I am not a festival fan. I’m not saying I can’t enjoy them, but as someone who has spent a most of my years seeing live music, they are among my least favorite places to do so.
My lack of fondness for festivals is a lesson I first learned at Woodstock. Not exactly at Woodstock. But close enough, some six or seven miles away on the road from Monticello, NY, where the state troopers waved over the car of the sweet hippie couple from Buffalo who’d picked me up hitchhiking early that morning in my hometown of Binghamton, some 100 miles northwest up Interstate 17.
I didn’t have a ticket and wasn’t aware that if I made it to the fest, I’d still get in with no problem as the fences around the site had already been trampled down and it had been declared a free show. I just figured that even being within the surrounding scene was bound to be cool, and maybe there was some way I might be able to slip in.
I got within easy walking distance of the gathering of the Aquarian Tribes on Saturday, August 16, 1969, and turned around and went home. And never really regretted it.
Three Days of Chaos & Mud… Plus Historic Music
Most of my friends who did get to Woodstock returned with mixed reports. Yeah, there were some cool things about it. The vibe was mellow, cooperative and brotherly. It was a peaceful and fun three days for most. But there was the rain and the mud. What little food managed to get in was not enough. Unless you were fairly close to the stage, the sound kinda sucked. It was a mess that was declared a disaster area by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller – three days of mud and chaos.
I did know a few people for whom it was a wonderful experience. My late friend Anthony Santa Croce was a production assistant on the “Woodstock” movie. He spent the better part of one night into the next morning on a boom crane directly in front of the stage tripping on LSD while helping to film the concert. The look of glee on his face as he told me about it conveyed just how much of a – as we used to say – trip it was. How could it not be with an elevated front-row seat for sets by some of the most legendary musical artists of the era? Then you add the acid (and obviously not the bad brown acid people were warned from the stage not to take)….
Woodstock was all the legend says it was for my friend Vinny Campo. He was the one who gathered our gang of teenaged aspiring longhairs after the funeral of the hippie in San Francisco in 1967 for a ceremony where he solemnly buried his hippie beads in the backyard of his family home.
Vinny came back from Woodstock in a state of near bliss, glowing from the experience, which included tripping for three days straight (or three days anything but straight).
He’d had the time of his life. If you look closely, you can see Vinny almost in the middle of the crowd photo (above) on the inside gatefold of the original Woodstock soundtrack album, standing with his arm around his girlfriend, both wrapped inside a comforter. He was totally psyched when he pointed himself out to me after the album came out in 1970.
(Vinny later went on to do three stretches in Attica Prison for possession of heroin and died of a heart attack in this mid-20s – a genuine casualty of the dark side of the 1960s.)
My own experience was far less psychedelic, yet still a trip indeed.
Longhairs Marching to the Promised Land
After the state troopers ordered the car I was riding in onto the shoulder of the Interstate as we hit Monticello, I climbed out, thanked the couple for the ride, and set off across a field past the nearby Monticello Raceway trotter track.
It’s not like I had to ask directions. All around me fellow freaks and longhairs were converging like drops of water into rivulets all flowing along the same course towards County Rd. 117 that led to Bethel/White Lake and Max Yasgur’s farm. As I hit the two-lane road winding up a hill and out of Monticello under a canopy of trees, I ran into someone I knew: a short, burly one-legged Hells Angel biker by the name of Bear.
Bear had lost a leg up to his hip in a motorcycle accident, but it didn’t seem to much affect his general mood or mobility, happily hobbling around on his crutches and taking rides with the motorcycle club in a sidecar. He tended to spend more time hanging around my hippie crowd than at the local Angels clubhouse, and was often found at “The Wall” – a concrete retaining wall in front of a store on Main St. next to a Dunkin’ Donuts where many of us would gather on weekend evenings.
So it seemed only natural to run across him perched atop the hood of a car just after I started walking down the road to Woodstock. I stopped for a few minutes and chatted with Bear, learning of others he'd run into from the freak community in the Triple Cities area of upstate New York around Binghamton. He also gave me the first report on rumors filtering back from the festival, and it was a mixed bag indeed.
I carried on past a mounted horseback state trooper with a bullhorn waving and urging us pilgrims over and over, “Go back! It’s a disaster area!” It was as if he were invisible and inaudible to the throng of youth inexorably making our exodus towards the promised land of Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Sly & The Family Stone, Janis Joplin, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and the 23 other acts that ended up playing.
