By the Time We Got to Woodstock …
My wife, Anne, and I recently watched a replay of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, which originally aired in August to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair — or just plain Woodstock, as it’s come to be known in self-aggrandizing, counter-cultural mythology.
The program was hosted by Steve Scully, looking dull and disinterested. He repeatedly asked uninspired and uninspiring questions of watchers who phoned in: “Were you at Woodstock?” “How did you get there?” In between calls, he lobbed meatballs to his split-screen guest.
The guest was history professor, left-over hippie, and pro-counter-culture shill, David Farber. When not citing facts of mind-blowing understatement — “Well, ya know, Steve, the promoters didn’t expect so many people to show up” — he waxed nostalgic and glorifying, adding commentary that recalled Mark Twain’s description of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in Chapter 1 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Mostly a true book, with some stretchers.”
As the program ran, Anne and I would periodically look at each other, sometimes with raised eyebrows, sometimes not. We didn’t talk all that much about what we were watching and hearing. But it affected both of us.
The Aftermath
In the ensuing days, Anne and I talked at length about the so-called festival; how close each of us had come to going; what it meant (if anything); why it happened at the time it did; why the latter-day version, planned to take place on the 50th anniversary of the original, crashed and burned; how or why such a gathering would be different if it were to take place in the present day; whether it might be possible for any such thing to transpire again; and why we seriously doubted it.
We came to the conclusion that it’s impossible for anything of a similar nature ever to take place again for two reasons: dependence and immaturity. That’s why I don’t have much patience for all the peace, love, and music bullshit that continues to surround Woodstock. It’s why I’m all set with the palaver about anti-Vietnam-war unity. It’s why I prefer to be spared the hot air about people looking out for each other, taking care of one another, and proving to the world that a half-million young people could come together for three days of cosmic harmony and utopian bliss. And it’s why I won’t go along with an idealistic revision of a historical accident.
It was Anne who asked the money question: “Were we [the generation constituting so-called Woodstock Nation, of which we’re chronological members] the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?”
Aye, there’s the rub.
Capsule Backdrop
The festival took place on the dairy farm of Max Yasgur in Bethel, New York. It was held there because the Town Fathers of Wallkill, New York, caving to pressure from the Town Mothers, pulled the plug on the event a month before its commencement date, even though they’d been quite happy to pocket the $10,000 the promoters had paid them to lease the land in their fair jerkwater.
With tickets sold and less than a month to prepare, the promoters opted to erect the stage and to install the sound system, rather than to construct fencing and ticket booths. When people started arriving on Wednesday in the tens of thousands, two days before the event was scheduled to begin, the promoters astutely recognized they faced the mother of all philosophical dilemmas.
As they saw it, they had three options:
- Try to extract admission fees from those who’d shown up without tickets, in which case an undue strain would have been put on the event’s already-acute shortage of ushers.
- Explain to a half a million gate-crashing stoners that the festival was cancelled, in which case Max Yasgur’s cows would have been barbecued, Bethel would still be a smoldering ruin, and no one would ever have been talking about three days of peace, love, and music.
- Send John Morris to the stage to announce: “You all, we all, have to make some kind of plans for ourselves. It’s a free concert from now on.”
They shrewdly went with Option 3. And the rest, as they say, is history that’s been subject to dreamy-eyed embellishment ever since.
Never Again
There are myriad reasons for which an event like Woodstock will never happen again:
- 50 years worth of electronic-media advancement have enabled our imaginations to expand to a point at which we’re capable of fabricating much more elaborate fictions than Woodstock.
- Counter culture is now defined by roving hordes of disguised thugs who prefer hate, violence, and anonymity to peace, love, and music.
- We prefer streaming music to live performance, thank you.
The list goes on, of course. But it needn’t. The impossibility of another Woodstock is completely explained by dependence and immaturity. Over the past 50 years, we’ve been killing ourselves, dying a death of a thousand concessions. As our dependence has grown, our maturity has withered.
If you doubt that, imagine if Pajama Boy (PB) were able to travel back 50 years, attend Woodstock, and interact with a typical Woodstock attendee (WA) from 1969. We’d almost certainly hear something just like this:
PB: Don’t worry about taking the bad acid. You can stay on your parents’ health insurance till you’re 26.
WA: What are you, nuts? I’ll have been out of college for four years by then!
PB: Dude. You got a lot of growin’ up to do.
