Author: Patrick Colucci

“I was a broken young man. One who set out to save the world only to become overcome by the waves of evil and despair, which pervaded the reality I found myself in, in 1960s America.”

I knew it would happen. It’s 3 a.m. in the morning and I can’t sleep. I’m thinking about the trip I made to Bethel, New York in August 2008 to revisit the site of the original Woodstock Festival. I had arrived here once before in 1969, now 39 years later I embraced the woman then a girl who had once saved my life. I had arrived upon the shores of White Lake way back then, on an old junker motorcycle, a suicide machine as battered and beat up as my own mind and body. The fact that either the bike or myself made the hundred-mile trip the first time was quite remarkable in itself.

I was a broken young man. One who set out to save the world only to become overcome by the waves of evil and despair, which pervaded the reality I found myself in, in 1960s America. I was deaf to the phrase “I love you” from those that mattered most, I was dumb to the ways of the world as I emerged from an autistic mindset and blinded to any possibility of overcoming the deep feelings of angst and alienation which weighed down heavily upon me. It was upon that very bike, stoned and unable to see clearly, I hurled myself at incredible speeds towards telephone poles on the foggy winding road that ran through my mind and where I traveled in the real world. Seeing how close I could come without touching them. knowing that a centimeter closer and it could be all over.

I was a seminarian who had faltered, ill-equipped to battle the existential windmills of grief placed before me. I had carried the hopes and aspirations of my monsignor, my parish, and the small Village of Irvington, New York upon my shoulders–and I was losing the battle. Unable to fathom the chaos before me (civil unrest, assassinations, war), I literally drugged and drank myself into oblivion, falling backwards into locked church doors-ways in the middle of the night.

Patrick Colucci Revisits Woodstock (2008). Source: Patrick Colucci.

So I returned in August to White Lake with Maria. She was just just seventeen and I was twenty the first time around. We were back to visit the Museum at Bethel Woods, built on the very spot we spent three days in the mud together 39 years prior. We first went directly to the stage area where the monument was placed. After moments of quiet reflection we met with Duke Devlin and had our pictures taken. Duke is a curator of the museum and like us an original survivor. Later we toured the museum. The museum was impressive and housed many memories of the past. After viewing the museum I left ahead of Maria and turned to take her picture as she stood in front of the edifice.

As I look at this picture, I was brought to tears. There in front of me stood a woman, now a grandmother. Behind her looms the Bethel Woods Museum on the very spot we spent three days in the mud together. I catch her on the phone. She is checking in on the grandkids–our grandkids! The irony is quite profound.

Stuck in traffic on my bike off 17b in August of 1969 a young seventeen girl opened the door and exited the car in front of me. As she walked shoeless toward me, her waist-long hair blowing gently in the breeze, little did I know my life would be changed forever. She asked if I would take her down the side of the road on my bike to wait for the traffic to clear. I agreed and rode toward the festival site with a shoeless Maria. We waited for hours, the car never made it. After several attempts to locate the car, we embraced each other, and rode together into the concert. The rest is history.

Patrick has written extensively on Woodstock, including a novel titled “The Closer’s Song” under the pen-name Christopher Cole, which can be found here.

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On Love: I Came to Woodstock to Die–An Angel Saved My Life appeared first on Witnify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJNSUSrs-0g

Some of the most unforgettable performances of the 1969 Woodstock Festival are commemorated. In this video, the reason that certain performances were so memorable are explained and clips of these artists playing for the Woodstock crowd are shown. An array of artists from folk singer Richie Havens to rock legend Jimi Hendrix are idolized and remembered.

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Memorable Performances of the 1969 Woodstock Festival appeared first on Witnify.

“Woodstock was both a peaceful protest and a global celebration.”
-Richie Havens

1. The idea for Woodstock came from Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld who were record company executives that wanted to raise money to build a recording studio in the town of Woodstock in upstate New York.

2. The Woodstock organizers originally told authorities that they were expecting 50,000 people, even though they sold 186,000 tickets in advance. Overall, the three-day concert brought in 500,000 people. That’s not all–another million turned around on their way to the concert because of bad traffic.

3. The famous Woodstock poster portraying a picture of a bird perched on the neck of a guitar is not a dove as some people think. It’s actually a catbird, an American perching bird that makes catlike calls.

Melanie Safka plays the guitar on the first day of the original Woodstock Festival. (1969). Source: Woodstock Wikia.

4. Melanie Safka, who was the sixth performer at Woodstock, was never meant to perform. She was not scheduled and had to sing her song “Beautiful People” to the security guards to get backstage.

5. Because of all the torrential downpours during the festival, there was a risk that some artists could possibly get electrocuted. Alvin Lee of the band, Ten Years After, was warned about this. His response: “Oh come on, if I get electrocuted at Woodstock, we’ll sell lots of records.”

6. The food stands raised the burger prices from 25 cents to one dollar when they began to run low on food. The festival participants claimed this was capitalist exploitation and burnt down the stand.

