Back to the Garden
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081403352.html
For Woodstock Vets, The 40-Year Reprise
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 15, 2009
BETHEL, N.Y., Aug. 14 Forty years ago, they came here to a stretch of
farmland in the middle of nowhere, to tune in and turn on. Nearly a
half-million people gathered for four days of music and mud,
camaraderie and chemicals, at the festival known as Woodstock, which
came to define the generation.
And this weekend some have come back, old Woodstockers like Teach and
Groovy and Debby, to try to relive the experience through the retelling.
At least one other, Duke, never left. In 1969 he hitchhiked here from
Texas, stayed on to help with the cleanup, landed a job on a dairy
farm and now works as the "site interpreter" at the museum and arts
center erected at the location of the original event, helping explain
to those who weren't here what it was all about.
"Something took place here, and it's still happening," said Duke
Devlin, 66, speaking from behind his thick, chest-length, snow-white
beard. "The sense of community we had was really overwhelming. I've
never really experienced a weekend like that again."
This weekend is probably as close as he'll get. While there have
been, of course, other youth-centered Woodstock concerts over the
decades -- including one in 1999 in Rome, N.Y., that was marred by
violence and vandalism -- the 2009 jamboree is specifically designed
as a kind of old-timers game.
The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts led off with a sold-out Friday
night concert by Richie Havens, who opened the 1969 Woodstock because
most of the other acts were stuck in traffic.
On Saturday at 5 p.m. there will be a "Heroes of Woodstock" concert,
also sold out, featuring a number of the graybeard performers who are
still around: Country Joe McDonald, Tom Constanten, Big Brother and
the Holding Company, Canned Heat, Ten Years After, Jefferson
Starship, the Levon Helm Band and Mountain. Of course, the very
notion of a "sold-out" Woodstock show, able to accommodate only a
certain number of people, indicates how much things have changed.
Many of the 15,000 concertgoers expected by organizers will be in
seats, not sprawling on blankets. And attendees will mainly be
overnighting at inns and motels up to 60 miles away, not . . .
sprawling on blankets.
On Sunday there will be a panel discussion about the original festival.
The sense of community Devlin mentioned, forged out of four days of
chaos, is what keeps the Woodstock veterans tied to this place. "It
was cool," said Debby, 58, who came down from Vermont and asked that
her last name not be printed, explaining, "I did some time in the
front lines of the drug war."
"It was just peace and love," said Debby, whose long hair is now
white. She's lost most of her teeth, and walks with a cane.
"Everybody cared for everybody. Nothing else happened except peace
and love and music." This is her sixth time back to the site, and she
had to be here this time, she said, because with her ailments, "I
probably won't live to see the next big anniversary."
Some come here every year. Gary Rupp, known as Teach because he is a
high school teacher, comes up from Carbondale, Pa., often toting with
him some of the Woodstock memorabilia he has collected. This time he
was showing off the perfectly preserved red T-shirt he got
autographed by many of the top musicians who performed then.
Asked what Woodstock means today, Rupp paused and said, "You're
looking at a generation of music that people all over the world still follow."
"You have kids that still follow this music, even though they call us
old hippies," Rupp said. "We understand what peace, love and music is
all about. We understand how to live in harmony, not like today's world."
"None of this stuff was here," said Groovy, now 61, who also asked
that his last name not be used. He came from close by in 1969 and
worked as a stagehand, building the giant stage and helping the
musicians. "Jimi Hendrix was the best," Groovy recalled. "He was just
like normal people." Others speak wistfully about Sly and the Family
Stone or the Who or the Grateful Dead.
The Woodstock site, originally Max Yasgur's farmland, is now a place
of manicured green lawns surrounded by wooden fences, with a
performing arts center and a museum dedicated to the 1960s and to Woodstock.
Part of the story is how the festival came to this place by accident,
after it almost never happened at all.
The original plan, by four promoters, was to have a giant music and
arts festival 54 miles to the east in Wallkill, and to attract some
of the big-name musicians, like Janis Joplin, who lived in nearby
Woodstock. But in mid-July, the Wallkill town zoning board rejected
the permit, leaving the promoters without a venue just a month before
the scheduled opening date.
