Woodstock remembered

I was out with friends last night, and I was again reminded of how people are surprised to hear I went to Woodstock (yes, THAT Woodstock) in 1969, at the tender age of 18. This morning, at the request of one of them, I sent them a three-part column about my experience at the event, that I wrote a few years ago at the suggestion of Glen Silvenis, for whom my daughter Kelly worked at the time. Having dusted it off, I'd thought I'd share it with you as well:

Woodstock remembered, Part 1

My daughter was speaking with her boss the other day. In their line of business, they get a weekly copy of The View, and they are familiar with my news stories and columns.

I’m not sure how the subject arose, but my daughter had said to him at some point that I had gone to Woodstock, the first one, back in 1969.

He said to her that those were the types of subjects that I should be writing about. And I couldn’t help but think: “And not that usual stuff he writes about!”

I don’t really think that’s what he was thinking (he’s a very nice man), but as I reflected on what she told me he had said, I couldn’t help but complete the thought in a cynical way.

And maybe that’s part of the legacy of how I grew up, in the 60’s: a challenge to conventional thinking here, a question there, often accompanied by humor with an edge.

But his reaction to my having gone to Woodstock was consistent with my experience over the last 35 years, and, as always, surprised me. I’ve never grasped the reasons for people’s reactions when they learn I was there. There is a visible change in their face, and an audible change in their voice, that I might proffer only if speaking with a D-Day veteran.

But, come on! Woodstock? What’s the big deal?

Woodstock for me fell into a continuum of attendance at weekend outdoor rock festivals, three in all. The first was in 1969 at an Atlantic City horse-racing track. It was among the public’s first experiments with such a festival, but I don’t recall the overall public reaction.

I do know I had a ball. I went down to Atlantic City traveling from Syracuse, NY where I lived, with several friends stuffed into a Rambler. (And if you can remember the Rambler, it suggests you were born before Woodstock).

We missed our freeway exit, and the wild man who was driving (it wasn’t his car, but a friend’s who was riding shotgun) pulled hard right over the elevated, rapidly expanding concrete peninsula that separated freeway and exit, and managed to land on the exit without blowing a tire, avoiding sending us to our doom. If the car had seat belts, I can assure you we weren’t wearing them.

We went down there without purchasing tickets. In fact, we didn’t bring enough money to purchase tickets when we arrived. My cousin, who was unable to get the time off from his job to join us, simply quit his job to join us on the adventure.

We were big rock music fans, each of us around 18 years old. Responsible parents probably wouldn’t dream of allowing their kids to travel to such an event these days, and we had responsible, loving parents.

Times clearly were different then. Case in point: I wouldn’t dream of hitchiking or allowing my kids to do so because of the obvious potential for danger, but I did it regularly in high school and college.

After high school detention which was punishment for poor preparedness in Father Kotzbauer’s Latin class, we put a boy on the road with his thumb out and, if a car stopped for him, the rest of us scrambled out of the ditch in which we were hiding to get a ride as well. Even in those times, no driver was stupid enough to stop for several boys on the side of the road, but they rarely refused us when confronted with the clever surprise.

Our musical tastes had matured through the early days of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and, while we still listened to them, we favored groups with a harder edge like Jefferson Airplane (I nodded in recognition when a friend declared one evening that he lived by their album “After Bathing at Baxter’s,”), Cream (the live version of “Crossroads” on the “Wheels of Fire” album is simply the best rock song ever recorded), the Doors and the Mothers of Invention.

In Atlantic City, we saw Frank Zappa and the Mothers on a Saturday afternoon, and, as advertised, spent an “Evening with Jefferson Airplane” that night, accompanied by a light show and a great performance. And the opener that evening was Creedence Clearwater Revival!

We had a wonderful time, unequalled in my teenage experience. And it would whet our whistles for Woodstock in a few weeks.

To be continued

Woodstock remembered, Part 2

“I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm, gonna join in a rock n’roll band...”