7. After getting word that there was a shortage of food, a Jewish community center used 200 loaves of bread, 40 pounds of meat and two gallons of pickles to distribute to the concert-goers.

8. There were two people who died at the festival. One man, from a heroin overdoes, and a teenager, killed when a tractor ran him over in his sleeping bag. The driver was never identified.

9. The last performance of Woodstock came from Jimi Hendrix. It was a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and it was described by one rock critic as “the single greatest moment of the sixties.” The funny thing is only a fraction of the Woodstock crowd saw it because most went home by the time he came on stage.

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[Blog] 9 Facts About the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival appeared first on Witnify.

Author: Howard Smead

“It had become so suddenly dark that I worried as we bobbed and weaved along the black, tree shrouded road that perhaps the Pied Piper was alive and well and piping in New York, a real animal picnic…” 

There were three of us: Walt and myself, and another fellow whom I met the day we left. His name was John Leisure, memorable for his huge, myopic eyes that seemed to reveal his utter disbelief that we would pay him ten bucks apiece for two film canisters of home grown that was so green it wouldn’t burn. I didn’t know he was going with us until I picked up Walt that morning and he told me about the distressed phone call he had received late the night before. “What the hell,” he counseled. “He said he has dope.” Walt and I were fresh from our first year at the University of Maryland where Walt had pledged, de-pledged, and freaked out all in one year. ‘Walt’ was not his real name, but it suited him better that his eminently pedestrian praenomen, ‘Walt,” or ‘Wild Walt’ as we called him most of the time, also said something about our callous sense of humor. Walt, you see, shared the same surname with LBJ’s ill-fated advisor, Walter Jenkins. Some nicknames take others don’t. In this case even his father started calling him Walt.  He accepted it graciously I must say; he was like that, not a contentious bone in his body. I suppose his nicknames bore the same relation to him as ‘Woodstock’ did to the town of White Lake. Both became more real than reality.

White Lake was just a small black dot on our roadmap, fortunately much closer to western Maryland than Woodstock, the real Woodstock.  It may have been an unknown quantity but at least we had a destination. That alone was justification enough for the trip.  Armed with some canned food, two packs of hotdogs, a ragged tent and high expectations, we pointed ourselves north early Thursday afternoon and closed our eyes. Walt had gone to the Atlantic City rock festival several weeks earlier and I went to the one in Laurel before that. We knew enough to know that anything could happen. When we hit New York we encountered the first signs that ANYTHING was about to happen. The lady behind the counter at the small roadside cafe at Narrowsburg just inside the state line where we stopped to eat was shocked almost speechless by the number of hamburgers she had cooked that day. All she could say to us was, “Where are YOU coming from?” and quickly turn away as though she were afraid we might give her the name of some small town in Russia. Her entire family sat at the counter watching the procession of the dispossessed trouping in and out. After Narrowsburg we shot through Neweiden and took a back road north through the two—door town of Forrestine. Suddenly we were in traffic. We came early but you never would have guessed it in all the confusion. I was able to park unknowingly just opposite the entrance to Yasgur’s farm about a mile east of town. Cars lined both sides of the old two-lane blacktop and people were walking up and down and all around as though this were nothing more than a spontaneous roadside convention. I wasn’t sure what to expect but I sure as hell didn’t expect to see so many people just milling. No one seemed to know where to go. No one had a clear idea of where they really were, and didn’t care. Maybe we weren’t in White Lake?  Maybe they cancelled it?

Attitudes changed that fast. The people of Woodstock had obtained an injunction that almost ended the event of the century before it began.  If it hadn’t been for one brave farmer (who received a substantial rental fee)….  But maybe the good folks of White Lake had pulled a fast one on him as well?

After wandering through the maze of people asking everyone who didn’t first ask us to fill their pipe where we were, we realized that we were supposed to follow the flow of people escaping down that one-lane farm road across from the car.  THAT was where the event of the century was supposed to be.  It had become so suddenly dark that I worried as we bobbed and weaved along the black, tree shrouded road that perhaps the Pied Piper was alive and well and piping in New York, a real animal picnic.  I carried the cooler on my head while Walt struggled with the tent and sleeping bags. We got separated from John and our food, but he turned up later, all smiles. We all felt that way; for better or worse we had arrived.

Setting up a worn out Boy Scout tent can be tricky in total darkness, especially when you first must beat down chest high weeds before even unrolling the damn thing. The good camp sites on what turned out to be the hilts along the lake were taken so we had been forced to crash down off the road into the weeds. After setting up the tent and burning a small, obligatory fire, we crawled into the tent and fell fast asleep, three of us crowded into space enough for two small Boy Scouts. But we were too tired to care.

