Woodstock Memories

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August ’69. Manson and Vietnam, the real moon walk and the Beatles walking across Abbey Road. And five freaks joining a half-million rock fans, seekers, and party monsters in mid-state New York for something … well, we weren’t sure what it was going to be, but it certainly would be the proverbial “something else.”

As we drove east on Interstate 80 from Kansas and Chicago, five of us turning Kate’s stereotypical VW bug into something of a clown car, clumps of longhairs became a tsunami of tie-dye. Excitement merged with traffic, and—hey, the fences are down, who needs tickets?!—soon we were camping in Bethel, N.Y., dots amid that delightful contradiction called Woodstock.

A free land, where we could make our own rules—but also a welfare state dependent on volunteer doctors, granola-bearing communards, and donated food from those of the permanent residents who felt hospitable toward a half-million new neighbors.

Fabulous music—but a festival where rolling thunder and shocking lightning storms threatened to make the Dead live up to their name in a set they’d hate for decades.

Three days of peace and love, music and kindness—but one where, in the wake of concessions being “liberated,” Straight Albert—at once dedicated meditator and one-time Army sergeant—became our quartermaster, guarding our tuna, beans, and water jugs with a sincere smile and a wary eye.

I oozed my way toward the stage, to hear Richie Havens chant “Freedom” and Sly take us higher. Hendrix’s “The Star-Spangled Banner” was at once chilling and rousing. But often the sets became background music as I searched for a purpose. As editor of an underground paper, I’d negotiated for permits for the ’68 Democratic convention, so after Chicago’s Boss, Mayor Daley, barked, “What trees do they plant?” hundreds of us had ginned up a Free City’s worth of food co-ops, clinics, and draft counselors. Now we were amid real trees, but, as the event teetered between epiphany and collapse, I gravitated to Movement City, where activists keen on turning the purple-haze horde into a political force were also trying to cope with joyous anarchy. When cranking out fliers for people too blitzed to read became irrelevant, I changed venues, to the bad trips tent.

Thousands might have been on personal cosmic voyages, but whenever the announcers cautioned against taking the brown or the blue acid, hordes of psychedelians boiled over the hill, a zombie-like image that later sparked the sardonic National Lampoon’s Lemmings. Doctors from the Medical Committee for Human Rights were there, as were Yippie counterculturalists and über-hipster Hog Farmers. And so was I, whispering to people to cool out and follow the bouncing butterflies. I’d found my anchor even as I went with the flow.

It may not be how I (rock and) roll these days, but Aquarian afterimages linger. Six years after Woodstock, I was the music news editor at Rolling Stone. Twenty-five years after, when I received an academic award, a member of my department gifted me with two tickets I’d never had. Now, of my Gang of Five, Kate, Richard, and Mary Sunshine are spirits in the sky, so this week I reached out to Straight Albert, the other survivor. Semiretired, he’s stayed the course and is affiliated with an ashram on the East Coast.

“When people ask me about the music at Woodstock, I draw a blank!” Al said. “I think I heard Hendrix but couldn't swear to it. In my state of consciousness there was way too much other stuff going on; eating, staying dry, getting high, and dealing with freaked-out trippers. I will never forget those things.”

Al’s right: As great as it was to hear the instant legends, something beyond the music lured us to that charismatic chaos. Chemically charged children of relative affluence and higher education, babes of the nuclear age, we longed for community and transcendence. A slogan from the 1968 Paris demonstrations summed it up: “Under the cobblestones, the beach.” Even if we came as a tribe and left as a market, we’d tried to tear away the Matrix to glimpse a mud-stained, soulful utopia.

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