These lyrics from the song about the Woodstock Music Festival, performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, helped to explain my motivation as I traveled there with friends in 1969.

Not that I was good enough to join the pros being paid to perform onstage before thousands, but I admired them and wished I was good enough to join them.

I became interested in popular music late in the 50’s, but reached a point of no return when I first heard Chubby Checker introduce the Twist in 1962, when I was 11 years old. I recall my aunt teaching me how to do the dance, as if you were drying your backside with a towel after a shower.

I got a guitar, learned some chords (I had a single music lesson, but was too impatient with the discipline required to read music), and started a band.

We were awful. The others had about the same discipline as I about learning music, but we were amplified. The band went through a series of personnel changes and name changes through the decade.

I selected the name “The Easter Rebellion” at one point, and it stuck for a while. I didn’t know what the phrase meant, but it suggested something counterculture, and it sounded good, a little learned. I’ve since learned it was an Irish uprising against the English in Dublin in 1916.

I liken my attitude at the time to Marlon Brando’s attitude in the 1950’s biker movie “The Wild Ones.” When asked what he was rebelling against, he asked “Whaddya got?”

Except Brando was dangerous, and I wasn’t. Nor was I truly rebellious.

There was only one performance for which the band was actually paid: a dance at a rural high school that marked our last performance together. We gave free concerts, but they weren’t in Central Park, and the people who watched us for a brief time hadn’t come to see us.

Meanwhile, my interest in rock music continued to evolve through the 60’s, and we developed a keen interest in the harder-edged groups during that time, many of whom planned to perform at Woodstock.

Interestingly, the folksinger Joni Mitchell wrote the song “Woodstock” immediately after the event. She was unable to reach the concert, but wanted to immortalize the experience she had heard about.

After completing the song, she read it over the phone to CSNY, who had performed at Woodstock. They rushed to record it, and added it to an album they were about to release.

Mitchell was not alone in being unable to reach Woodstock. In fact, 250,000 people never got there, unable to join the estimated 400,000 who had arrived in time.

We were among the lucky 400,000. We started on Friday morning from our homes in Syracuse, NY, and reached Woodstock in downstate NY in a few hours.

We parked the car, and walked a mile or two to reach the site. There were young people everywhere: short and long hair, bell-bottomed jeans, tie-dyed shirts, backpacks, food, drink, and tents. The common denominator was youth, except for the occasional authority figure like a police officer, all of who treated us in a kindly way.

When we arrived at the site, we walked over the chain-link fence that had collapsed at some point earlier that day. We hadn’t purchased tickets anyway. We were clueless and careless about the logistics of getting there, or what we would do when we arrived.

To be continued

Woodstock Remembered - Part 3

It’s helpful to remember some of the key events in 1969, to place Woodstock in context. It was a time of incredible ferment, some positive, much negative.

The prelude: John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and the Vietnam War escalated. The war and its violence played out for us on TV screens in our living rooms. Assassinations of key leaders shocked and saddened us, riots in cities scorched neighborhoods, and the war was going poorly.

Youth mistrusted the adults who appeared to have wrought this tragic mess, and vice versa.

But recall what happened in that single year, in events large and small: the upstart AFL NY Jets, led by Broadway Joe Namath, upset the NFL Baltimore Colts. Nixon was inaugurated as President, and the SST Concorde jet made its first flight. Heavy bombing continued inVietnam, even as peace talks were conducted in Paris. James Earl Ray was convicted of the assassination of Dr. King.

Had enough? How about Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick? Or Neil Armstrong walking on the moon? The NY Mets won the World Series, and upstart “Penthouse” magazine was launched, featuring full frontal nudity, and challenged “Playboy” magazine’s pre-eminence among upper-tier men’s magazines. Things - the way we lived, what we believed - were rapidly changing.

The Manson murders occurred five days before Woodstock. The Altamont Music Festival near San Francisco, viewed by many as the apotheosis of the outdoor rock festival as it erupted in violence and needless death, happened a mere 110 days after Woodstock.