In the morning I awoke to the sound of voices—all loud and happy— and above that someone rattling the air with John Coltrane riffs.  None of us had any idea where exactly we had pitched our tent.  We had not seen the famous revolving stage we had been hearing so much about, although over a hill to our right came sounds of hammering that had lasted far into the night. To my dismay, my face and hair were soaked.  I had slept in the middle, right under an uneven tear in the canvas.  The rain had come and gone like a thief in the night. Yet it hadn’t totally dampened things, the sounds of life were all around us and somewhat nervously I unzipped and crawled out trying to dry myself with John’s shirt.  I expected to encounter many more people by day than I had in the groping black night before, and I did, but I was not prepared in the slightest for what lay directly beyond our tent. “Walt, you gotta wake up,” I called to him as though I needed his calm verification to make it so. “You’re not gonna believe this. We camped on the edge of White Lake.

There not twenty yards from the tent White Lake stretched out to the left as far as I could see and to the right 100 yards down past a very cozy pine grove. I had heard splashing sounds while still in my sleeping bag but it hadn’t registered that there was actually a lake in White Lake. To our immediate right a small path led from the road to the water and people were beginning to stray down it, slowly, like they were still asleep. Beyond the path was a large field filled with blues, oranges, yellows and greens of hundreds of tents. Frisbees buzzed over head like low flying birds. John went off to find out how we went about getting tickets and Walt and I went on down to the lake. A large clump of bushes partially blocked our view so we followed the path to the edge, then left along the bank. There was a small slip from which people were jumping into the water. Others lounged in the grass at the side. I turned to Walt with genuine surprise, “Jesus, they don’t have any clothes on.” Walt acknowledged this with his toothy smile and took his clothes off and jumped in.

We found out a little later that the in-coming hordes had overrun the fences early on Thursday and the organizers, who didn’t really care anyway, bowed to the inevitable and opened it up, as free as free could be. It was great news because tickets had sold for $37 apiece and that was more than I had brought along even before I gave $10 to John.  The ice had all but melted and when I sat on the fragile styrofoam, that dispensed with the rest of it.  From then on it was lake water nothing cool at all.

Word spread that the music was supposed to start at 2. The three of us headed toward the sounds of pounding and sawing and found the huge, wooden monolith of a stage at the foot of a long, sweeping hill— a natural amphitheater. We had walked past it the night before. It had been so dark and the stage down so low that we saw only the faint corona of the work lights. Workmen were still hammering things together when we sat down. The music came 3 hours later but in the pleasant sunlight afternoon conviviality passed instantaneously from one person to like the hastily rolled joints that went through your fingers once then sped away never to return, from one hand to the next before it became a smudge on the last person’s middle finger. It was very easy and very relaxed.

Richie Havens performs (1969). Source: Woodstock Wikia.

Around 5 o’clock the people on the stage stopped their exhortations that we be patient to announce the first performer. We all stood up and cheered. It was Richie Havens; his first song, Handsome Johnny, crystallized the mood into a kind of celebration of defiance—we would triumph—damn the war, damn the government, damn the politicians, and damn the weather—we were marching off to our own war.

It was fortunate that the swami who was supposed to begin things with a meditation had been delayed. He came on after Richie Havens. The crowd had no desire to repeat his pious incantations and ignored him right off the stage. I don’t know if it was the incessant repetition of ‘ohm’ or the claustrophobic feeling of being walled in by people he had remarked upon several times, but Walt began to complain of a headache later on as the afternoon sky began to fade. I gave him a couple of my grandmother’s Darvons that put him out for all of Tim Hardin. While he slept John slipped my wineskin from his neck and took a drink. Rather than passing it to me, he screwed the cap back on and struck out across the wilderness of people. I didn’t see it or him again until the next morning when he straggled back to the tent to tell us of his good fortune. “This chick is going to split a tab of STP with me tonight,” he enthused,”That is, if I can find her again.”

John may well have returned later that night, but if he did I was in no shape to identify him or make much sense of anything. Sometime during Ravi Shankar a tall guy with a maze of electric black hair piled up on his head in a hysterical imitation of a redneck beehive stopped to share a joint with us. Before he went on his way he stood up and looked down at me and did a very strange thing. He started rubbing my hair in time to the music saying, “You’re doing all right, you’re doing all right, you’re doing all right.” I just sort of sat there trying to figure what the hell he was talking about. At the time it made zero sense to me. I was very well aware I was doing okay. Anyway I thanked him, three times. I’d be the first to admit that much of the conversation probably went right past me. And after thinking about it for about ten years I guess he was congratulating me. I had had my hair cut only five days before and I must have looked pretty callow at that. Needless to say, many a moon passed before the barber’s scissors met my hair again —1973 in fact — but that’s another story entirely.

The rain that became so much a part of Woodstock held off until the very end of Ravi Shankar. When it came people retreated to the dryness of their tents and sleeping bags. Ole Joan Baez stuck it out though, and so did Chip Monck. From that first shower on, he was the man who enabled us to endure. During the times of disaster to come, if there was any one person who kept things together, it was Chip Monck, who served among other things as one of the stage announcers. I don’t know if you’d agree with me or not, but after attending nearly half a million rock concerts I think I can safely conclude one thing about stage announcers——they’re all assholes. Except Chip Monck. He had the kind of voice you’d want your father to have, very well modulated, very calm and knowing. Anyone who listened to him could not help but feel comforted, even as the rain pelted the festival without mercy. Whether he was killing time between groups, telling us not to take the brown acid, giving directions to the first aid tent, or simply telling Joe Blow to call home, he was always in control. There were many others who spoke to us from that vast wooden ship over its Olympian sound system but no one contributed more to Woodstock by his mere presence than Chip Monck.

