August 15, 1969, 50 years ago: The Woodstock Music & Art Fair begins on Max Yasgur's dairy farm outside Bethel, Sullivan County, New York. Around 500,000 fans attended the 3-day event, a landmark in rock and roll history.
John P. Roberts and Joel Rosenman were New York entrepreneurs, and were building a recording studio in Woodstock, in Ulster County in the Catskill Mountains of New York. They thought of holding a rock concert to promote the studio. In the end, the studio became an afterthought, and was never built.
They contacted Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld, who had organized the Miami Pop Festival the year before, bringing in 25,000 fans over 2 days. Between them, they began setting up what they had hoped would be an East Coast equivalent of the Monterey Pop Festival that had been held outside San Francisco in June 1967. Monterey Pop had gotten 50,000 people. The Woodstock promoters planned for 3 times that many, or 150,000.
Except they couldn't get a place to hold the show. The Town of Woodstock denied them a permit. So did Saugerties, and then so did Wallkill. Finally, Max Yasgur, a dairy farmer in Bethel, offered his farm as a site, as it had a slope which made for a natural amphitheater.
Tickets were $24 for the whole 3 days -- about $167, or $56 per day, in 2019 money. Sounds like a bargain. Maybe it would have been, if not for the rain and the mud.
Sure, it looked like a blast, if you saw the movie Woodstock, which was released on March 26, 1970, 7 months after the festival. Because that meant you didn't have to live through...
* The traffic jam, as bad as any as has ever hit the New York Tri-State Area. When Arlo Guthrie said, "The New York State Thruway's closed, man!" he wasn't kidding. The promoters expected around 150,000 people, and thought they had enough facilities, including the access roads, to handle that.
But, depending on whose figures you believe, anywhere from 300,000 (The New York Times on the day after) to 850,000 (cited by Richie Havens as a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show 25 years later) showed up. The best-known figure is 500,000, due to the line in Joni Mitchell's song, "By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong." The next week's issue of Rolling Stone had the headline, "Woodstock: 450,000," and that is usually cited as the most accurate number.
(By the way, Joni wasn't there. Neither was Bob Dylan, whose supposed presence was said to be the reason so many people came -- the reasoning being that he actually lived in the town of Woodstock, which refused to host the festival. By the time they finally got the permit from the Town of Bethel, the posters with the name "Woodstock" had already been printed.)
In the 1970 Census, Buffalo was listed as having 462,768 people. If there were more than that at Woodstock (which is certainly possible), that would have made the Festival the 2nd-largest "city" in the State of New York, behind only the City of New York. And since about 3 times as many people as expected showed up, they had problems with...
* The food situation. There wasn't enough. To this day, there are nearby store owners who say they made a fortune selling sandwiches and soda to people going to the festival.
* The hygiene situation. Anyone who's ever been to a sold-out football game and had to use the bathroom, and has been foolish enough to wait until halftime, understands why baseball has 9 innings instead of 2 halves or 4 quarters. It's bad enough when 60,000 people want to use the john at once, in a building designed to hold that many.
Now imagine that, out of 500,000 people, at any one time, 1 percent need to relieve themselves. That's 5,000. I don't know how many port-a-potties they had, but imagine that it was 100. That's 1 contained hole in the ground for every 50 people. That's not enough.
And I don't think there were shower facilities there, and lots of people stayed for the full 3 days. (Given the traffic, they may not have had much choice.) And remember, this was the middle of August in New York State. Hot. So even if it hadn't rained, producing all that dinginess and mud, those 600 acres must've given off some serious fumes, above and beyond anything that was being smoked. This, of course, gave rise to the myth of "the dirty hippie," which is also greatly exaggerated, but, at Woodstock, was bad enough.
* The medical situation. I don't know how many "bad trips" or overdoses there were. But the legend of someone getting on the microphone and warning Woodstockers about "the brown acid" (LSD, possibly laced with PCP, a.k.a. "angel dust") has been well-documented. Out of the 500,000 or so people who were there, it's been said that 3 died: One from an overdose, one from appendicitis, and one fool who decided to sleep under a tractor on a hill, and you can guess the result.
Now, there were almost certainly more murders, overdoses, accidents, medical miscues and "deaths by misadventure" that weekend in New York City, with all the modern medical facilities available, including some of the most honored hospitals in the world. But the men running Woodstock were woefully underprepared in this regard.
Anywhere from 1 to 3 births were said to have happened there (although no one has ever found a documented "Woodstock Baby"), to say nothing of the conceptions that happened there, and the couples that met and had children later on, so the deaths are probably more than balanced out. But then, if there were births at Woodstock, those required medical attention, too.
* The weather situation. Yeah, it rained. That's no myth. At one point, somebody onstage got all those people to chant, "No rain! No rain! No rain! No rain!" That worked about as well as chanting, "One, two, three, four, we don't want your fuckin' war!" As in, not at all.