That was when Max Yasgur, a Sullivan County farmer, came to the
rescue and agreed that his big open hay farm could be used, one of
nine farms he owned. His son, Sam Yasgur, recalls that Max was a
49-year-old conservative Republican. But he resisted efforts from the
town to prevent the festival from coming here.
"He said, 'You don't like these kids because of the way they look,
because of the way they dress,' " said Sam Yasgur, who was 27 at the
time. He said his father told the detractors, "Tens of thousands of
soldiers died so they have the right to do what they're doing."
"During the festival, it was intense," Sam Yasgur recalled. "There
were threats. There were neighbors who couldn't get out and milk
their cows. Their fields were being chewed up by cars, their crops
were being destroyed." But he said when his father was invited
onstage, he surveyed that huge sea of people and defended their right
to be there.
Not all the townsfolk were upset with the invasion.
Leni Binder, now with the Sullivan County legislature, became
something of a Woodstock legend. She and her husband ran a local
gasoline distributing company in nearby Woodbourne. When she heard
about the huge crowds gathering, she went to a local market and
bought all the bread, peanut butter and jelly she could, and made
scores of sandwiches. She then instructed her delivery drivers to go
out and hand out the sandwiches to anyone who was hungry.
"Until 1 or 2 in the morning, I was making sandwiches," Binder, now
67, recalled. "I was the sandwich lady. We were feeding the kids."
What made Woodstock special, these veterans insist, is that it
happened almost accidentally, spontaneously -- far more people showed
up than planned, the traffic came to a standstill miles away, the
rain turned the hills into mud, the limited toilets soon overflowed,
and there was little food. But it was that shared experience that
formed a common bond among those who were there.
"You could feel that this was something special," said Duke Devlin.
"We had issues -- the war in Vietnam, civil rights, women's rights. .
. . Our main thing was to show everybody how we could live in harmony."
And live in harmony they did, sharing what food (and other
substances) there was. According to informal reports, at least two
babies were born at the festival. "There were a lot more conceived,"
Devlin added.
Woodstock veterans are convinced that the 1969 festival's ending up
here was no accident, that this is a holy place, recognized as such
by the earliest Native American tribes. This area of central New York
in the Catskill Mountains still has a large number of Hasidic Jewish
communities, ashrams, a cloistered community of French nuns and,
since Woodstock, a number of drug rehabilitation centers.
And now it has the museum and arts center, which continues to draw
the old-timers looking to relive that one magical part of their youth.
"This is a monument to what we did in 1969," said Devlin. "I call it
a time machine. It's very emotional, too."
He added: "I'm proud of what we did in 1969. . . . The ingredients
were perfect. Perfect. If you try to duplicate it, it's not perfect."
--------
Villager recalls '64 concert she attended with late brother
http://www.thevillagesdailysun.com/articles/2009/09/07/news/news02.txt
Sep. 7, 2009
By DAVID R. CORDER, DAILY SUN
THE VILLAGES The marketing blitz taking place in advance of
Wednesday's release of The Beatles' digitally remastered music
catalogue doesn't interest Mary Ann Yurfest all that much.
What makes the Village of Duval resident a little wistful, however,
are the fond memories she and her late little brother shared at one
of the group's historic concerts almost 45 years ago at the Baltimore
Civic Center.
Although not a devoted Beatles fan, Yurfest understands the current
consumer interest in the catalog's re-release from witnessing her
brother Jimmy Baldwin's reaction to the band that started the British Invasion.
"Oh yes, because he was in love with them," Yurfest said. "I remember
I liked them better after I saw them. The show itself was not that
long compared to now under an hour, 45 minutes, maybe. And everyone
was screaming."
Breadth of appeal
The Apple Corps and EMI Music release of The Beatles collection by
chance coincided with a newly released independent survey that
discovered a majority of Americans still like The Beatles.
Pew Research Center, which studies U.S. cultural trends and
attitudes, found that 49 percent of survey respondents liked The
Beatles a lot, 32 percent liked the group a little bit, 11 percent
disliked the group and 4 percent never heard of the group.
One fact emerged, however, from the generational survey that focused
primarily on cultural issues in the 40 years since Woodstock, the
historic New York music festival.