Before the rain came on Friday night he told us Tiny Tim had suggested that everyone in the audience light a match and hold it aloft. We scurried around borrowing and distributing matches and on his count struck them and held them up. There must have been well over 200,000 of us by that time, enough to produce a shockingly brilliant glow that re-created thirty seconds of daylight over the delighted crowd which showed its approval by erupting into a roar of self-congratulation. A thing of such spontaneous beauty was to be savored and even though it had lasted such a short time, I didn’t want it to happen again, ever. For the first time I knew I was part of something that very few people would ever have the chance to experience. We all belonged.

Saturday morning was wet and miserable; it rained all night long and we woke up soaked to the bone. Believe me, there’s few things in life more miserable than a soggy sleeping bag. I went down to the lake for a quick bracer and decided to walk over to the pine grove to escape the gawking crowds along the shore by the slip. One rather hysterical man stood on the bank shouting at everyone to get out of the lake because it was furnishing the drinking water. A group of four guys and a girl came by in a completely submerged rowboat, stopped to listen- then paddled away, unimpressed. Apparently the unfortunate soul whose job it was to stand there and yell at the swimmers did not know that the pumping system had collapsed during the night. There was no more fresh water until the helicopters brought it.

The pine grove where on Friday I had tried to talk Walt into moving our campsite was a perfect swamp. The few tents remaining lay useless and abandoned. A few disgusted people had stretched their sleeping bags over a fallen limb like snake skins to dry, but it was pointless. Nothing was going to dry out in that quagmire for days. I made a quick exit, greatly relieved that I wasn’t one of the unlucky who’d been rolled and packed in pine water during the night. Back by the dam the water was cool and clear and just deep enough, so relaxing in fact that I forgot how miserable I had been when I first woke up, almost. I worked my way out into deeper water intending to make an attempt at a serious swim back. Fat Chance!  I quickly disabused my self from that foolish notion and idled around until I had rationalized my laziness away. The urge to exert myself wasn’t strong enough. Back on shore, however, someone had an urge he couldn’t rationalize. There like a coiled snake beside my neatly bundled clothes lay a pile of fresh turds. Good morning.

As I was returning to our camp, a middle—aged man clad in a black stretch bathing suit asked me to take his picture. “The boys at the office will never believe this,” he explained as he handed me his Instatmatic and waded out into the water amid several of the less conventionally clad.  Holding his arms out to include the glorious totality of the lake and its occupants, he grinned like a mad bomber and shouted, “Okay, now!”

“If it hadn’t been for changes between day and night, it would have been very easy to loose track of the time entirely. The weekend just sort of slogged on. You ate when you felt like it; rested when you could; and stayed as stoned as possible. The music was continual…”

Later that afternoon as Walt and I were trying to scrounge enough dry wood to build a fire, this girl walked past us on her way up from the lake. I tapped Walt on his shoulder; most people dressed as soon as they came out of the water. We watched her walk across the crowded road and on up the hill to her tent. She held her composure almost the entire way but just before she reached the tent, the weight of all those staring eyes got to her; she scrambled into it and yanked the flap down behind her. Her name was Lonnie. Several months later I ran into her at the offices of the Quicksilver Times in DC.  I was sitting in front of a battered wooden desk trying to talk one of the editors into hiring me as a photographer when she emerged from the next room.  I stared at her with such disbelief that I forgot entirely about the interview. Sal Torre the guy I was talking to, said something to her that she shrugged off and she returned to whatever it was she had been doing. I thanked Sal and left. They didn’t need any more photographers. It was a good thing because the next week somebody broke into my apartment and stole my camera.

In November I volunteered to work on one of the food trucks the DC cops were kindly allowing to traverse their barricades to ferry hot stew to the people braving the freezing weather for the Moratorium.  The trucks worked out of a church in Foggy Bottom. Guess whose truck I was assigned to? There, standing on the rear bumper was Lonnie, just as blond and just as beautiful….

The weather and the immense crowds slowly distorted everything to the point where it became impossible to adhere to even the most basic of schedules. If it hadn’t been for changes between day and night, it would have been very easy to loose track of the time entirely. The weekend just sort of slogged on. You ate when you felt like it; rested when you could; and stayed as stoned as possible. The music was continual, better still, all around you people were having a great time, mud or no mud. If you were so bummed out you missed the humor in it all, chances were you didn’t care enough to come in the first place. Some people did get desperate though. Well, at least two that I know of. As we were cooking some hot dogs Saturday afternoon, two washed out guys came by looking for food. We gave them some hot dogs but rather than cooking them they crammed them into their in mouths raw and trundled off.  God knows why they hurried away. There was no place to go. People now over whelmed the hill in front of the stage all the way up to and over the road. All the camping was gone. The roads were jammed. And after lunch it became difficult even to get into the town of White Lake, from any direction. I heard the police had closed the highways but what really told me that many more people came to Woodstock than ever saw Yasgur’s farm were the rows and rows of tents in the fields on either side of 17B TEN miles away from White Lake. There was no way Walt and I could get within half a football field of where we sat on Friday; so we didn’t try. You could hear the music most everywhere anyway.