No, on August 15, 16, 17 and 18, 1969, Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel Woods, Sullivan County, New York, where the festival was held, was not the place to be. In contrast, the next year, when the documentary about the festival was released, a movie theater showing it was the place to be. There, the millions of people who have said they were there could have a far better experience than the half a million or so who actually were there.
Max Yasgur was actually something you would think the Woodstockers would have opposed: A businessman. Yes, he was a farmer, but he had the largest dairy farm in Sullivan County. He was also a registered Republican, hardly surprising for a man living in the Catskills. And his son, Sam Yasgur, was that oh-so-square profession, a lawyer. Good thing, too: He was the main negotiator between the festival promoters and his father, to secure the farm as a site. Max died in 1973, just 54 years old. Sam went on to serve as Sullivan County Attorney and Westchester County Attorney, and died in 2016, at 74.
On the other hand, Max Yasgur, despite being a guy who grew up during the Great Depression and came of age during World War II, was a big believer in freedom of expression, and didn't like the way the hippies had been portrayed in the media to that point. He rented out his field because it had been a wet Summer, and this made up the difference in the cost of the hay he didn't have available for his cows.
He also gave away the milk he was producing that weekend, and filled up his empty milk bottles with water, and had them distributed for free to the concertgoers. The Republican businessman was doing a full "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
And on the final full day, Yasgur addressed the crowd, and said:
I'm a farmer. I don't know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this. But I think you people have proven something to the world. Not only to the Town of Bethel, or Sullivan County, or New York State. You've proven something to the world.
This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place. We have had no idea that there would be this size group, and because of that you've had quite a few inconveniences as far as water, food, and so forth. Your producers have done a mammoth job to see that you're taken care of... They'd enjoy a vote of thanks.
But above that, the important thing that you've proven to the world is that a half a million kids — and I call you kids because I have children that are older than you are — a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music, and have nothing but fun and music, and I God bless you for it!
It probably wasn't the largest group of people ever assembled in one place -- I've heard that Mohandas Gandhi's funeral, in early 1948, had over 2 million people lining the streets, and some New York ticker-tape parades have topped that -- though Yasgur may not have known that. But he saw the point.
As far as I know, Yasgur's thoughts about the quality of the music were unrecorded. But, as Ray Charles once said in a commercial for Pioneer laserdisc players (laserdiscs were like album-sized 1980s forerunners of DVDs), "If the music don't sound good, who cares what the picture looks like?" (Both a reference to Ray's blindness and a valid point.) So how good was the music at Woodstock?
Supposedly, transcendent performances were given by several performers, including The Who, Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, The Band, Sly & The Family Stone, and, closing the show as the sun rose on the 18th with a psychedelic "Star-Spangled Banner," Jimi Hendrix. And, I have to admit, they all sounded good on television, decades after the fact.
But Grace Slick of The Jefferson Airplane, Joe McDonald of Country Joe & The Fish, and John Sebastian of The Lovin' Spoonful all said it was the worst performance of their careers. Sebastian, by then split from The Spoonful, took the stage at Woodstock and sang one of my favorite songs ever, "Darling, Be Home Soon," but I have to agree with his self-assessment: He was terrible. He either was really, really stoned, or wanted people to think he was. Slick actually said that the music was better at Altamont, the festival held in the Bay Area that December, where even more went wrong.
* The traffic jam, as bad as any as has ever hit the New York Tri-State Area. When Arlo Guthrie said, "The New York State Thruway's closed, man!" he wasn't kidding. The promoters expected around 150,000 people, and thought they had enough facilities, including the access roads, to handle that.
But, depending on whose figures you believe, anywhere from 300,000 (The New York Times on the day after) to 850,000 (cited by Richie Havens as a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show 25 years later) showed up. The best-known figure is 500,000, due to the line in Joni Mitchell's song, "By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong." The next week's issue of Rolling Stone had the headline, "Woodstock: 450,000," and that is usually cited as the most accurate number.
(By the way, Joni wasn't there. Neither was Bob Dylan, whose supposed presence was said to be the reason so many people came -- the reasoning being that he actually lived in the town of Woodstock, which refused to host the festival. By the time they finally got the permit from the Town of Bethel, the posters with the name "Woodstock" had already been printed.)
In the 1970 Census, Buffalo was listed as having 462,768 people. If there were more than that at Woodstock (which is certainly possible), that would have made the Festival the 2nd-largest "city" in the State of New York, behind only the City of New York. And since about 3 times as many people as expected showed up, they had problems with...
* The food situation. There wasn't enough. To this day, there are nearby store owners who say they made a fortune selling sandwiches and soda to people going to the festival.
* The hygiene situation. Anyone who's ever been to a sold-out football game and had to use the bathroom, and has been foolish enough to wait until halftime, understands why baseball has 9 innings instead of 2 halves or 4 quarters. It's bad enough when 60,000 people want to use the john at once, in a building designed to hold that many.
Now imagine that, out of 500,000 people, at any one time, 1 percent need to relieve themselves. That's 5,000. I don't know how many port-a-potties they had, but imagine that it was 100. That's 1 contained hole in the ground for every 50 people. That's not enough.