If they ever got the point of making small talk, it’s very likely we’d hear this:
PB: How did you get here?
WA: I drove.
PB: Yourself?
WA: Yeah.
PB: In a car?
WA: Uh, yeah.
PB: You have a license?
WA: Don’t you?
PB: Why? My parents do.
And if the mud, music, and mayhem left anything at all like idle time, Pajama Boy and his cultural, chronological opposite would probably have an exchange very much like this:
PB: What do we do when the music ends tonight?
WA: I don’t know, Man. Get high and rap, I guess.
PB: Wrap? You mean like Christmas presents?
AW: No, Man. Rap. Like talk.
PB: About what?
WA: I don’t know. Anything.
PB: I’ll tell you what: I brought two phones. I’ll stay here. You go over there. And we’ll text each other.
WA: What’s text?
PB: Ugh … I wish my parents would pick me up.
Truth vs. Good Story
As a storytelling Irishman, I’d be the last one to let the truth stand in the way of a good story. But considering the scale of the stretcher (to use Twain’s term) the retrospective glorification of Woodstock has become, at least a cursory examination of reality might be in order.
Joni Mitchell wasn’t at Woodstock. Her manager, David Geffen, suggested she bag the festival, the better to keep a date on TV with Dick Cavett the day after the festival ended. Nevertheless, a scant seven months after the conclusion of the event, Joni released the song, “Woodstock”, in March of 1970, on her album, Ladies of the Canyon. “Woodstock” contained these lyrics:
I’m going down to Yasgur’s Farm
Gonna join in a rock and roll band
Got to get back to the land and set my soul free
Get back to the land? Set my soul free? What?! I don’t know whence the band, Collective Soul, derived its name. But I’d bet big it wasn’t the few hundred thousand gate-crashers who turned Woodstock into a pestilent free-for-all.
Given the actuality of what happened there, Woodstock stands as the single largest recorded act of Grand Larceny since Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes liberated all of Eurasia in the early 13th century for the original Bloodstock Festival. (Genghis, or “Big G” as his friends who lived long enough to call him that called him, is reputed to have played a mean Psaltery; although, his performances were hampered by his chronic stage fright.)
Here’s the deal: So-called Woodstock Nation — subject as we all are to the mitigating forces of aging, disillusionment, complacency, the willingness to face up to some aspects of reality, and the willful and quite deliberate ignorance of others — went mainstream. With liberal help from the media (or help from the liberal media), Woodstock Nation accepted the sensationalist agenda and the opinion-mongering that passes for news and — worse — truth. It gave up its determination to find its own truths and to pay its own way, just as it gave up personal responsibility and individual liberty in exchange for dependence and the promise of being taken care of.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. (Benjamin Franklin)
The Twilight’s Last Gleaming
In the end, Woodstock Nation is this nation, embodied metaphorically by the car in the image at the top of this story — rotting hulks, abandoned to irresponsible carelessness, self-defeating thoughtlessness, and deliberate neglect. We keep painting over them with the brushes of our idealistic imaginations, hoping fresh coats of self-delusion will conceal the fact that they’re experiments gone bad through ignorance and abdication.
The United States was a grand experiment in individual liberty, in limited government, in self-rule and self-discipline, in the unifying ideal of the melting pot. Woodstock was its surrogate. In 1969, we at least pretended that we still believed in something bigger than ourselves; in higher, shared purposes; in the power we thought we possessed to determine our own fates. We likely suspected the dream was dying even then, that the melting pot was morphing into the crucible of self-absorption it’s become — a cauldron of divisive special interests, of an ever-growing government, of the dependence that will be our undoing. That’s why, in romantic hindsight, we contrive the spirit of independence we long to ascribe to Woodstock.
In the end, though, we all became the misbegotten, self-deceiving equivalents of Jay Gatsby, of whom F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote:
Gatsby believed in the … the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning —
The orgastic future recedes before us because we don’t have the will to create that future, to restore and redeem the experimental Republic, to preserve the independence, the spirit of unity, and the individual liberty we declared were ours just 193 years before Woodstock.
Since we’ve forgotten and foregone so much else, let’s not forget that the woman who wrote “Woodstock”, the song from which the title of this story is taken, also wrote the song, “Big Yellow Taxi”, from which this line derives: “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” So much for Joni’s sense of irony.
Back to Anne’s question: Was it the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
By the time we got to Woodstock — then as now — it was tough to tell.