Amidst this maelstrom, zoom in on a few young men who, although aware of the events described above (we were at or rapidly approaching draft age, after all), readily acknowledged their primary interests as sex, drugs and rock n’roll.

We had varying attitudes toward the Vietnam War. Most of us would have served if drafted. One of us, it turns out, was drafted, and left for Canada for several years.

When I reached draft age, I was in the lottery that randomly drew draftees based on date of birth. I recall the evening as I worked with my fellow copy boys in the small, smoky, poorly lit copy room in the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper, and my number was in the high 200’s, likely high enough to avoid the draft and a tour of duty in Vietnam.

But, having set the stage, let’s return to Woodstock, a small community in downstate New York.

Richie Havens, a black folksinger to whom we listened regularly, opened the show at Woodstock. His opening song was “Handsome Johnny,” a reflection on mankind’s sad practice of sending young men to war, and as I recall now a bit of a play on Dalton Trumbo’s book, “Johnny Got His Gun.”

In this novel, told in the first person, a young man has physically been destroyed by war, and his only remaining faculty is his mind, having lost the others in World War I. If you’re looking for a sad, poignant book about the horrific consequences of war (and who isn’t?), read this book.

Havens was followed by Country Joe McDonald, who echoed Havens’ antiwar sentiments as he sang “Be the first one on your block to have your boy sent home in a box.”

We were familiar with this song as well, but Country Joe surprised all of us when he preceded the song with the infamous request, “Gimme an F…” We happily joined the fun, but we were ambivalent about the war.

These were followed by counterculture folksingers like John Sebastian, Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez, whose lyrics ranged from living together in peace, to smuggling drugs, to war resistance.

Baez in particular described a poignant story about her husband David who had just been taken to federal prison for war resistance.

A young Carlos Santana electrified the crowd with a searing instrumental song, followed by the larger-than-life Bob “Bear” Hite of Canned Heat and Leslie West of the group Mountain. At the time, West weighed 300 pounds.

Creedence Clearwater Revival and Janis Joplin followed with creditable performances, but as I noticed darkness descending and the lights went on, I remember best a rollicking medley led by an energetic Sly and the Family Stone, who wanted to “take us higher.”

Politics re-entered when, during the Who’s set, radical Abbie Hoffman burst onstage and exhorted us to support John Sinclair, who had been arrested in Michigan for possessing two joints of marijuana.

This interruption didn’t sit well with Pete Townshend, the British lead guitarist of the Who, who evidently wasn’t as into U.S. politics as Abbie, and simply wanted to be left alone to perform.

As Hoffman was haranguing the crowd, Townshend walked up behind him, jammed the butt of the guitar into Hoffman’s side and sent him tumbling off the front of the stage. Keep in mind the stage was about ten feet off the ground.

Townshend calmly returned to the microphone, said the enigmatic words “We can dig it, too,” and continued performing. We laughed wildly, and cheered – we were apolitical, and wanted to listen to the music.

Our favorite group at this time, bar none, was the Jefferson Airplane. They were based in San Francisco and got their start in the mid-60’s, and after a few personnel changes settled into the group that my friends and I revere to this day – founders Marty Balin and Paul Kantner, lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, bass guitarist Jack Casady, drummer Spencer Dryden, and, last but never least, singer Grace Slick.

If they hadn’t been there, we might not have made the trip. We looked forward to seeing them. So we waited…and waited… and waited. The delays between some acts were as long as two hours.

About 17 hours after the Airplane was scheduled, they appeared on stage. They were intended, I think, to close out the performances on Saturday evening, but the rain that began falling on Friday had gotten in the way.

Did I mention the rain? Put 400,000 people in a farmer’s field that slopes downhill, mix in 450 cows freed by fences destroyed on adjacent farms, fences that were used for firewood, and music that relies on electricity and you’ve got a potent mix.

