They were so good, it was amazing . . . They’d obviously rehearsed their harmonies to perfection.
—Grace Slick on CSNY at Woodstock
It was pretty shitty.
—Graham Nash on CSNY at Woodstock
News bulletins said it was a disaster area. The music wasn’t scheduled to begin until Friday afternoon, but twenty-four hours in advance the fields were already under occupation, as if an entire town had suddenly been uprooted and dropped into the New York countryside. Stephen Stills caught the first hyperbolic TV reports and panicked, ready to pull CSNY off the bill. John Morris in the festival production office took the call and held up the receiver. In the distance, Stills could hear CSN’s album playing over the PA system, with wild applause greeting each song. Consoled that they would have a receptive audience, Stills relaxed and assured Morris he’d be there.
Nobody was prepared for what they might find. Nothing had gone according to plan at Woodstock, even after Max Yasgur’s farm was filled with all the paraphernalia required to power a rock festival. Michael Lang and his team had bargained on attracting two hundred thousand fans, but more than half a million set out toward Bethel, backing up traffic across New York State. Helicopters had to be chartered to bring the artists in, but the trucks that held their equipment were marooned in the snarl-up. At the site, the rotating stage refused to rotate, the power supply kept being interrupted, and the event was twice visited by epic downpours, with gales to match, which caused the rickety lighting towers to sway and creak over the crowd. Meanwhile the stage itself became waterlogged. “That’s what really threw our schedule off,” Michael Lang explained. “That’s why everything ran so late. The rains would get so heavy that you’d have to shut down, so the musicians wouldn’t get fried. Then you had to wait for it to stop, and for everything to dry out again. But it’s funny—that’s what really solidified this community. You’d expect people to take off and head for the hills, but nobody did. Everybody sort of hunkered down together. And once the rain stopped, they made this giant amusement park everywhere, with mud slides all over the place, and people just had a party.”
Music was the reason hundreds of thousands of bedraggled, half-starved people were clinging to any refuge from the mud that seeped through their clothes and their sleeping bags. But once they were there, the sights and sounds emanating from the distant stage paled alongside the communion of simply being there. New York’s underground paper the East Village Other reported from the front line: “The society up at Woodstock lived on drugs, air, water and hope. There wasn’t enough food to go around, but everyone was fed, not enough to drink, but no one went thirsty . . . All the space is taken, clotted with bodies, dots of color, people swaying, sleeping, laughing, talking . . . All senses become sharpened in a throwback to the time when people knew it was important to locate friends in the strange alien universe.” As the paper concluded, “The music went on almost independently of this, the greater festival of revelation.”
Little of this was apparent to the musicians until they reached the festival site. Some, such as John Sebastian, had been there since the beginning and became embedded in the crowd. Others arrived like tourists, and only then became aware of the surreal world they were entering. Crosby, Stills, and Nash flew in by copter, the craft carrying Graham Nash lurching the final fifty feet to the ground as if it had been held aloft and then let go. But John Sebastian was there to greet them and smooth their passage into the Woodstock spirit, with grass and good vibes. As ever, Neil Young followed alone, arriving at the farm on a pickup truck that Jimi Hendrix had commandeered at a nearby airport.
CSNY were supposed to be onstage on early Sunday evening, but the weekend’s second deluge held everybody back several hours. Then the band’s equipment wasn’t ready, so they were pushed back some more. Finally, around four in the morning on Monday, at least two members of Crosby, Stills & Nash toked up with the Colombian Gold that Crosby’s friends Rocky and Big John had brought in for the occasion. Then they walked nervously out in front of a crowd that had looked like an ocean from the air but was now effectively invisible. All CSN could see was a semicircle of their peers behind them, waiting to judge whether this was indeed a supergroup or just showbiz hype.
Under this scrutiny, leading off with the “Suite” was a vow of death or glory. Stills’s guitar remained stubbornly out of tune throughout the opening salvo, but CSN were salvaged by their harmonies—wayward enough to sound human, tight enough to prove their bond. After Stills’s immortal punchline (“we’re scared shitless”), “Blackbird” and “Helplessly Hoping” completed a trio of three-part harmonies, and CSN’s reputation was intact. Somehow, amid the tension and the tiredness, David Crosby was able to make “Guinnevere” sound like a sailboat floating over a placid sea on a summer’s afternoon, effortless and majestic. A few minutes later, Stephen Stills reduced a sprawling farm to a fireside living room with an equally stunning “4+20.”