"Clearly, the numbers speak for themselves," said Paul Taylor, survey
co-author and Pew Research vice president. "The Beatles were No. 1,
but their breadth of appeal across all generations was impressive."
Such research may explain why Apple Corps and EMI picked Sept. 9 for
release not only of the remastered music catalog but also Apple
Corps' decision to release a Beatles music video game in partnership
with MTV Games and Harmonix.
The release date is significant, too, since it appears to refer to
the surreal, some say psychedelic, song, "Revolution 9." It was
released on the 1968 album, "The Beatles," commonly known as "The White Album."
Music's resilience
The persuasiveness of The Beatles still has a strong influence in
today's society, said University of Florida professor Bill McKeen,
who not only wrote the book, "The Beatles: A Bio-Bibliography," but
also created a class on rock 'n' roll history.
"Their hands were everywhere in the 1960s," McKeen, chairman of the
university's journalism department, said
of The Beatles' influence on society.
One student at the university is now working on a graduate
dissertation on the influence of popular music and philanthropy with
a focus on The Concert for Bangladesh, the fundraising concert that
the late former Beatles
member George Harrison organized.
"It's amazing to me this music is so resilient," McKeen said.
The group also emerged during a time in society when there were fewer
choices in life, McKeen said, and many people marked key points in
their lives by songs played on the radio.
"You remember the point in your life when (The Beatles album) 'Rubber
Soul' came out," McKeen said. "You remember falling in love, and this
was the song playing then. I don't think music fills that function anymore."
Important influence
Whether loved or disliked, The Beatles had a pervasive impact on Villagers like
Scott Hoffer.
Although he never attended a Beatles concert, Hoffer later saw former
member Harrison in concert in 1976 and former Beatles member Sir Paul
McCartney live in 1976, 1990 and 2005.
At his Village of Duval home, Hoffer has created a Beatles memorabilia wall.
"I'm 59, so I grew up in the '60s," Hoffer said. "Literally, the
Beatles, next to my parents and my teachers, were the most important
influence in my life."
Hoffer even convinced his wife to name their second son after McCartney.
Beatles fans like Hoffer have waited years for the release of the
remastered CDs in digital-quality sound.
"I've been hearing about this for about three years and followed this
very closely," Hoffer said.
Although interested in the catalog's re-release, Hoffer hopes Apple
Corps/EMI takes the next step in the digital music evolution.
"The next thing I'm looking for is the entire collection to come out
on iPod," Hoffer said. "They've been talking about that for years, too."
Enjoying it
When the new collection comes out Wednesday, Yurfest acknowledged she
may think about purchasing a favorite Beatles CD. Some copies will be
sold at Starbucks and Blockbuster in The Villages, as well as the
larger mass merchandisers.
Yurfest will be thinking about the events that led her that night in
1964 to the Baltimore Civic Center.
While she was home from college, Yurfest's parents asked her to take
brother Jimmy, a junior-high school student, to the Beatles concert.
The parents thought she would be an appropriate companion.
"My brother was seven years younger and absolutely in love with The
Beatles," Yurfest said. "He wanted to go, and my parents asked me to take him."
Many years later, her brother called Yurfest. He had found the event
tickets. Each had cost $3.50.
That thought made Yurfest smile as she recalled her brother's joy at
not only enjoying the performance but also being part of such a
historic cultural event.
It's bittersweet memories, too, since Yurfest's brother died a little
less than three years ago.
"I enjoyed it," Yurfest said of the concert. "I don't think I would
have gone if my parents hadn't asked me to take him. But I really enjoyed it."
--
David R. Corder is a reporter with the Daily Sun. He can be reached
at 753-1119, ext. 9066, or at david.corder@thevillages media.com.
--------
Couple in iconic Woodstock photo still happy together
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/music/1717865,CST-NWS-woodcouple15.article
August 15, 2009
For many Americans of a certain age, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair
is a hazy memory.
Not for Bobbi and Nick Ercoline -- the "hugging couple" whose photo
ended up on the cover of the Woodstock soundtrack album.
Forty years ago, they were girlfriend and boyfriend. She lived in
Pine Bush, N.Y., and worked at a bank.
He lived in Middletown, N.Y., and worked two jobs while going to college.
