The Woodstock Music & Art Fair is best known for one of its final performances, Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” From the ragged chaos of “Stepping Stone,” Hendrix began slashing at the anthem’s opening notes, stretching them out until the familiar melody sounded wobbly and shrill. His version is drenched in feedback and distortion, a call-and-response between the notes on the page and Hendrix’s extratextual flourishes. It’s a funkier version of what so many of the blues rockers of the previous three days had attempted, somehow more succinct yet more expansive. It feels like a prophetic vision of a future that never quite arrived.
It’s estimated that around four hundred thousand people attended Woodstock—enough to have made Max Yasgur’s three-hundred-acre alfalfa field, in Bethel, the third most populous city in the state of New York. As the cliché goes, if you remember Woodstock, you weren’t there. But most people who were there might misremember it anyway. By the time that Hendrix took the stage, the festival’s “three days of peace and music” had blurred into a fourth. It was Monday, about 9 a.m., and the crowd had thinned to between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand people, following a series of thunderstorms. It’s likely that some of the concert’s organizers had already left.
Hendrix’s anthem arrives on the thirty-seventh disk of “Woodstock—Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive,” a thirty-eight-CD set that includes nearly every moment of recorded sound from the festival, spanning thirty-six hours of audio. (Disk 38 consists largely of crowd noise and announcements from the stage.) By this point, the listener has heard thirty-two performances, a treatise on “celestial sound” from Sri Swami Satchidananda, and countless calls from the stage for concertgoers to climb down from the sound towers. M.c.s deliver announcements about a lost three-year-old girl with blond hair and about people locked out of their cars, or missing their duffelbags, or in desperate need of their insulin. One aggrieved Mets fan keeps asking for the result of the game, while anyone who was in contact with someone named Fritz is advised to “please go to the infirmary, identify yourself, and get a hepatitis shot.” Of course, there’s a lot of acid talk, from the famous warning about a bad batch of “brown acid,” immortalized in Michael Wadleigh’s concert documentary, from 1970, to arcane debates about what constitutes a “bum trip.” There’s also joy about what the organizers, performers, and crowd have created together.
“Woodstock—Back to the Garden” was produced by Andy Zax and Steve Woolard. Zax, an accomplished archivist and reissue specialist, spent more than a decade putting it together from hundreds of tapes that had never been consolidated in one place. In the process of reconstructing the festival, hour by hour, Zax has destroyed some myths. In the liner notes, he writes of a spirited argument that he had with the singer Country Joe McDonald, who had long maintained that, as a result of traffic jams and poor planning, he was rushed onto the stage as the festival’s second act, on opening day. In reality, he didn’t play until the second day. Music is a great catalyst for memory and nostalgia—versions of the past that often flatter in a way that history doesn’t.
A four-disk set commemorated Woodstock’s twenty-fifth anniversary, in 1994, and a six-disk collection was released in 2009. As an object, “Woodstock—Back to the Garden” feels oddly contemporary. So much of our pop-culture packaging is still calibrated to baby boomers’ had-to-be-there zeal and tastes, and the boxed set will likely sell out its limited run of nineteen hundred and sixty-nine copies, priced at $799.98 each. (A comparatively modest, ten-disk version of “Woodstock—Back to the Garden” was released in June.)
Woodstock wasn’t the first major rock festival, nor the most musically adventurous. The Monterey Pop Festival, which took place in 1967 and featured a more diverse slate of performers, is often credited with elevating Janis Joplin and Otis Redding to stardom. But Woodstock was far more conscious of the potential of mass spectacle, owing largely to its creative masterminds, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld. Throughout the festival, performers were aware of the symbolism of the moment; they talked about how important it was that they were proving people’s preconceptions wrong. The spectre of authority hung over the event, along with the dream that the kids might make a point to their parents. The singer John Sebastian implored folks to pick up a little trash on their way home. “The press can only say bad things, unless there ain’t no fuckups,” he said. “And it’s lookin’ like there ain’t gonna be no fuckups. This is gonna work!”
