $5 to see the movie — almost double what a normal first-run feature cost in 1970, when the film was released. (Again, isn’t inflation a bitch?) A group of my radical friends and I decided to protest the ticket price by sneaking into the movie (the only time in my life I’ve done that). To promote the movie, they generated an intense hype surrounding Woodstock that has become an integral part of the 1960’s counter-culture legend to this day. Rolling Stone magazine cooperated with the hype, giving the soundtrack album a rave review and saying it would be the perfect record to play to later generations who wondered what rock music was about and what made it so special. The result was a huge hit of a movie that is continually being re-released in various permutations — and whose royalties at least partially repaid the original Woodstock promoters for their losses on the festival.

Warner Bros. later followed up with another set of LP’s of the Woodstock performances, Woodstock Two, and in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s I heard these records again — and was startled at how mediocre most of the performances were. Not that the conditions at the festival were conducive to greatness: the PBS documentary includes scenes of roadies and tech people frantically wrapping the bands’ electronic equipment in tarps to protect it from the rainstorm that hit big-time on Sunday, August 17 the third day of the festival. Flown in by helicopter, given no opportunity for sound checks, and probably having to share a lot of equipment (most musicians are intensely protective and possessive of their own “gear”), it’s a testament to the professionalism of these musicians that they were able to perform at all.

The hype machine needed only one truly great performance to sell the Woodstock movie, and as it turned out they got two. One was the radiant folk-rock harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash, not only giving their first live performance but adding Stephen Stills’ former Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young for two songs. (They’d later add him to the lineup and, as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, achieve a reputation as one of the most internally combative bands in rock — so much so that Frank Zappa, in one of his concerts, joked about having “three unreleased recordings of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young fighting in the dressing room at the Fillmore East.”)

The other was Jimi Hendrix, whose performance closed the festival after a Sunday set that had gone on so long that by the time he went on it was already dawn of Monday, August 18. Though it was actually played in the middle of his set, Hendrix’ unforgettable performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was the part that stuck out then and now. One of the festival organizers told PBS that all of a sudden the sound of Hendrix’ guitar playing the national anthem cut through the haze. I remember playing this record for the 20-something man I was briefly dating in 1994 and he noted that through the first half of the song Hendrix played the melody pretty much “straight” — but when he got to the lines, “And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” Hendrix sent his hand sliding down the fretboard and actually made his guitar sound like rockets and bombs.

The PBS documentary Woodstock naturally tried to set the political and social context of the 1960’s, including the seemingly never-ending war in Viet Nam and the assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In the hands of Jimi Hendrix, clad in a white fringed outfit that made him look like an almost angelic apparition in the midst of a crowd of people mostly covered in mud, “The Star-Spangled Banner” became a weird song choice that seemed to sum up the whole contradiction of the counter-culture, loving America and the freedoms it offered while simultaneously questioning it for falling far short of its stated ideals. The contradictions within Hendrix himself — not only was he part African-American and part Native American, thereby belonging to two of the most oppressed groups in U.S. history, but he was one of the few 1960’s rock musicians who’d actually served in the U.S. military —just added to the overlay of the contradictions in his audience, his professional situation (like the other Woodstock performers, he was being well paid for his participation in a “free” festival) and the nation’s history at that particularly fraught moment.

Fifty Years On: Woodstock in the Trump Era

The inexorable push of the calendar has brought the 50^th anniversaries of all sorts of major cultural touchstones for those of us who were alive and aware in the 1960’s: the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beatles (the so-called “White Album”); the Apollo 11 landing on the moon (which was the subject of its own round of retrospective documentaries, not only from PBS from CNN and other sources as well), and the dark sides of the era — the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, the Manson murders and the attempt by the Rolling Stones to promote their own instant Woodstock at Altamont. I did attend Altamont and have vivid memories of a green-suited young Black man being murdered on stage by the Hell’s Angels the Stones had hired as their “security.” That just upped my level of cynicism about the “Woodstock” hype and the ability of our generation to do a better job of bringing about peace and love than our forebears.

“Woodstock” has become a brand name. Anniversary festivals have been held in 1979, 1989, 1994, 1999, and 2009, and I recently saw a news report that John Fogerty, who as leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival had been the first person to sign up for the original Woodstock, had just dropped out of Woodstock 2019. It’s also become a touchstone for the continuing conflicts between the mainstream culture and the counter-culture. One can’t understand the ascendancy of Donald Trump — and of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes before him — without acknowledging how much of their political power has come from attacking the Woodstock counter-culture.

