Aug. 3, 1979 Gusto cover story: Looking back at Woodstock

 

On the 55th anniversary, here’s a look at it from just 10 years away.

Aug. 3, 1979

Woodstock Ten Years Later

I didn’t go to Woodstock. It wasn’t for lack of opportunities. The News proposed to dispatch me to the Catskills when the Aquarian Exposition began to look like a gargantuan catastrophe the morning of Friday, Aug. 15, 1969. Unfortunately, there was a conflict.

         At that time, I was a reporter by day, but by night I was a bass player in a rock ‘n roll band. That Friday and Saturday we had a gig. Shell’s Lounge on Broadway – $85 for five sets a night. During our breaks those hot, humid nights, we sat on the concrete steps out front of the place, drinking beer and wondering what we were missing.

         It turned out to be the high-water mark of the youthful counterculture of the ‘60s – a sprawling celebration of music, drugs and free-spiritedness in spite of the Vietnam War and the new Nixon administration. Its numbers were unprecedented. So was its tranquility. When it was over, it took on an almost apocalyptic afterglow, The kids had gathered to reaffirm their independent lifestyle and, against all odds, it had worked.

         “I came upon a child of God

         He was walking along the road,

         And I asked him, ‘Where are you going?’

         This he told me …”

         Bruce Beyer remembers Woodstock almost as vividly as if it were yesterday. Buffalo’s most prominent draft resister was out on bail at the time, the summer after the showdown with federal officers at the Unitarian Church on Elmwood Avenue. He’d bought his ticket months in advance. He had to ask Federal Judge John Curtin for permission to go to the festival.

         “There were five of us,” he says. “Me and my girlfriend, another couple and another member of the Buffalo Nine. We arrived a day early and there were a lot of people there already. We had no problem getting in. We camped right beside a pond. We had three tents and food. We were completely prepared. By Friday morning, we couldn’t get out. It was just jammed. People were even up in the trees.”

         The sound, Beyer recalls, was clear as a bell at his tent site, half a mile from the stage. It took him and his friends more than an hour to walk that distance late Friday afternoon. Finally, they settled in and listened to the music. It was very hot. Saturday brought the rains and then the mud. Beyer’s group forsaked the stage area and wandered.

         “There were really two Woodstocks going on,” he says. “There was the major stage and then there was a second stage put up by the Hog Farm commune and the Up Against the Wall people. They also built a children’s playground and a kitchen. Joan Baez played over there. I spent a lot of time in that area. The thing that distressed me about the festival overall was the lack of political awareness. At that point, politics was my life.”

         What Beyer witnessed instead was a different form of political expression. He notes the sense of sharing, the peacefulness, the absence of social restrictions.

“Everything you normally did in private,” he says, “you’d do in public.”

Beyer came home elated and the Woodstock experience clung to him through stormy protests and finally exile in Sweden and Canada. He still counts the Woodstock rock bands among his favorites. Now he teaches a college course on the ‘60s and hopes to organize a local 10th anniversary celebration of the anti-war movement in October.

“There was a whole sense back then of what life could be like,” he says. “There was a whole mentality set into motion about what’s good and what’s bad. I think people haven’t sold out their ideas and idealism so much as they’ve submerged their feelings. They’ve had to cut their hair and move into society.”

“I’m going down to Yasgur’s Farm,

Gonna join in a rock and roll band,

I’m gonna camp out on the land

And try and get my soul free …”

Mike Regan sits with his broken leg in a cast, looking out over his second-floor porch toward the scenic blue of the Niagara River. He’d been all set to take a new job a month ago when a ladder fell out from under him while he was helping a friend fix a house. He loves dogs and plans to study to be a veterinarian. He also moonlights as a security guard at rock concerts.

“I see the kids at the gates and I sympathize because I was there once,” he says. “But things changed over the years. I think what happened at Woodstock was just meant to happen once in a lifetime.”

Regan turned 20 the week before Woodstock. He was not working that summer and one of his best friends, a musician, proposed to take a party of six down to the festival in a van he reclaimed from a junkyard. Comforted by four gallons of wine, they ignored a failing clutch and lurched into the Woodstock traffic jam Friday evening.

“We decided then why don’t we jump out and get tickets,” he says. “My friend Wally, who’s a non-stop partier, and I got out of the van and went to the top of the hill. We saw the fences down and people all over the hillside. There were all kinds of people wandering around, a lot of New York City hippies with frizzy hair.