When they heard about the huge musical festival, "We just had to go,"
Bobbi Ercoline told the Albany Times Union.
They stayed only one night, and never saw the stage.
"Woodstock was a sign of the times," Bobbi told the paper.
"So many things were churning around in our world at that time: civil
rights, the Vietnam War, women's rights. It was our generation," she said.
They married two years after Woodstock and have children ages 28 and
30. They live in Pine Bush.
Bobbi Ercoline is a school nurse who started a food pantry. Her
husband is a house inspector.
"I think the further we get from the original event the more
meaningful it becomes, the more we realize how phenomenal it was: all
those people coming together with no violence, just peace, love and
sharing," Bobbi Ercoline said. "Forty years later, it's just
remarkable that it could have occurred."
--------
Vermonters remember Woodstock
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20090814/NEWS02/90813035/Vermonters-remember-Woodstock
By Susan Green, Free Press Correspondent
August 14, 2009
In her song about the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Fair, Joni
Mitchell invoked idyllic imagery: "We are stardust, we are golden.
And we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden."
Despite this elusive dream of Eden, the half-million Adams and Eves
in flower-power regalia at the historic event might have been
thinking: "We are tired, we are muddy. And we've got to get ourselves
back to reality."
By the time we got ...
Four decades later, several Vermonters retain vivid and varied
recollections of the massive gathering on the long weekend of Aug.
15-18 in Bethel, N.Y. Although part of an aging generation that once
famously mistrusted anyone over 30, many continue to cherish their
counterculture past.
"When I got to Woodstock, I saw a sea of humanity," recalls Jonathan
Leopold, back then a University of Vermont junior and now
Burlington's chief administrative officer. "It was a stunning
experience that totally blew my mind. I figured every hippie east of
the Mississippi was there."
And they were all groovy. "If you had food, you shared it," he says.
"People took care of each other."
The concert site was a natural amphitheater in an alfalfa field on
600 acres the promoters rented from farmer Max Yasgur. But no one
could predict the numbers of ragtag bohemians that would show up,
clogging traffic for 20 miles and overwhelming basic amenities. To
make matters worse, after a serene start, heavy rains pounded the
festival late Friday. Five inches fell in three hours, soaking the
crowd and turning the pasture into thick mud.
Leopold found that his sleeping bag had "sort of sunk down into two
or three inches of mud" by morning.
Leopold, then 20, was accompanied by about a dozen fellow UVM
students traveling via two Volkswagen Beetles and a motorcycle.
Mark Ransom and Bob Meijers, both Queen City residents today, were 19
when they trekked to Woodstock with 40 friends from their hometown of
Bronxville, a New York City suburb. They encountered a scenario of
bellbottomed, tie-dyed, dancing potheads and readily available
psychedelic substances.
"I was not tripping like everybody else," says Ransom, a preschool
teacher and bass player.
"I tried some mescaline," admits Meijers, a contractor.
Woodstock had billed itself as "three days of peace and music," with
a subtitle: "An Aquarian Exposition." The hot, drenched, hungry,
thirsty audience did remain mostly blissful, despite more than 700
youngsters visiting the Bad Trips Tent to ride out their LSD nightmares.
Richmond resident Roz Payne, then living in Manhattan, headed to
Bethel a week earlier to help establish the infrastructure the
original architectural design for the festival is still in her
collection of memorabilia. She worked on setting up a "field
hospital" and food giveaways. Two California communes, the Hog Farm
and the Merry Pranksters, delivered these humanitarian services in a
compound dubbed Movement City.
Before briefly spearheading security on stage, Payne participated in
the subversion of festival restrictions along with some Yippies,
including her friend Abbie Hoffman. Concerned that Woodstock "was
ripping off our culture" by charging for admission, at night they
took down wire fences installed around the perimeter. "And we changed
No Trespass signs into The Peoples' Bulletin Boards," she notes.
Songs and celebration
Their mischief paled in comparison with planned ticket booths that
were never quite completed and arriving hordes that simply surged
over those fences, rendering Woodstock a free concert from then on.
