The View from Mudsock Heights: Woodstock, the Legend, Isn't Much like the Festival as Experienced at the Time

By Dennis E. Powell | Aug 17, 2009 at 14:43:6

Somewhere, deep in a box someplace, I have an original, unused ticket for all three days of the “Woodstock Music & Art Fair,” held 40 years ago this coming weekend. I think I still have it, though I haven’t seen it for years. I hope I do, because I paid for it.

The summer of 1969 was an interesting one. It is remembered primarily for three events: The first moon landing, the Manson Family murders, and Woodstock.

That spring found me working as a bellhop at a Howard Johnson hotel in Missouri. One of the desk clerks, who was a student from New York, came in oneday with an advertisement from The New York Times. The ad described an incredible upstate music festival in which everybody you ever heard of would be playing.

Tickets were expensive at $21 for the three days when purchased in advance. (Compare this to the $100 one might now be expected to pay to see the creaky corpses of Long Gone and the Where Are They Nows prove that their days of musical skill have passed.)

The desk clerk had an idea: we’d all pile into his car and drive to New York, sponge off his parents for a couple of days, and head up to see the show. It all seemed sensible, so I forked over my $21. Not long afterward, he brought in the tickets and distributed them (a bad idea, it seems to me now — it would have made more sense to keep them all together).

There was a lack of planning in our proposed excursion. Everyone involved worked at Howard Johnson. Management had no intention of closing the hotel so that all the desk clerks, plus some other employees, could go to a concert. Among those who were not given time off was — me. (I was happy, though, because I was promoted to desk clerk, at least for that week and for other vacation replacement purposes that summer.)

So they went and I stayed. Listening to the radio that weekend, I heard reports that things were not going exactly swimmingly in and around Bethel, New York.

These reports were amplified upon when the exhausted travelers returned days later. It had been, they said, the most horrible thing they had ever experienced. The crowd was awful — they had paid someone miles away $25 to park their car at his house. There were insufficient facilities for human biological needs including eating and divesting of the results of having eaten. Such food as there could be found was expensive. One of the group had had his billfold lifted. It had rained and the whole place had turned to mud.

It was in every way, they said, a disaster. They couldn’t even really hear the music. Bands were on at all hours, seemingly at random. My coworkers were eager to recover from the experience.

The few others I knew who had gone to the Woodstock festival shared similar stories. None felt enriched or uplifted through attendance at the thing.

I was glad I hadn’t gone.

A year later, the movie of the festival was released. It employed all kinds of cinematic effects not often seen before — split screens, cuts from songs to attendees talking, back to songs, the interview with the Port-O-San man. A leading figure was the strange and likable Hugh Romney, who was all over the movie in his white jumpsuit, beat-up hat, raspy voice, and seemingly toothless grin. Woodstock was suddenly very cool. My friends were briefly promoted in the pecking order of hippiedom because they had been there. I say “briefly” because soon absolutely everyone claimed to have been at Woodstock. If all of them had been there, the audience would have been on the order of 25 million, not 500,000. The legend zoomed past the reported reality in record time. LP record time, it turned out; if you did not have the double album Woodstock movie soundtrack, you might as well not have existed. It was entirely absurd.

Over the next week, we’ll no doubt see tributes to and programs about the Woodstock festival, and my guess is that they will pretty much entirely embrace the revisionist, romanticized version of events. Some will return to the site, where now stands a commercial venue, the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts and The Museum at Bethel Woods. I have seen accounts of the place which condemn the structure there — maybe it should have been preserved forever as a place to wallow in the mud.

The whole thing was a cultural landmark, certainly (though people I have talked with who performed there did not remember it at the time as having been even the best festival that summer). Like so many things, it is in retrospection made bigger and better than it was.

But there was another side to it, the reality at the time. Yes, indeed.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.