http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_12977980
08/02/2009
by Wallace Baine
My friend Geraldine's surname is not "Shewasatwoodstock," but a
friend of hers - a music nut, we should add - always introduced her that way.
"It was like all in one breath," Geraldine told me. "You know, like
'ThisisGeraldineshewasatWoodstock."
Allow me to translate: My friend Geraldine, she was at Woodstock -
yes, that Woodstock, the legendary live-music bacchanalia that took
place on a muddy swath of farmland in upstate New York almost 40 years ago.
It's not a bad way to be introduced at all, except that she was
always compelled to say, "It's nice to meet you and no, I didn't take
the brown acid."
Now that all the anniversary hoopla is dying down for the Apollo 11
moon landing, it's time to get another hubaloo cranking - the
nostalgia industry is recession-proof apparently. This month marks
the 40th anniversary of two of the most significant events of the
hippie era - Woodstock, of course, and more sinisterly, the infamous
Manson Family murders in Los Angeles. Taken together, those two
events in August 1969 have probably shaped how everybody views the
free-love counterculture of the 1960s. As most things having to do
with the Sixties, both events are caked with several layers of myth
and hearsay. They were both built on lies from the beginning.
Woodstock didn't even happen in Woodstock, N.Y. And the Manson
Family? Not a real family. Honest.
My friend Geraldine is one of 50 contributors to a new book called
"Woodstock Revisited: 50 Far Out, Groovy, Peace-Loving,
Flashback-Inducing Stories From Those Who Were There." To her,
Woodstock isn't some creaky baby-boomer cliché. It was a real experience.
She was living in Connecticut at the time, just a few days from
turning 21. She drove a 1962 VW Beetle with a guy whose name she can
no longer remember.
For the record, she had nothing to do with the Manson Family.
"I was a real hippie girl," she told me. "I totally loved Bob Dylan
and Joan Baez. But I also liked Grace Slick and Hendrix and ... well,
there was nobody playing (at Woodstock) that I didn't like."
Woodstock - which is also the focus of Ang Lee's new film "Taking
Woodstock" due this summer - wasn't the first rock festival of its
kind; that would be Monterey Pop, here in our neighborhood, which
took place two years before. But it was first time that the hairy
hordes of young people and their wild, rebellious movement captured
mainstream public attention. That's because Woodstock was a major
surprise. The three-day event drew about 10 times the number of
people that it was expected to draw.
Woodstock and the Manson Family were two sides of the same coin in a
cultural war having to do with the hippies. Woodstock has for years
been idealized as what the hippie movement was supposed to be about:
great music, groovy people, no one getting hurt, everybody sharing
everything. The Manson incident, on the other hand, has similarly
been waved around as a meaningful social marker by those who
disapproved of the hippies.
Were the hippies gentle, loving people who presented a new model on
how humanity should live with each other? Or were they deluded,
insane heathens capable of the most heinous kind of murder? August
1969 offered a "yes" answer to both questions.
Geraldine told me that Woodstock was so memorable not only for the
great music that was presented, but because it represented one brief
moment in time when the mercantile imperative did not rule the day.
Sure, they sold tickets; she got to go because her parents bought a
ticket for her younger brother, who decided he didn't want to go. But
the incoming crowds were so massive, ticketed admission was quickly
abandoned and the show was essentially free for most people who were
there. There were also food vendors there, but, said my friend, those
food vendors were giving away most of their food for free as well.
"It was pure," she said. "It was only about peace and music."
Geraldine has only one regret, but it's a doozy.
She left early.
She and Whatever His Name Was arrived early also, a full day before
the music was to begin. She got to watch the whole thing be put
together, and she was early enough to nab a prime spot up close. She
saw Friday's show - Richie Havens, Ravi Shankar, Arlo Guthrie, Joan
Baez - and then Saturday morning, she split. She had slept in the VW
Beetle and, largely because of that - you try it some time - she was
not in a good mood come Saturday morning.
"It started raining, and everything was full of mud. And I was still
really bummed out that Dylan wasn't there, and he would have played
Friday because that was folk-music day. So I just said, 'I'm getting
out of here.' I got a couple of guys to help me push my car out of
the mud and that was that."
She could only go one way, south toward Pennsylvania, then back east
across New Jersey and up to Connecticut, because the roads in were
beseiged by hippie pilgrims.
The rest, of course, is history. Someone tried to revive the
Woodstock vibe many years later, but it ended up a dispiriting
affair, mainly because the money changers, so undermined at the
original festival, were able to reassert themselves.
As for the crazed Mansons, Geraldine said "They weren't like anybody I knew."
Still, to this day, the muddy but bedazzled fans of Woodstock and the
glassy-eyed nutjobs of the Manson Family represent the two faces of
hippiedom to those of us who weren't around to get it and those who
were around but still didn't get it.
So, which image do you believe? Maybe the truth is in the numbers.
The murderous Mansons added up to a couple of dozen people at the
most. And Woodstock? To quote the song, they were "half a million strong."
--
Contact Wallace Baine at wbaine@santacruzsentinel.com.
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