It’s certainly ironic to hear Joan Baez and Jeffrey Shurtleff singing “Drug Store Truck Driving Man” — a savage and not especially witty satire on Ronald Reagan — on the latest incarnation of the Woodstock recordings when we know the sequel. Reagan, like Nixon before him and the Bushes and Trump afterwards, rode to the governorship of California three years before Woodstock and the presidency 11 years afterwards, largely by exploiting the racial and cultural prejudices of working-class white voters scared that the advances of African-Americans and other historically marginalized minorities were coming at their expense, and that the hippies were throwing away the advantages their parents had worked so hard to give them — including admission to college — on drugs, free sex and bad music.

The modern-day Republican party is still fueling its ascendancy by “hooking” the racial and cultural prejudices of working-class white voters. It’s true that there are almost no real-life hippies left for them to rail against, but with the rise of the Queer rights movement in the 1970’s the prejudices against the counter-culture simply shifted from anti-hippie to anti-Queer. Donald Trump and his supporters — including virtually the entire Republican Party — are simply the latest and most determined culture warriors aiming to wipe out the entire political and cultural legacy of the 1960’s and get people of color either out of the country altogether or back to the back of the bus where they “belong,” end all this “nonsense” about women having the right to control their careers or even control their bodies, and drive Queers back to the closet and to disgrace or suicide.

Woodstock — both the reality and the hype — seem in a lot of ways to belong to a long-lost cultural era. Because the hothouse atmosphere of the 1960’s had brought about such an incredible expansion in young people’s sense of the possibilities — political, economic, racial, cultural, sexual and, alas, pharmaceutical — a lot of us back then thought the possibilities would just keep on expanding and the world would fundamentally change without the bother, brutality and bloodshed of violent revolution. Alas, we underestimated not only the remarkable ability of the capitalist system to grab hold of our rebellion and sell it back to us as a commodity, but also the depth of the commitment of our adversaries in the “mainstream” culture and their determination to reverse the social and cultural gains of the 1960’s and thus “make America great again.”

As I write this, I’m listening to the three-CD set that’s the latest incarnation of the Woodstock recordings. They sound better to me now than they did in the 1980’s; what seemed on that go-round as the professionalism of musicians doing their best to perform under awful conditions (the truly inspired sets by Hendrix — who for contractual reasons involving his estate doesn’t appear on the new version of the album — and Crosby, Stills and Nash excepted) now comes off as an appealing raggedness that makes the musicians seem more human. At the same time, there’s a tragic cast to the Woodstock recordings from the number of the performers — including Hendrix, Joplin, Alan Wilson (the appealingly whiny-voiced singer featured on Canned Heat’s performances) and two members of The Who, John Entwistle and Keith Moon — who died well before their times.

I’m not sure what the 20-something people of today would make of the Woodstock recordings. Young people’s whole relationship to music has changed; instead of collecting records they “stream,” and they treat musicians as mere entertainers instead of cultural and social avatars. It’s only on the rare occasions when a modern-day singer is directly confronted by the evils of the world — as Ariana Grande was when her concert in Manchester, England was targeted by terrorists who assassinated 22 members of her audience, and she responded by hosting another concert there weeks later, making it a benefit for the victims’ families, and closing with the 1939 song “Over the Rainbow” (co-written by Leftist E. Y. Harburg and originally sung by Judy Garland, who campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy) — that musicians of today put their art in the service of social ideals beyond safe “benefits” for anti-disease campaigns.

Would today’s youth regard Woodstock as the quaint music their grandparents listened to — as my friends regarded the 1920’s jazz and 1930’s swing music I was starting to like when Woodstock happened? Would they hear the anticipations of heavy-metal in the Who and disco and modern dance-pop in Sly and the Family Stone? Would they like some of it but miss the social significance it had for us 1960’s kids? Would they just hear it as one more element in the universal soundtrack of the computer age, in which just about any song ever recorded is instantly available for a small debit-card charge on a computer? Would they understand how we heard it now that the 1960’s conflicts are something they’ve learned about in American history classes — even though the battle lines that were drawn in the 1960’s still largely rule American politics and culture, and are indeed at the heart of the divide between Donald Trump and his political adversaries?