And I don't think there were shower facilities there, and lots of people stayed for the full 3 days. (Given the traffic, they may not have had much choice.) And remember, this was the middle of August in New York State. Hot. So even if it hadn't rained, producing all that dinginess and mud, those 600 acres must've given off some serious fumes, above and beyond anything that was being smoked. This, of course, gave rise to the myth of "the dirty hippie," which is also greatly exaggerated, but, at Woodstock, was bad enough.
* The medical situation. I don't know how many "bad trips" or overdoses there were. But the legend of someone getting on the microphone and warning Woodstockers about "the brown acid" (LSD, possibly laced with PCP, a.k.a. "angel dust") has been well-documented. Out of the 500,000 or so people who were there, it's been said that 3 died: One from an overdose, one from appendicitis, and one fool who decided to sleep under a tractor on a hill, and you can guess the result.
Now, there were almost certainly more murders, overdoses, accidents, medical miscues and "deaths by misadventure" that weekend in New York City, with all the modern medical facilities available, including some of the most honored hospitals in the world. But the men running Woodstock were woefully underprepared in this regard.
Anywhere from 1 to 3 births were said to have happened there (although no one has ever found a documented "Woodstock Baby"), to say nothing of the conceptions that happened there, and the couples that met and had children later on, so the deaths are probably more than balanced out. But then, if there were births at Woodstock, those required medical attention, too.
* The weather situation. Yeah, it rained. That's no myth. At one point, somebody onstage got all those people to chant, "No rain! No rain! No rain! No rain!" That worked about as well as chanting, "One, two, three, four, we don't want your fuckin' war!" As in, not at all.
No, on August 15, 16, 17 and 18, 1969, Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel Woods, Sullivan County, New York, where the festival was held, was not the place to be. In contrast, the next year, when the documentary about the festival was released, a movie theater showing it was the place to be. There, the millions of people who have said they were there could have a far better experience than the half a million or so who actually were there.
Max Yasgur was actually something you would think the Woodstockers would have opposed: A businessman. Yes, he was a farmer, but he had the largest dairy farm in Sullivan County. He was also a registered Republican, hardly surprising for a man living in the Catskills. And his son, Sam Yasgur, was that oh-so-square profession, a lawyer. Good thing, too: He was the main negotiator between the festival promoters and his father, to secure the farm as a site. Max died in 1973, just 54 years old. Sam went on to serve as Sullivan County Attorney and Westchester County Attorney, and died in 2016, at 74.
On the other hand, Max Yasgur, despite being a guy who grew up during the Great Depression and came of age during World War II, was a big believer in freedom of expression, and didn't like the way the hippies had been portrayed in the media to that point. He rented out his field because it had been a wet Summer, and this made up the difference in the cost of the hay he didn't have available for his cows.
He also gave away the milk he was producing that weekend, and filled up his empty milk bottles with water, and had them distributed for free to the concertgoers. The Republican businessman was doing a full "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
And on the final full day, Yasgur addressed the crowd, and said:
I'm a farmer. I don't know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this. But I think you people have proven something to the world. Not only to the Town of Bethel, or Sullivan County, or New York State. You've proven something to the world.
This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place. We have had no idea that there would be this size group, and because of that you've had quite a few inconveniences as far as water, food, and so forth. Your producers have done a mammoth job to see that you're taken care of... They'd enjoy a vote of thanks.
But above that, the important thing that you've proven to the world is that a half a million kids — and I call you kids because I have children that are older than you are — a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music, and have nothing but fun and music, and I God bless you for it!
It probably wasn't the largest group of people ever assembled in one place -- I've heard that Mohandas Gandhi's funeral, in early 1948, had over 2 million people lining the streets, and some New York ticker-tape parades have topped that -- though Yasgur may not have known that. But he saw the point.
As far as I know, Yasgur's thoughts about the quality of the music were unrecorded. But, as Ray Charles once said in a commercial for Pioneer laserdisc players (laserdiscs were like album-sized 1980s forerunners of DVDs), "If the music don't sound good, who cares what the picture looks like?" (Both a reference to Ray's blindness and a valid point.) So how good was the music at Woodstock?
Supposedly, transcendent performances were given by several performers, including The Who, Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, The Band, Sly & The Family Stone, and, closing the show as the sun rose on the 18th with a psychedelic "Star-Spangled Banner," Jimi Hendrix. And, I have to admit, they all sounded good on television, decades after the fact.
But Grace Slick of The Jefferson Airplane, Joe McDonald of Country Joe & The Fish, and John Sebastian of The Lovin' Spoonful all said it was the worst performance of their careers. Sebastian, by then split from The Spoonful, took the stage at Woodstock and sang one of my favorite songs ever, "Darling, Be Home Soon," but I have to agree with his self-assessment: He was terrible. He either was really, really stoned, or wanted people to think he was. Slick actually said that the music was better at Altamont, the festival held in the Bay Area that December, where even more went wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment