America’s Woodstock moment

Written by Fred Musante
Thursday, 13 August 2009 10:05

When I picked up my friend Mike in Huntington and we headed for Woodstock in my Volkswagen Beetle on Saturday morning, Aug. 16, 1969, we still didn’t know what had happened. We only knew that all of our friends, everybody our age, had gone there, and we figured we might as well go, too.

But as we crossed the Hudson River and turned northwest, the news on the radio told us that Woodstock had turned from a three-day rock music festival into the signature cultural event of a generation of Americans.

A half million young people in their late-teens and early-20s from all over the country had trekked to Bethel, N.Y., and their arrival astonished themselves and everyone else.

They had been heading for Woodstock for about two decades, of course, under various names: The Beats, the youth culture, the counterculture, and finally the hippies. They marched to the beat of rock and roll, shocking their elders, sometimes behaving outlandishly. Mostly, they rode a wave of social change that had accelerated faster than anyone had expected.

At Woodstock, they reached critical mass, and for a moment lasting one long weekend, they shared an extraordinary experience.

Officially, it was called the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Concert promoter Michael Lang and record company executive Artie Kornfeld joined up with a young millionaire, John Roberts, and a recent Yale Law School graduate, Joel Rosenman, and leased a 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel. Roberts was the oldest, and he was 26.

Their original plan was to hold it in the artist colony town Woodstock a few miles away, but the town officials wouldn’t have it. The name stuck, nonetheless.

They lined up an impressive collection of talent. It was easier to name the top rock bands that weren’t there than the ones that were. They included folk singers (Richie Havens and Joan Baez), folk-pop singer songwriters (Melanie and Arlo Guthrie), soul and blues bands (Sly & the Family Stone, Paul Butterfield), country rock (John Sebastian and the newly formed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young), jam bands (The Grateful Dead), metal bands (The Who, Ten Years After), and the inimitable Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

As the huge crowd poured into the concert site, the promoters shrugged and declared it a “free concert.” When some of the bands refused to perform until they were paid, Roberts made a telephone call and arranged for a $100,000 line of credit.

It was a gamble, but they owned the ancillary rights to the concert. As it turned out, the multi-LP concert album and the Oscar-winning documentary film “Woodstock” made the venture profitable many times over.

Mike and I parked the car about a mile past the Monticello Racetrack just before noon and started walking up Route 17B. There were so many cars parked there we thought we were close to the festival. In fact, we were 10 miles away, and it was almost five o’clock by the time we got there.

Local residents took it all gracefully. Many brought water, cookies and lemonade out to the road to give to the hungry, thirsty kids trudging by.

Someone came by and warned us not to take the “brown acid,” which we thought was a joke. In fact, he was only repeating a public service announcement given from the stage.

New York declared the concert site an official disaster area so officials could truck in food, water and medical supplies, which were in short supply considering the size of the crowd. Nobody expected that many. The organizers thought at the most there might be 150,000.

And the most amazing thing happened. For three days, a half million people lived together without fighting or violence. If it doesn’t sound like much, consider that it is rare for gatherings a tenth or twentieth the size to go on for less than a day without a fight breaking out over a parking space or somebody looking the wrong way at someone else.

It was as if for one long moment human nature was suspended, and a multitude actually practiced the peace and love that everybody always talks about.

Moreover, it was the moment when America’s youth of the Baby Boom generation discovered how many they were and that their numbers mattered.

At the start of the weekend, the news media tried to make the story of it about traffic jams and rampant illegal drug use, but by Monday morning the major newspapers, wire services and television newscasts acknowledged that the peaceful nature of the festival made it remarkable.

Woodstock was 40 years ago. I’m sure it’s easy to find someone to scoff and sneer at Woodstock. We’ll hear them on television this week telling us it was phony. And they will drag out their so-called Culture War and plant the flag of cynicism.

But if you asked them you’ll learn they favor fighting, war and political division, and that none of them were there.