A nation of loners - Woodstock Festival

National Review, Sept 1, 1989 by Joseph Sobran

Love and hope and peace and mudthat was Woodstock, apotheosis of the counterculture.

The Dionysian energies released there were supposed to transform the nation, and, alas, some of them did.

IN EARLY 1969 a quartet of young promoters decided to stage a weekend rock festival in Woodstock, New York, two hours from the Big Apple. At first they figured on 25,000 fans. But as they lined up 27 acts for the August date, the projection grew. They were prepared-in food, sanitation, and medical facilities-for 150,000 people.

That turned out to be about a third of the total. Tickets were selling for $6 a head, but every hippie in the Northeast had heard about the big party, and by Friday, August 15, the roads to Woodstock were clogged with old Volkswagens crammed with scraggly-haired kids intent on three days of sex, drugs, and rock.

The promoters had rented a field from a dairy farmer named Max Yasgur, and hoped to keep freeloaders out with makeshift fences. No use. The entire hippie economy was based on freeloading, and the minimal security arrangements couldn't cope with a half-million unexpected guests.

The townspeople had been nervous about the invasion. In fact, the festival wasn't allowed in Woodstock itself-it had had to be relocated to Bethel, fifty miles away. In those days upstate people were still afraid of hippies, especially in groups of 500,000 or so.

By Friday night the excitement was tremendous. None of the really big stars of rock-the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan-were there, but the roster was still impressive: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, Johnny Winter, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, and such newcomers as Joe Cocker and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Later, having been at Woodstock would become a mark of status, for performers and fans alike. This was to be a legendary weekend.

Hippie events tended to be-well, unstructured. To give you some idea of how unstructured Woodstock was, Abbie Hoffman was partially responsible for security. Additional security was provided by a former standup comic named Wavy Gravy (nd Hugh Romney), who ran a commune out west called the Hog Farm. A slight hitch developed when the Hog Farmers threatened to leave in protest against the killing of mosquitoes. The promoters had had the field sprayed with insecticide. For some hippies, insecticide was right next door to genocide.

Woodstock finally got under way, though not without a few more hitches. For one thing, it rained. Hard.

Since shelter consisted almost exclusively of sleeping bags, this caught the crowd off guard. But they were having too much fun-ecstasy, really-to mind very much.

The rain didn't help the music, either. Acoustic conditions were already less than Van Cliburn might have wished: loudspeakers blaring into a pasture, rendering even Jimi Hendrix inaudible to much of the throng.

THE FESTIVAL was attended by federal narcotics agents, who did make a hundred arrests for sale and possession of hard drugs, but made the strategic decision, lacking a half-million jail cells, to let pot-smoking ride. Marijuana enjoyed de facto legalization for the nonce. As for sex, there was plenty of it. In the general camaraderie, total strangers shared soggy sleeping bags. By day, some of them simply shared exposed patches of ground. Toplessness and nude bathing (in nearby ponds) were frequent.

It was all very Dionysian, a mass rejection of the false values of Ozzie and Harriet. From the bandstand, Country Joe McDonald led a joyous chant: "Give me an F! Give me a U!" until the crowd had spelled the whole word, bellowing it out in unison, not caring a whit if Nixon and Agnew and J. Edgar Hoover heard it all.

Leftist politics was taken for granted, but only as a sort of backdrop. When Abbie Hoffman tried to hog the microphone to deliver a political message while The Who was performing, Pete Townshend belted him from behind, decking him. Abbie scrambled off the bandstand and didn't come back.

Apart from that incident, all was peace and nonviolence. A gentle hippie oversoul seemed to suffuse the festival. As Wavy Gravy put it, years later, "The universetook over and did a little dance. . . . And you could just feel these little tendrils of invisible energies kind of like-I felt at times like a marionette almost." Strangers had become

brothers and sisters, smiling beatifically at each other with chemically induced inner peace.

But by Saturday afternoon, there were more hitches. The field was sheer mud. Food had just about run out. So had toilet paper. The Port-O-Sans smelled so foul that people were using the earth itself, and it was getting . . . noticeable. One youth was run over in his sleeping bag by a tractor hauling away Port-O-San deposits; he died.

At one point there was a serious scare. Several helicopters were approaching ominously. Was Nixon launching an aerial assault? No. It turned out that the U.S. Army and National Guard were flying food and medical supplies to Woodstock Nation. On Sunday morning more food-eggs, doughnuts, cereal, milk, sandwiches-arrived, courtesy of local residents. Woodstock Nation had quickly become reliant on the adult world it had tried to do without for the weekend, About the only thing there was no shortage of was drugs.