“I’d just like to present the Buffalo Springfield,” Nash said excitedly. But the acoustic duet with Stills that introduced Neil Young to the stage was strangely out of keeping with what had gone before. Young transformed “Mr. Soul,” his most muscular Springfield tune, into a slow, modal drone, over which Stills vamped blues licks as if he was trying to keep himself awake.
The electric set provided a much-needed jolt of energy, as “Pre-Road Downs,” “Long Time Gone,” and “Wooden Ships” punched a hole through the careful perfectionism of the album versions. Young briefly fired into life on “Sea of Madness,” having spent most of the set in the shadows, trying to avoid the camera crew. Finally, as dawn approached, CSNY returned to their acoustic guise and delivered a lullaby-cum-prayer for their generation, with “Find the Cost of Freedom.” “We were good, thank God,” Crosby recalled. “It went down very well.”
They had taken the stage as, in the words of Greil Marcus of Rolling Stone, “the festival’s most unknown quantity.” They left as conquering heroes, but heroes who seemed to speak for, and from, the crowd. CSNY looked as if they belonged among the half a million Woodstock pilgrims, as if they should be sitting with their ladies in front of a rain-soaked tent, passing round a joint and a guitar. But they also scorched with an intensity that startled the customarily reserved Marcus into one of the most fervent reviews of his career. “I have never seen a musician more involved in his music,” he wrote about the creator of “Long Time Gone.” “At one point Crosby nearly fell off the stage in his excitement.” And that excitement spread out across the fields, ensuring a state of union between this band and this audience that would pass into legend.
Afterward, as the festival grew from a happening into a myth, the band could afford to bask in what they, and the crowd, had achieved. “Woodstock made me realize for the first time that it was possible to get a half million people together in a peaceful way and have just a great time and not get your heads kicked in,” Graham Nash declared. Stephen Stills, the CSNY member least likely to find himself in a hippie commune, still reckoned that, “We came out of the sixties with a few really, really wonderful ideas, and one of them was a sense of community.” David Crosby agreed: “Up to that point, we had been scattered hippies. And then, all of a sudden, we were this huge bunch of people, all feeling pretty similarly about things.” Neil Young wouldn’t go any further than to admit that it “was a turning point in rock and roll history.” He added: “It was so big, it was scary.” It also locked him into the orbit of his three bandmates, in a way that he had never anticipated.
Once they came offstage, Crosby and Stills bummed a ride in the helicopter reserved for Grace Slick, who was due to join the rest of Jefferson Airplane at the ABC-TV studios on West Fifty-Seventh Street. Dick Cavett hosted the hippest of late-1960s talk shows, and he had booked Jimi Hendrix and Joni Mitchell to appear on what should have been the morning after Woodstock. But Hendrix did not go onstage until around nine in the morning, so when the filming began in Manhattan, he was still performing one hundred miles away, escaping a meandering, frustrating jam with a sudden shift into “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Joni Mitchell had been extracted from the festival bill by David Geffen, to ensure that she didn’t miss her prime-time TV spot. “I felt left out,” she admitted. “I really felt like The Girl. The Girl couldn’t go, but the boys could.” Her sense of betrayal increased when Cavett’s studio filled with those who’d made it back from Woodstock: the Airplane, slipping the word motherfucker past network censors on “We Can Be Together”; Crosby and Stills, the latter proudly showing off the authentic Woodstock mud on his jeans; and a gathering of fans who’d hitched their way back to the city. But there was no Graham Nash, who had stayed behind to watch Hendrix, or Neil Young, who had disappeared into the night as soon as CSNY had come offstage.
Crosby and Stills were gate-crashers, but Cavett took them in his stride. Stills had the chance to offer another resonant version of “4+20,” his second of the day, while Crosby educated America about the Woodstock spirit. “It was incredible,” he purred. “It was probably the strangest thing that’s ever happened in the world.” Then he painted an enduring image of the Woodstock Nation: “It looked like an encampment of the Macedonian army on a Greek hill—crossed with the biggest bunch of gypsies you ever saw, man.” You didn’t need to be steeped in the classics to conjure up the scene in your imagination, somehow more vivid even than the helicopter footage of the crowds delivered on TV news. And as the show finally melted into hippie chaos, the Airplane jamming through the time allotted for Cavett to say his farewells, Crosby and Stills were onstage alongside them, Crosby rattling a tambourine with frantic energy, Stills conjuring up a muddy blues vibe with wah-wah guitar. In that moment, they wanted the day to last forever. What they didn’t realize was that for them, and everyone who attended Woodstock, it would do exactly that, freezing them forever in the festival mythology.