Despite having lived within a few hours from the old farm in Bethel, NY, I never went there in the decades since that incredible event. I never was there when the New York Thruway was shut down and a musical explosion defined my youth. I am talking about three days of music and peace known as “Woodstock.”
But on a rainy weekend more than 40 years later, I went there. It was time to once again think about my wasted youth. So it was time to get myself “back to the garden.”
The site is a small part of a farm. It is a dell, with upward slopes on three sides going down to where the stage was. It was farmland that due to the slope, really couldn’t be farmed so old Max decided to make some money by renting it out. In the far left (how appropriate) part of the hillside is a small stone monument commemorating the 1969 festival that is so etched in the mind of my generation. It lists the musicians who performed there, but not the hundreds of thousands who played there. At the top of the hill is now a performing arts center and a museum about the event. I went there with a local resident who has lived within a few minutes of the site all her life. She didn’t go to the event because she was about seven months pregnant, but gazed the site the day after and remembers the incredible garbage and mess that took months to clean up. For her and many other area residents, the site is not about the past, but the present, where top entertainers perform outdoors throughout the summer.
The museum is a touchstone not just to Woodstock, but also the 1960s. It is a place to rediscover many of the trends and events that molded the person I am today. One can see fashions ranging from Jackie Kennedy-style dresses to the British invasion “mod” look to American flag jackets, bell bottoms, tie dyes and free flowing styles of the hippies (I absolutely HATE it when one describes oneself as a “hippy”).
One hears the music and looks at the wonderful cars that transported us not only through space, but time. There’s a Volkswagen original “beetle” covered with flowers that was owned by someone who is a former Sullivan County legislator, and album covers by the Beatles. You can sit in a psychedelic bus and see memories about travel and lifestyles that you kind of wanted. It’s ironic that today I travel in a truck and RV trailer – the far more comfortable geezer answer to the VW pop top vans of those days.
There are many photographs of the era and memories of things like American Bandstand, especially ironic since I visited there during the week Dick Clark died. If you never went home from school to watch Bandstand, don’t bother reading further unless we share blood. But if you did, this is a place to find it all. The politics, the people and the possibilities we shared are frozen in time there.
One of the exhibits has a television showing news events. I happened upon it at the moment of RFK’s murder. Many decades before, I had awoken to the television I had left on to see the same thing live. It shook me and I had to leave that particular exhibit and recover my wits. For I had been transported back to 1968 and all its traumas I was living in a different century.
One of the major exhibits was a 20-minute film about the music. It showed excerpts from the stage with musicians commenting about what it was like to be there. One of the most interesting things was the way they viewed other acts. They weren’t just performers, they were fans. And their perspective provided new vistas to people like Jimmy and Janis. You didn’t need to know their last names in my aging generation.
Of course, the museum had a gift shop and there were certainly tees and other memorabilia that helped empty my bank account. I picked up a beer bottle opener for my son, thinking how much he was like the people who made Woodstock the party it was.
At the moment, there is a special exhibit about the people who created the iconic “Peace and Music” and “Aquarian Exposition” posters. The artist who gave our generation the bird sitting on a guitar also gave us many of the Harry Potter illustrations that have become icons for our children and grandchildren. It was also interesting to see how the original festival poster image has been modified for many other events ranging from other music festivals to corporate events to wedding invitations.
A few years ago, I had been unable to go to sleep and happened across the Woodstock movie being played on VH-1. I didn’t focus on the music, but rather on the self-centered brats we were back then. I wondered why I wanted to be like that, and if I was like that? And if, in fact, I still am like that in light of my current journey as I find myself growing apart from friends instead of coming closer together?
But this time, I also focused on the hope and quest for what was right and just. Out of those days, we have more equality in our laws and in reality. Yet we aren’t anywhere near where we wanted to be yet. We still have some draconian laws about drugs and a drug problem no one really knows how to solve. So what has the “Woodstock Generation” done since then? Have the ideas of the 1960s become the ideologies of today? Certainly not. And I have to ask myself if anything has really changed – or if it should have?
I find myself realizing that, like it or not, those three days made a tremendous change in our art and certainly to those who were there. I only knew one person who was actually there, and she probably was one of the people I would least expect to have attended. I wish we were still in contact so I could ask, after all those years, what lasted beside the music?
Would those of you who read this share your thoughts about it?