News coverage was sparse, often dwelling on the traffic, the mud, and the long hair. “What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?” an editorial in the Times read. Surely, the article continued, at least some of the blame lay with the parents responsible for creating the society that teen-agers found alienating. But Woodstock almost immediately became a myth. Shortly after the festival, Abbie Hoffman speed-wrote and then published “Woodstock Nation,” giving texture to the idea that those who had been at the event constituted a new generation: “I took a trip to our future. That’s how I saw it. Functional anarchy, primitive tribalism, gathering of the tribes. Right on! What did it all mean? Sheet, what can I say, brother, it blew my mind out.”
Michael Wadleigh’s hastily edited concert film, released the following March, and a soundtrack album, which came in May, brought the Woodstock vibe to people who weren’t there, and perhaps influenced the memories of those who were. In a Washington Post piece marking the festival’s tenth anniversary, one concertgoer described the event as a moment of “naive faith.” Another, who hadn’t attended, recalled her experience from afar: “All was possible.”
Lang, Kornfeld, and their financial backers, Joel Rosenman and John Roberts, initially conceived of Woodstock as a ticketed event. They had met when Lang and Kornfeld, who were passably cool, saw an ad that Rosenman and Roberts, who were not, had placed in a newspaper, calling themselves “young men with unlimited capital” looking for something interesting to fund. Woodstock was supposed to make some money, but maintaining the entry gate proved futile, and on the first day everyone was allowed in for free. Unlike most of the festivalgoers, Rosenman and Roberts took a bath. But they began recouping the following year, after the documentary and the album were issued.
The legend of Woodstock became a business model. The festival didn’t invent rock nostalgia, but as the most visceral stand-in for sixties utopianism it lives at the forefront of commemoration culture, helping to fuel the sense that the more we turn any anniversary into an event, the more we might understand the past. In 1974, Rosenman, Roberts, and Robert Pilpel reflected on the experience, in a book called “Young Men with Unlimited Capital.” When they republished it, in the eighties, they lamented the “Me Generation” that emerged after the idyllic sixties. By the mid-seventies, rock festivals “had been tarnished by greedy, and sometimes unscrupulous, promoters, unruly crowds, and sky-high fees for performers,” they wrote. “Rock and roll had become such a big business that there no longer seemed to be a place for a homemade festival like Woodstock.”
The extent to which Woodstock was “homemade” is debatable; by contrast, the festival’s role in making rock “big business” is hard to dispute. By 1969, the counterculture had already given way to “hip capitalism,” the subject of satire and academic study; three weeks after Woodstock, the sociologist Theodore Roszak published “The Making of a Counter Culture,” which became a best-seller. During the Who’s performance at the event, Abbie Hoffman crashed the stage and asked how the band could be playing and “digging rock music” while the activist John Sinclair sat in prison. Pete Townshend told him to “fuck off” the stage. One of the legacies of the sixties is this desire to understand where the angst and alienation of the young might come from, or go. Mass politics could be casual, or a life style.
Listening to the set all the way through—something that I imagine few people will do—I was struck by how it all worked out, despite the missing kids and bad acid, the lack of food, the pouring rain. There are marriage proposals and news of a child being born. (“That kid’s gonna be far out!” someone says from the stage.) An m.c. talks about how the Army and the state police are lending a hand: “They’re with us, man—they are not against us.” In one particularly lovely moment, Yasgur, a lifelong Republican, takes the stage and expresses his admiration at what these kids have made. As Chip Monck, one of the festival’s hosts, says, “The man next to you is your brother.”
What I envied wasn’t the peace and the music but, rather, this generation’s good fortune. During Sebastian’s blissed-out set, he sings, “I dreamed we all were all right / happy in a land of ours / Why did everybody laugh when I told them my dream / I guess they all were so far from that kind of scene / Feeling mean.” As someone more generationally aligned with Woodstock ’94 (Green Day, Cypress Hill, Aphex Twin) than with the original, I’m probably constitutionally predisposed to dwell on the possibility of one’s brother’s meanness. There’s a history of American ascendancy that might be written in terms of luck and timing, guile and opportunity. Listening to thirty-eight CDs brings you no closer to experiencing such felicity and innocence—the possibility in the tripper’s brittle laugh. There’s the past, and there’s the story we tell about it. Those who benefitted from being in the right place at the right time often write a version emphasizing vision and hard work. Maybe it was just a glorious accident. ♦