In 1969 Avram Patt, currently general manager of the Washington
Electric Cooperative in Montpelier and the drummer of a klezmer band,
paid a whopping $25 for his Woodstock ticket. He was a 19-year-old
Columbia University dropout from The Bronx who "hit the road" with
his girlfriend in a Ford sedan that belonged to her unwitting
parents, conveniently away on vacation.
"We packed provisions, including a bag of potatoes," Patt says. "I
thought, 'We'll roast potatoes.'"
En route to Bethel, they picked up some hitchhikers but decided to
abandon the car about two miles from the site in bumper-to-bumper
traffic on the New York State Thruway. The potatoes were also left behind.
At the festival, sitting a few hundred feet from the stage, Patt and
his passengers were entertained by folk acts such as Richie Havens,
Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez. But the weather changed their plans.
"We slept outside in the rain and woke up wet, cold and miserable,"
he said, adding that they left after catching a few more bands
Saturday. "I couldn't take the mud anymore."
The sun finally reappeared just before noon Saturday, when Quill
began to play. The rock quintet's 26-year-old guitarist was Norman
Rogers, raised in Brattleboro. His Boston-based band, already signed
with a major record label, had recently jammed in a New York City
club with the likes of Jimi Hendrix.
Cog in something turning.
Back in his hometown since 1972 and still a working musician (albeit
classical), Rogers has an insider's perspective on Woodstock. The
producers hired Quill to put on free local shows during the week
before the main event to reassure townspeople about the impending
influx. Among the venues for the public relations initiative was what
he describes as "a prison for the criminally insane."
At the festival itself, Quill was airlifted by helicopter from a
nearby Holiday Inn, where many of the stars were staying. "As we
descended, I saw a pond with naked people frolicking in the water,"
Rogers says.
A short time later, the band members left a tent set aside for
performers and walked across a footbridge to reach the stage. Rogers
spotted two columns of fans on the road below: one line arriving in
brightly colored clothing, the other leaving and covered with mud.
That evening he somehow found himself barhopping with Keith Moon,
drummer for The Who. "We ended up at Grossinger's," Rogers said,
referring to the legendary Catskills nightspot. "We watched some
Borscht Belt comics. The emcee welcomed us by name and we got a round
of applause."
Applause was a given among Woodstock's music-lovers, but some also
ventured there to affirm their idealism in an era marked by civil
rights struggles and the Vietnam War. The desire to change the
zeitgeist was epitomized by Jimi Hendrix, who closed the festival on
Monday morning. Everyone understood the message when he launched into
a provocative version of the national anthem, his guitar simulating
the sounds of bombardment.
Burlington's Bea Bookchin, then 39 and a denizen of Greenwich
Village, expected that Woodstock would offer "a glimpse of how things
could be." Her Lower Manhattan household was a haven for
left-of-center thinkers.
"The festival demonstrated how we could relate to each other in a
more cooperative, human way," suggests Bookchin, who brought along
her 8-year-old son Joe now executive director of Vermont's film commission.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the immense throng, her adolescent daughter
Debbie was also exploring visions of "a utopian society." At the
tender age of 13 she had gone to Bethel a few days earlier to lend a
hand in festival preparations.
"I figured she was a very intelligent and capable young lady,"
explains Bea Bookchin, when asked if there were any maternal worries.
"I knew we'd all be 100 percent safe."
Debbie Bookchin, who never crossed paths with her mother at Woodstock
and these days has a guitar-playing 15-year-old daughter named Katya,
agrees. "It was a grassroots democracy. People would help you with
anything you needed."
What she needed most were shoes, having lost her own in the mud.
Ransom had a different requirement. To escape the muck, he borrowed
clean pants from someone's girlfriend in the well-populated
Bronxville contingent.
His cohort, Bob Meijers, believes that many people found relief at
Woodstock during a time of anguish. "The year before, there were so
many deaths Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Mark's brother."
Michael Ransom, a 23-year-old infantry platoon leader, had been
killed by a landmine in Vietnam.
But for a few days 40 years ago, the world seemed to be a more
hopeful place at the madcap rock 'n' roll extravaganza. "The vibe was
that everything's OK," Ransom surmises. "The peace part was good."
Meijers echoes his assessment: "The peace part was excellent. If
nothing else, we all had that freakin' bonding thing going on."
.
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