http://www.buffalonews.com/entertainment/story/751529.html
By Jeff Simon
Arts Editor
Updated: August 06, 2009
The official name was the Woodstock Music and Art Fair and Aquarian
Exposition. That's the one that took place on Max Yasgur's farm 40
years ago and became a symbolic touchstone for everyone afterward who
bought a record or went to a concert.
My view is that the "revolution" of Woodstock, in cold truth, turned
out to be entirely commercial.
You couldn't assemble half a million people to suffer, get high, make
love, slosh around and hear music for three days without America's
business geniuses realizing that such an audience could be exploited
for decades of quick profits in the culture and lifestyle business.
Here, then, are my memories of something that was as much a
generational power trip as the place where, as Sly Stone put it, you
could sing "Higher" and "throw up the peace sign" and "it will do you no harm."
These are some mental snapshots from the reality of the event, rather
than the mythology. These are dispatches from the biggest mosh pit in
American history:
THE FRONT PAGE, AQUARIAN STYLE
I'm a young reporter, barely four months on the job. In other words,
I have finally decided to straighten my life out instead of throwing
it away, as I did so carelessly in the '60s.
The managing editor (and later editor) of the paper who sits only
15 feet away calls me over. It's early Friday morning, before first
edition deadline. The wire services are full of stories about some
kind of rock festival in the Catskills. "All those kids" are royally
screwing up Thruway traffic. He wants someone from The News to go and
find out what's going on.
The editor lays down the ground rules: I'm not there to review the
music. He wants news stories. And he wants me reachable at all times,
which means in the era before cell phones, he wants me to have a
motel room. (Hey, we didn't know. Honest.)
His secretary -- an improvisational genius named Jeanne Ray -- gets
on the phone, finds me a flight to the Sullivan County airport and a
room in Monticello, vaguely nearby. I am, it seems, covering Woodstock.
OLIVE DRAB
A cab driver, in Monticello, tells me not to worry about all the
traffic tie-ups. So what if they have now actually closed the
Thruway? He knows some back roads to get me a mile from the place.
After that, I'm on my own.
He was as good as his word. So there I am, in my responsible young
reporter's olive drab suit and preppie silk tie walking the final
mile to the festival. When I get there, I discover I'm not the only
journalist in a suit and tie. NBC's Lem Tucker is wearing a suit and
tie too. But then he is getting in and out by helicopter.
I'm walking up the hill. The locals offer to sell me water and
lemonade not give me water and lemonade, sell me some. Forty years
later, they seem progenitors of the era, the ones who really
understood the event's true significance.
The festival's mythology ultimately transformed America and moved a
small continent of merchandise, from records to clothes to roach
clips. Woodstock, at long last, seemed the countercultural revolution
people were waiting for.
And I was there, in a suit and tie.
ABBIE
In the press tent, I file my first story by phone -- dictating it, in
the old way, to an experienced fellow reporter excited I'm there.
Then I'm sitting transcribing notes. Abbie Hoffman walks in. A
photographer for one of the New York tabloids nudges me. "That's
Abbie Hoffman. Wherever he goes, he makes news." I nudge him back and
point to his camera. "You're the one who makes news wherever you go."
He doesn't seem to be up for a metaphysical discussion.
In my olive drab suit, I ask Abbie a question. He gives me, and
everyone around us, a 10-minute harangue on the need to free John
Sinclair of the White Panther Party from legal bondage.
Abbie, at that stage, was irresistible, a walking agenda who'd
stumbled into the coolest media opportunity ever, a generational
Armageddon if ever there was one. He couldn't believe his luck.
Later, the veteran organizer turned into a tireless force for area
soup kitchens and medical care for the drug casualties.
Whatever the revolution was ("Woodstock Nation" he later called his
book), Abbie the Revolutionary was OK, no matter how rancid things
turned out in ensuing decades (coke busts, years underground in
hiding, inept gigs as a "standup comic" in his old American flag shirt).
PRESS ON
In no time at all, the press tent is gone. It turns into a medical
tent. The brown acid is taking its toll. Abbie, bless him, is on the
case, by all reports. Woodstock, let's face it, was a drug festival.
And a mud festival (the rains were coming) as well as a music
festival and that mythic American shining city on a hill for those
who believed that all you needed was enough music, enough land and
enough people and voila, you had your own society.
WONDER BREAD
A helicopter lands in the middle of Monticello, N.Y. It's on its way
to the festival. The door opens. I see the pilot completely
surrounded by white packages decorated with multicolored balloons. He
is only able to occupy a few square inches of space. Every other
available inch is occupied by stacks of Wonder Bread piled up to the
aircraft's roof. Question: what sort of revolution requires airlifted
Wonder Bread?
MUSIC, MUSIC, MUSIC
So much of the music is on record and deathless, especially those two
great early morning revelations, Sly & the Family Stone very late
Saturday and Jimi Hendrix, early Monday ("You can leave if you want
to, we're just jamming.") A lot of musical mediocrity happened, too
Janis Joplin, for instance, reportedly stumbling to the gig with a
bottle in each hand and sounding it, even to her.
Woodstock? It was freedom, it was license, it was a generation's
celebration of itself, it was a gloriously indelible moment of
American popular music.
And it was a glass of water for sale.
Five bucks.
You can keep the cup.
--
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