It rained and rained, then the wind blew, and then it rained some more, washing out part of the afternoon show and not a few of the less hardy. Helicopters began buzzing overhead with frightening regularity it was nice to see that Cobras could be put to peaceful use. But it was also disconcerting to see a military presence at Woodstock.  Only later did I learn that Woodstock had become a disaster area. Things plowed on of their own momentum. There was nothing really anyone could do to stop it, not that anyone wanted to.  Max Yasgur blessed the crowd with his benediction and everything gained an air of besieged respectability.

Indeed, when I returned home late Sunday night, my father who had been obstreperously opposed to such silly notions, had waited up to offer his praise. As I closed the front door, he was just sitting down on the steps. My mother stood at the top of the stairs as though she didn’t know what her husband intended to say or do. He looked at me; I looked at him. “Well, you proved your point,” he said with a wry smile. They had been listening to news reports about us all weekend long. Woodstock was the major story of the day. “If 100 adults had gotten together in that mess,” he said as he stuffed his hands in the pockets of his robe, “they’da killed each other.” Possibly, but I pointed out that 100 adults wouldn’t have gone to Woodstock.

John never did show up again (presumably he found his friend and their motors were still running) and early Sunday morning Walt and I woke up with the tent collapsed around our heads. It helped us decide we had had enough. I took one last tour, stood for an hour or beside the information booth listening to one confused guy asking directions to his own tent. I even ran into some friends from home who had arrived on Saturday. But enough WAS enough.   It was great while it lasted. We rolled up our bags, then folded the remaining food — a few cans of baked beans and fruit — into the plastic ground cloth and rolled that up into the tent for John. By then nothing — even leaving — was easy. There was so much mud and so many people that working your way out to the road proved to be as much a hassle as finding a place to sit down. At the highway where the farm lane ended and where our car was parked, we stopped for one last joint. We ended up smoking three and sitting there until dusk watching the stream of people coming and going, all of them weary, all of them expectant.

After popping all the dents out of the hood from people sitting on the car, we loaded up and started to inch our way into the flow. A girl in an unbelievable fishnet top climbed onto the back of my VW and asked through the sun roof if she might hitch a ride down the road to the country store. She held onto the sunroof and pressed herself against the rear window and chatted with Walt who put his head up through the opening. We met her thanks with profuse thank-yous of our own and watched her sidle through the people lazing on the front steps of the besieged store and close the door behind her.  I never saw John Leisure again.  Walt gave up on college shortly after New Years and went off to LA (where he still lives) to become an actor.  I saw him once in a crowd scene in “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”

… Unfortunately, Woodstock (and especially its sentiment of naïve optimism and hope) failed to survive its times, which were, as they say, achangin’.  Seriously changing. What a long, strange trip it’s been. So strange most of it has been forgotten, or suppressed. It’s been a long, hard three and a half decades with more than a century’s share of disappointments since those optimistic days. Who could have guessed that weekend in August of 1969 what lay ahead of us? War, more war, more domestic unrest, Kent State, Watergate, Iran-Contra, domestic terrorism, Oklahoma City, international terrorism, Clinton’s obscene impeachment, September 11, more war – and right now, more executive branch malfeasance than Watergate and Iran-Contra combined.

Back then everything seemed possible if you just had the right attitude. Hopelessly naïve. I guess it was a case of closing your eyes and thinking of Christmas.

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Woodstock Revisited Ten Years Later appeared first on Witnify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8LcqwL8a00

Carlos Santana and members from his original band describe the performance they put on at the first Woodstock Festival on August 15, 1969 in Bethel, New York. The band shares how they took LSD backstage, anticipating that they had hours until they were supposed to perform. As it turned out, they were needed on stage much sooner than expected and had to perform under the influence. Carlos Santana himself describes bargaining with God, saying the he will never touch LSD again if God will help him stay “in time and in tune.” Another member, José ‘Chepito’ Areas, describes the sound that they created during their performance as unique and unlike any that the large Woodstock crowd had ever heard. Areas claims that is the reason they became so famous.

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The ‘Trip’ of a Lifetime for Santana appeared first on Witnify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvWgPIhuCpQ

Susan Rodriguez, self-proclaimed hippie that was present during the first Woodstock Festival in Bethel, New York on August 15, 1969, takes us day-by-day through the music festival that helped to define a generation. Rodriguez discusses such topics as how people acted in a unified and loving manner, who her favorite performers were, her fondest memory of Woodstock and what she found most surprising. Being only 15-years old when she traveled to the three-day concert with friends from Boston to New York, she claims that she was never worried about being too young or getting lost due to the fact that all the concert-goers acted in a unified manner as “one giant family.”