In an interview in Rolling Stone in 1989, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead said “There was a great big blue spark about the size of a baseball, and I got lifted off my feet and sent back eight or ten feet to my amplifier.”

Off the stage, the rain made things a little harder and introduced delays but hey, we were young and having the time of our lives. No responsibility, no parents – in a word - freedom. It was intoxicating.

The soil on which we stood, sat and lay was clay, not a bad thing when dry, but mix it with water and you’ve got a slippery mess, on a downhill slope.

And the wet clay stunk. I remember the smell – it was awful. We were far enough away from the portable toilets to avoid that smell (there were 600 toilets for 400,000 people), but the mud was nauseatingly redolent of it.

We had not slept. In fact, I don’t recall sleeping during the 40 hours we were at the festival. I probably slept on the ride home, but I don’t remember.

So, in what I recall now must have been early Sunday morning, call it 6 a.m., on no sleep, soaked, hard to stand up, huddled in a wet blanket, overwhelmed by the stink, my heroine Grace Slick stepped onstage in a fringed outfit of pure white, framed by her band mates, excellent poets and musicians all, people who spoke the truth to us, and intoned in a husky voice, in that sassy way of hers, “You’ve heard all the heavy groups, now welcome to MORNING MANIAC MUSIC! GOOD MORNING, PEOPLE!”

And I recall I had what theologians call a parousia, of being in the moment, and I was raised aloft in a swift ascent toward heaven, as the Airplane began their set with the raucous song “Volunteers.” I was transcendent, released from my mortal bonds.

This was truth; this was beauty, in the midst of 400,000 like-minded people. We were Woodstock Nation - we could spend a weekend together in conditions that might have sparked an international crisis elsewhere, and have a ball.

Conditions? Two infants were born at the festival. Four miscarriages were reported. Three died, one sadly being run over by a tractor as he slept huddled in his blanket.

A phone call at one of the 60 public booths required a two-hour wait. Traffic leading to the site was backed up for 17 miles. Emergency helicopters ferried in 1,300 pounds of food.

But, “With A Little Help from My Friends,” the song Joe Cocker sang at Woodstock with extra significance, we made it. Hell, we not only made it; we nailed it, even if just once.

My friends and I left shortly after the Airplane’s set. People sometimes are amazed at this – after all, we missed Jimi Hendrix’s famous rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

But Hendrix didn’t perform till the wee hours of Monday morning. And, despite a weekend where life changed forever inside and outside of us, we had responsibilities back in Syracuse – school, jobs, mom and dad, sisters, brothers - people we loved, and who loved us. It was time to go home.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my life would change dramatically after Woodstock, changes that would last forever, changes that would arrive in a very short while. I would leave my home and my good friends to go to college in Boston for two years, followed by another two years in Seneca Falls, NY.

The experience at Woodstock was part of a series late in my teens in which I became thirsty for ideas, and for learning. I majored in Philosophy and Literature in college, and read books voraciously, most of these books not assigned for my classes – 70 books in my freshman year alone.

I graduated, returned to Syracuse for a couple years, lived at home for a bit, got a job and an MBA and married in 1975, and moved to southeastern Michigan where I live today.

But I’ll never forget returning to Syracuse that Sunday afternoon after Woodstock. It was warm and partly cloudy, reflecting my mood. I was toast, as they say.

I was dropped off in downtown Syracuse, and crossed Clinton Square to reach a bus stop for the ride home. I was alone and happy to be so, in a state of elation. Downtown Syracuse was rather quiet that day, with a few people in the streets. I was going home.

As I crossed the square, exhausted, filthy, warm, wishing to reach home, but forever changed, I was raised aloft yet again as I walked on a small patch of grass in the midst of a city, surrounded by tall buildings – I felt I was 1,000 feet tall, able to touch the sky. These days, I would recognize it as being touched by God, something He still does occasionally, but I was an agnostic back then.

And as I experienced this feeling, I promised myself then that I would never forget that experience, never forsake the truths I had lived that weekend. And I have not.