“People were really stoned. Chicks were walking by with no clothes on. They had booths set up to sell acid just like a county fair. I was in there for a couple hours. I forgot about the people I left back in the van. It was just so amazing. When I got back, they were all yelling at me: ‘What happened?’ I told them, ‘Man, you wouldn’t believe this place.’”

The next day they slogged through the mud to watch the show and discovered Woodstock was a law unto itself. The realization came when a law-abiding member of Regan’s group objected to the marijuana being passed around.

“He was telling people: ‘You know this is illegal,’” Regan recalls. “And the people all around us pointed at him and started chanting: ‘The Judge, The Judge.’ I told him: ‘Hey, man, the laws don’t apply here. You don’t go telling people it’s wrong.’ Finally Santana came on and the whole day got nice. Everybody loves Santana. We sat up very late. It was such a continuous show we didn’t want to leave.”

Leave they did on Sunday, but they didn’t get far. The ailing van’s clutch and transmission blew up. They pushed the truck into the village of Swan Lake. There they pooled funds and sent two of their party on a fruitless trip to rent a car in Binghamton. The rest of them retired to a local bar and found more of the Woodstock Nation inside. Some motel owners, grateful for the weekend bonanza, took pity on their stranded plight and put them up for free. Eventually, they were retrieved by the father of the kid who owned the van.

“We sat there for days talking about the festival,” Regan says. “1969 was a rough year politically and everything. A lot of my friends were candidates for being drafted. With a lot of young guys, you knew this was on their minds. They appreciated being there instead of in Vietnam. I came back with a better outlook on a lot of things, like the differences between people. I learned to accept a lot better. Everybody there got along so well. There was no reason to worry about the things you usually worry about.

“Now I’m 30,” he says, “and I have my dogs. I don’t own very much, but I don’t owe anybody either. What I’d like to do is get some people and go down to where Woodstock was. I want to go down there and see if the bar is still there and see the motel.”

“Then can I walk beside you?

I have come here to lose the smog,

And I feel to be a cog in something turning …”

“We had press passes and all that stuff,” says Paul Palo, deejay at progressive rock WBUF-FM. “I just wrote to their publicity people and got passes for three of us. There was Carl Walters and his girl, me and my girl and some guy who worked in sales. God, it took a long time to get there. We almost burned up the transmission in the car.”

Palo then was Chris Clark, program director for Buffalo’s first album rock station, WYSL-FM. The station was promoting Woodstock and “the peace-love thing” heavily. They even went so far as to warn festivalgoers to beware of drug searches by the police. It was advice well taken. Walters was stopped by officers en route. The car and the occupants were searched. Happily, they were clean. Walters, however, was ticketed for an expired driver’s license.

“We got there Saturday morning,” Palo says, “found the press area and put our tent up, then we walked backstage a little bit. You could tell there were too many people for the facilities. It was raining. That’s the thing I remember most – how sloppy and unpleasant and hot it was.”

Palo’s Woodstock bummer didn’t end when he left the festival Sunday. Monday he got a phone call from the station. His superior, Dave Shafer, told him he was fired, but wouldn’t tell him why. The rest of the FM staff was booted too. It became known as the Monday Massacre. Palo thinks it may have been station owner Gordon McLendon’s retribution for Woodstock, long hair and the rest. Especially Woodstock.       

“Maybe I’m kind of cynical,” he adds, “but it gave me an idea of what it’s like to be under really adverse conditions and not know what’s going to happen, whether the people are going to freak out or the police are going to come in. Woodstock’s reputation was better than its reality. Its reality was muddy, dirty people with cut feet and people ODing on things.”

“By the time we got to Woodstock,

We were half-a-million strong,

And everywhere was song and celebration …”

Tom Constanten lives in Oakland, Calif., and he occasionally sees his old mates from the Grateful Dead. Keyboardist for the band during its most experimental period in the late ‘60s, he’s now a composer and a classical music scholar. At Woodstock, he and the band stayed in the Holiday Inn in Liberty, hanging out with Jefferson Airplane and members of Traffic. For Constanten, Woodstock was “just another show.” He maintains that the Dead played better the next night in Central Park.

“The set wasn’t very good,” Constanten says. “Jerry (Garcia) had a bad time. It was that twilight time when we went on and it wasn’t raining any more, but the guitarists were worried about shocks and the stage itself was shaky. Do you know about the circular stage they had? They set you up on one side of it and turned it around and you’d come out playing. It didn’t turn out that way in our case.