For an accurate depiction of what it looked like on the road to this momentous gathering, check out the road scenes in Ang Lee’s 2009 movie “Taking Woodstock” (see still above). When I watched the film it felt like an uncanny flashback, sans the acid, to that cloudy Saturday morning in August ’69.
As “Taking Woodstock” portrayed in a way most other film and TV depictions get dead wrong, not everyone who was a freak or longhair in that era was decked out in full flower power regalia. In truth, most all of us were not. That day on the road to Woodstock, I had on a striped t-shirt, straight-legged jeans and a pair of rough-out Acme cowboy boots.
Don’t Bogart That Joint, My Friend
While walking along, I caught a sweet whiff or marijuana. A few guys on the side of the road were passing a joint among them. They were decked out in colorful boutique hippie finery in front of a brand new tricked-out Volkswagen camper van.
One of the unwritten rules of the head counterculture was that once you lit a joint in a crowd you passed it along so that anyone could enjoy a few hits. The smell of the nearby jay stoked my appetite for a taste of weed. As I looked over at the hippie arrivistes, one of them took a long draw of smoke and then sneered at me, saying: "Hey maaann. Get some bellbottoms!!"
It took all I could muster to not lash back at the guy. (Earlier that year, I had walked into my first period 10th grade science class wearing a pair of bright pink and white striped elephant bellbottoms. The crusty old teacher took one look at me, threw out his arm with index finger pointing to the door and yelled, “OUT!!”)
By the time I was walking towards Woodstock, I had concluded that bellbottoms may have their advantages for sailors, but as everyday pants they were kinda stupid -- the belled-out material would get caught underfoot; hems would drag on the ground. Being a freak wasn’t about what you wore.
The memory of that moment became for me the sign that the 1960s were over and the real hippie culture was dead. The accepted wisdom is that Woodstock was the apotheosis of the hippie movement and Altamont was the death knell of a brief and shining moment of possible cultural sea change towards a more peaceful, loving, spiritual and aware way of living that could, just maybe, transform the planet into a better place. Idealistic and naïve, I know, yet how can anyone who is not a total shithead argue with the merits of the goal?
That ersatz hippie jerk on the road to Woodstock proved that the real 1960s bohemian deal was over. The counterculture was becoming an over-the-counter culture that anyone could buy into with some dough. The spirit of being one among many enlightened souls was being replaced by cooler-than-thou status seeking. A movement was devolving into a trend.
Perhaps I make too much of the guy not offering me a toke or two, but a genuine freak would have done so without giving it a thought.
(I would later chuckle at the memory of getting mocked on the road to Woodstock as my straight-legged jeans and cowboy boots became de riguer fashion in the mid-1980s for all my rock’n’roll friends in the East Village, and again in Austin now.)
Wanna Split? Sure, Why Not….
After my run-in with the faux boutique freak, I continued down the road to Woodstock for another mile or so until I ran into a guy and girl I knew from home in a car parked on the side of the road. I can still see their faces. I climbed into the back seat to rest for a while. As we passed around a bota filled with cheap sweet wine – hippies were not connoisseurs of the liquid fruit of the grapevine – we discussed all of the rumors we’d heard through the human telegraph emanating back from the festival site a few miles further down the road: The rain had washed out the entire concert; The Beatles were on their way to perform; it was total chaos; it was a groovy bacchanalia of free love and drugs…. It was hard to determine fact from fiction.
I hung with them in the white Dodge Dart for about two hours, ever less motivated to get out and carry on walking to Woodstock, given the mystery of what I might find. Then the mounted state troopers came along, yelling: The traffic jam has opened up! Start up your cars and move along or you’ll get towed!
The three of us looked at one another. So, wanna split? Head home? We all shrugged yet began to nod our heads yes. Why not? No reason to stay here, right? Hey, we can get back by the early evening, maybe find some pot and get high.
So we left. The car crawled along amidst the others heading back to Monticello. As we got onto the Interstate then called Route 17, the traffic thinned out and we headed back to whence we came. As the highway threaded through the verdant Catskills Mountains, we witnessed a gorgeous multihued sunset over the hills.
The 1960s were over. But my life of rock’n’roll was only beginning.
The Birth of a Beautiful Myth
Most of the people I knew who had made it to the festival found it a mixed bag, even for all the fun they had. I later came across others who had set out but never made it (from the liner notes of the 25th anniversary Woodstock four-CD box set, I learned that a couple hundred thousand others never made it). It made me feel like I was part of a whole other allied phenomenon.
