I couldn’t believe the things people screamed at us. Such hate, such sickening things, such bad words. Why? We were working harder than anybody—why all that hate, just because we looked different?
—Thelma Schoonmaker, movie editor, and member of the Woodstock film crew
Nobody could accuse Stephen Stills of having hidden his feelings about the so-called Woodstock Nation. “It was lost on me,” he said. “They were mostly Grateful Dead people.” What’s more: “I abhorred hippies. That’s fair and accurate.”
Neil Young was no more starry-eyed about the festival experience. “I was really uncomfortable because everyone was so jacked,” he wrote in his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace. A decade after the event, he admitted that “I had a really negative attitude about all those things, about the pop festivals and Woodstock. I went there, but I wasn’t really into it . . . I didn’t even know what I was doing there. I still don’t know.”
The fact that two of the key participants—beneficiaries, too, of the ongoing Woodstock myth—should disavow themselves so completely from the festival spirit is merely the continuation of a contrarian argument that was first heard even before the crowds began to gather at Yasgur’s farm. It was aired in cavalier fashion by Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman, who harangued Michael Lang in the lead-up to the festival, begging him to use the gathering to promote righteous radical causes. As far as Hoffman was concerned, Lang and his colleagues were “hip profiteers” out to make bucks, and reputations, from the energy of youth culture. In the days immediately after Woodstock, when he was still coming down from the bad trip that had led him to invade the stage while the Who were performing, Hoffman speed-wrote a book to which he gave the sarcastic title Woodstock Nation—only to find the phrase borrowed and upturned as a celebration of the entire venture.
The key issue for Hoffman and his ilk was money; or, more accurately, the creation of “hip capitalism,” which was designed to use the culture and phraseology of youth for purely commercial ends. It showed its face in early 1968, when Columbia Records began to brand its artists as “The Revolutionaries.” They followed through with an insultingly banal advertising campaign around the theme, “But The Man can’t bust our music.” That emerged after agencies and record companies held a conference to discuss “Selling the American Youth Market,” and the FBI began to pressure record companies to withdraw their advertising from underground newspapers that were challenging the US government over human rights and the war in Vietnam.
For Hoffman and his ilk, Michael Lang and his friends were merely businessmen in hippie disguise. The promoters claimed that they faced financial ruin when the festival fences were pulled down and they were forced to announce that it had become “a free festival.” But reporters examined the plans for a full-length documentary about Woodstock, with tie-in record albums, and calculated that the promoters would show a healthy profit on the deal. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs large and small began to cash in on the Woodstock myth, selling “Carry It On” T-shirts or “We Proved It at Woodstock” bumper stickers.
The most eloquent advocate of the anti-Woodstock backlash was Ellen Willis, pioneering feminist and rock critic, who penned a dissection of the festival spirit in a New Yorker article entitled “The Cultural Revolution Saved from Drowning.” She claimed that the promoters were “motivated less by greed than by their hubris: the ambitiousness of the project was meant to establish them as the pop producers, kingpins of the youth market.” She lampooned their “incompetence” and “gross ineptitude,” suggesting that disaster was only avoided because “300,000 or more young people were determined to have a good time, no matter what.” But her critique went wider than Woodstock itself, toward the rock culture that produced it. Rock, she concluded, “is bourgeois at its core, a mass-produced commodity, dependent on advanced technology and therefore on the money controlled by those in power.”
Extending her message, journalist-turned-producer Jon Landau (later Bruce Springsteen’s manager) complained that Woodstock marked “the ultimate commercialization” of the underground and its culture. He traced how the festival led inevitably to Altamont, and “an audience once naïvely optimistic [who] turned rancid with cynicism, a cynicism that was but a reflection of the stars whom they admired . . . Altamont showed everyone that something had been lost that could not be regained.” And like Woodstock, Altamont was preserved on celluloid, to fix one version of the festival in our collective memory.