“We were on between Creedence and Janis. We came in by helicopter and went out by station wagon. I remember Janis was really giving it to them as we pulled away. All the way out, our road manager kept telling people, ‘Look out behind you. Car. It will run you over and maim you.’ It took us forever to get beyond where there were people. It was like New York without walls. I really wonder about the perspectives on it. It happened to be there at the right time, just like the Beatles. It wasn’t so much the crest of a wave as the monument to it. I think the crest happened a couple years before.”

“We are stardust,

We are golden,

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden.”

More of Woodstock’s backstage story can be found in a book written by two of the show’s moneymen – Joel Rosenman and John Roberts. They call it “Young Men with Unlimited Capital.” It recounts how Max Yasgur rescued their homeless festival after it was kicked out of Wallkill. It tells how they paid Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman $10,000 not to cause trouble. It runs from crisis to crisis – the loss of the security force, the incomplete preparations and the unforeseen emergencies. The road managers of the Grateful Dead and the Who, for instance, refused to let their bands go on stage Saturday night unless they were paid in cash or certified checks. In the end, the backers claim to have come out of the ordeal older, wiser and $100,000 in the red.

Now, 10 years after Jimi Hendrix’s final chorus of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Max Yasgur is dead. The farm has been sold. The hillside is overgrown with grass. It’s reported that the residents of the nearby towns still don’t know quite what to make of the affair. In the half million ways that Woodstock will be recounted during the next few weeks, one forgiving gas station owner may have summed it up best when he told a reporter: “It was the end of the ‘60s and Woodstock was a bang-up party.”

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IN THE PHOTO: The original Woodstock poster.

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FOOTNOTE: After I turned down the chance to go to Woodstock (I’ve long maintained that I didn’t want to cover Woodstock, I wanted to play it), managing editor Murray Light assigned my colleague Jeff Simon. Here’s his 10-years-after account in a sidebar to this cover story.

The Grandest Illusion

         You had to walk up a long hill to get there, to see it. But the very sight of it brought out instant religion of the “Oh my God” or “Holy …” variety. And once you saw 400,000 people in one place with your own eyes, you never quite forget it.

         “The mindblower of all time,” said singer John Sebastian, looking at the crowd. Only he didn’t say “blower.”

         The Woodstock Festival was so big it had to have a meaning. And so Media America applied one. The most important thing I learned covering the Woodstock Festival for this newspaper in 1969 was that there was sometimes an enormous gulf between what is widely reported and believed and what is.

         All the stories stressed peace, harmony and understanding, abounding sympathy and love. They could have been written by the librettists for “Hair.” Woodstock Nation, said Media America, was the world’s biggest sleep-in high school sporting event – with hair, jeans, sneakers and rock stars instead of cleats, shoulder pads and pom-poms. Sort of Camp Counterculture.

         History now makes a neat contrast between peaceful Woodstock and violent Altamont (where the Rolling Stones didn’t quite preside over a constituency “policed” by Hell’s Angels). It wasn’t the first mistake History made and won’t be the last.

         Woodstock was called a rock festival. It was also a drug festival and a mud festival. The first act was Richie Havens. While he was on, I strolled over to the infirmary and saw, already, kids whimpering softly on bad acid trips (as the festival went on, the press tent became a makeshift infirmary).

         Everybody was so happy to be part of it all that they invented in their minds what they were a part of. This was supposedly proof that the future worked – without materialism and Vietnams – if only people would bring their own sleeping bag.

         One of the troubles was that there weren’t enough toilets. And the single most symbolic image I remember from the whole three days was outside the police station in nearby Monticello, N.Y. I saw a pilot shoehorn his way into a helicopter that was loaded top to bottom with loaves of Wonder Bread. It occurred to me then that a paradise where you had to airlift in loaves of Wonder Bread wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be.

         I learned quite a few other things besides how to hitchhike by looking pathetic. I learned that Abbie Hoffman was quite a nice fellow (I talked to him for a while. Of the anarchist gold-dust twins, Jerry Rubin was always a loudmouth jerk. Abbie Hoffman was the real thing. I feel bad that his cocaine bust has kept him underground and out of public circulation); and I learned that Sly and the Family Stone were one of the great rock acts (Sly Stone, formerly Sylvester Stewart, is another Woodstock era casualty. He hasn’t been heard from in years.)

         I missed completely the ‘70s letdown some felt because I was always reasonably sure Woodstock Nation was a mythical kingdom to begin with. There were real people there – half a million of them – but we were all part of one of the grandest illusions of modern times.