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‘One Giant Family’ appeared first on Witnify.

Author: Victor Englebert

“I had not been a fan of hippies. I had seen them living sloppily on one or two dollars a day in places like Marrakesh. But they understood the futility, injustice, and cruelty of war. They knew that you could not buy happiness with money. They lived with open arms. At Woodstock I started seeing them differently.”

I was showing my photographic portfolio to Business Week magazine’s photo editor one day in 1969 when he said, “Would you like to photograph a rock concert? It will take place tomorrow in Bethel, New York.”

I had never photographed rock concerts. I didn’t even have a clear idea of what a rock concert was. I photographed mostly wild people in wild environments, from deserts to rain forests, for such magazines as National Geographic. But I never turned down an assignment. I did the right thing, for at Woodstock I would photograph wild people too.

I realized this as soon as I arrived, driven by the reporter who would write the story. We found the traffic backed up several miles. Young people crowded over vehicles that included psychedelically painted buses and vans, none of which were moving anymore. There was no way of knowing how long we would be stranded, so I got out of the car to start shooting. I told the writer I would be back in a few minutes.

The traffic did not move another inch for the rest of the August-15-to-18 extended week end. And the chaos did not allow me to find the car again. My luggage, which included much of my film, would unfortunately remain out of my reach the whole time. So I spent the next four days carrying nothing more than a small camera bag with only a dozen rolls of black-and-white film–what the editor had asked me to use. This forced me to think at least twice before shooting a picture, lest I run out of film before the end.

Now, 44 years later, and though I must be one of the few who was not touching marijuana, I can’t remember some things, as for example where and how I slept during those few nights, even though the driving rainstorms should have made the memory indelible. But then, with so many memorable experiences cramming my small brain, this one may just not have found room enough for itself.

But I do remember how ill-equipped I was for this particular adventure. I carried no tent, no sleeping bag or blanket, no jacket, or even a sweater. In the rain forests of the Amazon and Borneo it was hot. And I had always been able to get into dry clothes at the end of the day. And at night I had thrown a sheet of plastic over my hammock. But at Woodstock, day and night, for much of the four days, I had to walk around and sleep in soaking wet shirt and jeans and muddy shoes. I did not eat much either, for there was not much food to buy and lines were endless at the makeshift stands.

But what an amazing spirit there was. How contagious love was. The kids hailed me as “brother” and begged me to smoke pot with them. And then there was the music, nearly non-stop.

Thanks to my photographs there are things that I remember more clearly. Santana’s band, for example, though not the many other musicians, as I focused my attention on the mind-boggling crowd, acting nearly as insanely as the musicians. The thousands of young men and women whose faces radiated as if they had just seen Jesus Christ himself. The stoned naked man who hung high on a music tower to better expose himself. The sleepers packed at night like canned sardines. The restless men who kicked the sleepers’ shoes away from them as they walked around. And then, the morning after a night’s rain, the kids who kept trying to keep sleeping to delay the moment they would have to deal with their wet muddy situation (hundreds later abandoned their blankets and sleeping bags stuck under the mud). And the many who at the end were forced to walk back shoeless to their cars.

I had not been a fan of hippies. I had seen them living sloppily on one or two dollars a day in places like Marrakesh. But they understood the futility, injustice, and cruelty of war. They knew that you could not buy happiness with money. They lived with open arms. At Woodstock I started seeing them differently. And now that greed has plunged the world into misery, I can’t help thinking that we were better off with the hippies. At least they owned some truths. And they were so much more human than the financial predators that left us wondering what future we may still have.

Victor Englebert is a photojournalist exploring world cultures. He has appeared in magazines including National Geographic and Smithsonian Magazine. Learn more about his work on his blog and website.

The post Woodstock Festival of 1969
Photojournalist Among a Hippie Tribe at Woodstock appeared first on Witnify.

Author: David Edward Byrd

Materials: Black ink, transparent dyes, tempera. Central drawing on buff paper in colored pencil. Image Source: David Edward Byrd.

 In the spring of 1969, Woodstock Ventures asked me to do a poster for the large outdoor concert they were planning for the village of Woodstock, NY. in August of that year. I based the poster on Ingre’s La Source and surrounded that image with cupids, flowers and hearts in jewel-tone colors. After I delivered the art to the printer in late June, I left for a month in the Caribbean to a town with 30 people and no telephone. During this time, the town of Woodstock forbade the show and it had to be moved to Max Yasgur’s farm. As I was not available to do a new poster, it was done by another artist, and appropriately became very famous, while this version is mostly forgotten.

The post Woodstock Festival of 1969
[Image] Woodstock’s Original Artwork Is a Riot of Color appeared first on Witnify.