The few reporters who actually were there did recount something phenomenal, if only how half a million people descended on what became a disaster area and all got along. And heard some awesome musical performances. Those were the snowflakes that began to snowball into something bigger in the annals of pop culture history.
Joni Mitchell spent the Woodstock weekend in a Manhattan hotel room while her friends Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were airlifted into the festival to perform. Watching the news reports on TV, she wrote the song “Woodstock.” CSN&Y recorded it and their version reached No. 11 of the pop charts in 1970.
In March of that same year Michael Wadleigh’s film “Woodstock” was released. It captured performances as well as scenes backstage and out among the audience. In May the double album of the soundtrack was released.
For me it meant that I was able to see and hear what I missed in the comfort of a movie theater – no rain or mud – with superior sound. And listen to the album again and again. You'd think it would have bummed me out to experience what I was so close to being a part of, but it didn’t.
Within the swirl of pop culture and memory, the movie and album gave Woodstock its full imprimatur as the hallmark moment of the 1960s youth movement. It’s like the line at the end of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” – When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
Woodstock & The Twin Towers Collide in My Life
In August 1984, Joe Cocker was a client of the Los Angeles based music PR company I was working for as its New York office, Jensen Communications, Cocker was managed by Woodstock promoter Michael Lang. In the movie, he was the Botticelli hippie boy, barely a man, with his cascading ringlets of hair framing a youthful face, his chest bare but for a leather vest, riding a motorcycle around backstage.
My boss had booked Lang and fellow Woodstock figure Wavy Gravy onto “The Today Show,” “Good Morning America” and a CNN midday news show on August 15, the 15th anniversary of the first day of Woodstock. A limo picked me up as day was dawning at my Upper West Side apartment, and we then went to fetch Lang from his Park Avenue abode, and rode further down in the soft morning half-light to the NBC headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Center.
Wavy was already in the “Today Show” green room when we arrived. As junior show staffers offered us coffee, juice and pastries, he began to shed his aging hippie street clothes and transformed himself as he donned full clown regalia.
Mr. Gravy, as he would be referred to in the fussily formalistic stylebook of The New York Times, was born Hugh Romney and is a link between the Beat Generation and the 1960s freaks. At Woodstock he was “Chief of Please” and his Hog Farm Collective the “Please Force,” charged with "security." He’s the guy who announces in the movie and on the album, “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000!" He actually didn’t get his fitting moniker until two weeks after Woodstock, given to him by B.B. King here in the Lone Star State at the Texas International Pop Festival in Lewisville. I think of him as one of the last and true hippies.
After “Today” we headed up to the ABC studios for “GMA,” and then down to the World Trade Center, where CNN’s New York bureau was headquartered. It was a little after 9:00 a.m. and the interview was scheduled to be done live around noon. With time to kill, Wavy, Lang and I decided to go up to the observation deck atop the north tower. Then we descended down into the mall in the bowels of the WTC to get something to eat.
There is something about wandering the halls of global finance with a clown that was – that word again – a total trip. People couldn’t help but turn their heads. Their reaction was a litmus test. If they smiled and showed delight at the sight of a clown in such an unexpected place, it was obvious they were cool. If they looked askance or sneered, well… I have always imagined that the "get some bellbottoms" hippie ended up working on Wall Street.
Eighteen years later, on September 11, 2001, I came out the front door of my Travis Heights home to take my dog for her morning walk and encountered my neighbor across the street. He looked pale and shaken. “Have you heard what happened?” he asked. No. “Two planes just crashed into the World Trade Center towers.”
The news hit me like those airliners had also crashed into my gut, being a New Yorker for 14 years when the twin towers were an inescapable landmark in the skyline, wayfinders you could spot if you came up out of the subway confused about directions. I’d been up to the observation deck, and eaten and gotten drunk at Windows on the World atop Tower Two a number of times, but none more memorable than that 15th anniversary of Woodstock with Wavy Gravy and Michael Lang.
I won’t speculate on whatever cosmic connection there may be between the two earth-shaking events. It simply just is.
When I pass through the gates at Zilker Park into ACL Fest on Friday, I do know that there is a connection I cannot deny with Woodstock, the event that engraved the rock festival into the American consciousness. There’s a lineage that runs from Max Yasgur’s farm to the Great Lawn at Zilker; ACL, Lollapalooza, Bonaroo and Coachella are the great-grandkids of Woodstock.
And even if I'm not so fond of festivals, I hope that I nonetheless have a grand ole time.