Author: Fred LeBrun

“One smiling, bearded long-hair was working a big bulldozer at the site, which was all hills and angles, just off a deserted and narrow two-lane country road. The same country road that in a few days, cluttered with humanity, would make the front page of every newspaper in the nation, and most in the world.”

As I begin writing this memory exercise, it is the 40th anniversary of the first day of the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair in the Sullivan County hamlet of Bethel.

Three youth, one carrying a baby, walking through field in Bethel, New York. Source: Bob Paley.

Hard to believe it’s 40 years after Woodstock. There were two other Woodstocks, of course, remembered mostly for the giant mosh pit of gray clay mud in Saugerties in 1994, and for the break down of law and order during the blistering heat and heavy metal of the Rome festival five years later. What the three had in common were some of the promoters and that none of these rock festivals was actually held in the Ulster County community of Woodstock, New York.

Shortly after the true and original Woodstock, Time Magazine called it “one of the most significant cultural and sociological events of our times.” For once, the media made one of its pronouncements for eternity on a contemporary event and got it pretty close since Woodstock has endured as perhaps the prevailing symbol of optimism out of the ’60s, of a socially progressive generation rising above turbulent times. Contrary to news accounts at the time, it was not some sort of way-out hippie-fest.

Youth Smoking Pot. Source: Bob Paley.

Oh sure, there were counter-culture types of all sorts and stripes drawn to the event, and the blue haze of pot was everywhere. But Woodstock was much more a compelling pilgrimmage for a true cross-section of the young of America, most of whom were main stream. A goodly number were lured to a fantastic musical program, but the biggest draw was the mass compulsion to congregate, to be there, to be part of this giant, cultural happening.

Woodstock was in the air and in the news all through the early summer of ’69, as the young promoters tried to persuade a number of towns in the Catskills to cough up a performing venue after the village of Woodstock proper had said no. You could feel the anticipation growing that if it happened this was going to be a very big deal and you had to be there, or at least anyone under 30 who was tuned in sensed that.

As a newsman, I covered all three Woodstocks, and yet for reasons I will explain I didn’t actually attend the original Woodstock festival in Bethel on Aug. 15 through 17, or whenever you could find your car could get out. For many, that wasn’t until late on Monday, the 18th, because traffic was so snarled.

Oh, it’s a complicated story, but probably typical of newspapering in 1969, which was mostly run by older, white males with a dim view of rock and roll, long hair and anti-war sympathies, who didn’t have a clue that Woodstock could happen or what it meant if it did. I have to be careful when I say that, since 40 years later I have become one of those harrumphing oldsters having trouble seeing through the eyes of young staffers who readily embrace Twitter and Facebook. Also, and mostly, I have nothing but the greatest of affection and respect for that older generation of newsmen at the Knick now departed, notably editorial page editor Duane Lafleche, city editor Leighton O’Brien and my immediate boss, Jack Givney. They were expert guides and teachers and very patient, and we were surely rough material to work with.

Knickerbocker Newsroom. Source: Bob Paley.

It wasn’t simply about those challenged with chronological age not being able to see Woodstock for what it was, it was about attitudinal age as well. My dear colleague, Knick News photographer Bob Paley, who was in his 40′s at the time, he got it. And he didn’t even care for the music that much.

The Knick was part of the Hearst-owned Capital Newspapers. The Knick and our sister paper, the Times Union, shared space and presses in a huge, colorless warehouse on Sheridan Avenue in downtown Albany. Otherwise, we were active if not bitter rivals for the news and readers, although those of us in our 20′s couldn’t help but cross-germinate our thoughts over a few beers after hours at the Press Box bar across the street, or at the Kenmore Hotel around the corner.

I was a suburban reporter at the time, with a weekly rock column in the Knick’s Weekender tabloid. So I was current with Woodstock preparations and setbacks, as were reporters Marty Schwartz and Charlie Bermpohl at the T-U. All three of us followed every twist and turn of the formative Woodstock as if were a NASCAR race.

Knickerbocker News shows a Woodstock youth reading Sartre. Source: Nickerbocker News, Fred LeBrun and Bob Paley.

At a crucial point in pre-Woodstock, the town of Wallkill first granted and at the last second withdrew permission to have the event there. Yes, Woodstock could have come down as Wallkill, which admittedly doesn’t have the same ring to it. Wallkill’s denial appeared to doom the event, until a 46-year-old well-educated dairy farmer with a heart condition named Max Yasgur, who got it, invited promoters John Roberts, the money man, Mike Lang and Joel Rosenman, all aged 24, to bring their rock weekend to his 600-acre alfalfa fields.

And so they did. It was very exciting.

I so harassed our managing editor, Bob Illingworth, that he finally approved sending me down for the day with a photographer four or five days before the event. Bob Paley volunteered to be the shooter, I remember. He was all chuckles and smiles on our drive down there because this was his sort of thing. When Bob was excited about a project, he tended to slip into an exaggerated Aussie accent. I have no idea why, but it was endearing then and cherished now. I can’t believe he’s gone 30 years. Our executive editor, Bob Fichenberg, whom I have also grown to appreciate greatly over time, said it right about Bob. He was a poet. Bob had a tenderness in dealing with difficult people that you’d never suspect from his tall, loping presence. On the job, he bristled cameras. I think he was primarily shooting 35 mm Nikon F-1s at that point, but he often carried a 35 mm Leica rangefinder as well, and even a rolleiflex.

Woodstock Youth In Crutches. Source: Bob Paley.

I remember it was a lovely, bright, sunny August day. We stopped briefly at Max’s farm and got directions to what would become an historic hillside, which was a beehive of the unlikely and unfamiliar for an alfalfa field. A massive, log house of an arrangement was going up with the help of small cranes and a lot of swearing, and already crews under the direction of John Morris, the director of operations, were shimming out to the extremes and hooking up lights and cables. This was to be the performing stage. Several trailers were being coaxed to fairly level places close by. We were told these were to be the facilities for the performers. One smiling, bearded long-hair was working a big bulldozer at the site, which was all hills and angles, just off a deserted and narrow two-lane country road. The same country road that in a few days, cluttered with humanity, would make the front page of every newspaper in the nation, and most in the world.

Bob never stopped shooting, never stopped talking to these workers on site, none of whom were beyond their mid-20s. Most of the tech crew were affiliated with Fillmore East down in the city, and were the best in the trade at the time and had plenty of experience and expertise in setting up for big rock shows. They were all barely out of their teens.

Already, groupies and early arrivals were drifting in, setting up spots for blankets and tents. Bob and I chatted with these early attendees. Nobody was hassling them, or us, for that matter. They came from all over the country. They all seemed mellow, a word that would come to define Woodstock. They also didn’t seem to me especially well prepared for days of living far from stores and provisions, which also proved correct.

Peace Signs. Source: Bob Paley.

Members of the Hog Farm, a well-known commune in New Mexico at the time, were visible walking about the grounds in twos. They were there early, hired to provide comfort and services to the expected multitudes, especially those in drug crisis or otherwise disoriented. As it turned out, after the New York Police Department at the last minute denied the use of their off-duty officers, the Hog Farmers were the only security at Woodstock. In essence, Woodstock was self-policing, which is mind-boggling in its own right.

Bob Paley and I got home late that night, convinced that Woodstock was going to be a happening on a cosmic scale. On Thursday, the 14th, the Knick ran a full page of photos by Bob and text by me on Woodstock coming together at the last minute.

On Friday, I asked the managing editor for overtime for the weekend of the actual festival, and I was told with a patronizing grin, “It’s not worth it to us. You covered it. Nothing’s going to come of this anyway,” Bob Illingworth told me. And he capped it off with what has become the most annoying insiders cliche in journalism: “We’ll let the wires cover it.”

Ah, the wires. There was the lightly staffed UPI, and the mainstay AP. The newest reporter in the Albany AP bureau, sent to staff it, was Naomi Rock. A terrific, young reporter who was no fan of rock, and favored the classics. It seems the AP also felt Woodstock wasn’t going to be much, and didn’t get around to sending experienced reporters to the site from the New York bureau until Saturday, after the news value of Woodstock become all too apparent.

Woodstock Knickerbocker News Article. Source: Knickerbocker News, Fred LeBrun and Bob Paley.

I gave my Woodstock ticket to Bob McManus of the Times Union who scrambled down to Bethel in a hurry, and found a way in from the west side. Everyone else was coming in from the south. He did a stellar job of reporting from the field all through the weekend. Years later, Bob became the city editor of the Times Union, and is at present a significant part of the editorial presence of the New York Post. Philosophically, I can’t say the Bob was in tune with the masses at Woodstock, but as the consummate professional, he wrote admiringly about those who endured, those who rose above the mud and muck and inconvenience to bring honor to themselves and a generation.

A month later, after Woodstock was etched in the public conscience, Bob Illingworth came over to my desk one morning and sheepishly suggested I go down to the site for a follow-up piece. This time, instead of a day I was given two days, some spending money and the company of our chief of photography, Arnold Lefevre. We spoke with Max Yasgur at his kitchen table for the better part of an hour as he was fielding phone calls from all over the world. He had become a celebrity, and you could tell he had mixed feelings about it, more negative than positive.

In October, the Knick ran a full page of photos of the aftermath – there was still litter, and a few wandering, dazed folks who had come back to the garden – and an interview with Max.

And so that’s how it was that I covered Woodstock but didn’t attend the actual event. Like another cliche goes, you had to be there, or not there, to appreciate what that feels like.

The post Woodstock Festival of 1969
[Text] Being There But Not There: A Journalist’s Story on Woodstock appeared first on Witnify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8eiL25BjkY

Farmer and venue owner, Max Yasgur, speaks to Woodstock’s audience about his feelings on the music festival and its effects on history.

The post Woodstock Festival of 1969
Max Yasgur: ‘Woodstock is Changing the World’ appeared first on Witnify.