One town council in Florida got out an injunction against the film because it shows people smoking pot, and extreme views about the Vietnam War. They said they didn’t want the young people of their town being encouraged to take their bras off.
—Michael Wadleigh, director of Woodstock
The filming of Woodstock would have made as dramatic a documentary subject as the festival itself. The movie’s director, Michael Wadleigh, was just short of his twenty-seventh birthday when he and his crew were compelled to manufacture a coherent motion picture out of what was nothing less than a disaster zone. He had inherited the assignment at short notice, when the promoters’ hopes of auctioning the film rights to major studios were disappointed. Their lawyers had negotiated a deal with Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records, who, for $75,000, purchased the license to record and issue albums of the music performed at the festival (subject to contractual clearance from the artists and their labels). “I knew that Crosby, Stills and Nash were going to be playing,” Ertegun recalled, “and I was hopeful that Led Zeppelin might be on the bill as well, so it seemed a good risk to take.” With the film rights still available, he was persuaded to stump up another $25,000—with the result that Atlantic’s parent company, Warner Brothers, was able to exploit the festival’s notoriety and turn three days of mud, rain, nudity, dope, and music into a twentieth-century legend.
One of the assistant directors on the project was Martin Scorsese, who recalled that the crew were terrified the festival would quickly capsize under the weight of its own success. “We shot everything we could at Woodstock the first night,” he remembered. “We wanted to come away with something, at least.” The crew faced almost every imaginable technical challenge, from a physical lack of film stock (extra supplies were helicoptered in throughout the festival) to the extreme weather. “A lot of equipment was destroyed by electricity problems or rain,” Wadleigh explained. “Transport and communications were terrible. They had two mammoth generators up there, and we and the groups had to use them. The motors for the camera kept blowing, and they kept sending surges of power through, which played havoc with the equipment.”
A fearless cameraman himself, who shot some of the most memorable Woodstock sequences, Wadleigh brought his own aesthetic to the project, including his pioneering use of split-screen imagery, running several images past the eye simultaneously. One of the songs that was given this treatment was the opening number by Crosby, Stills & Nash: “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” As Wadleigh explained, “We took their first number because, like they said, they were scared. It was only their second performance together, and it was so interesting. The first part of the song was so bad. They were out of tune and mixed up. But the fun of watching them pull that song together—I mean, they were never better the whole evening. The tension behind that number was really nice.” Or, as one of the musicians remembered his embarrassment, “It’s all there in real-life living color—Stephen Stills trying to tune his guitar, keep it together, and make an impression at Woodstock.”
That was CSN’s only visual appearance in the original cut of the movie, although their songs were employed on the soundtrack as atmospheric coloring, beginning and ending the film. “Long Time Gone” and “Woodstock” itself bookended the picture, with “Woodstock” utilizing the original Stills lead vocal that Neil Young had insisted was better than the one heard on Déjà Vu. “One of the reasons we used so much of them was the idea that the movie was about community, a gathering, a sense of camaraderie, a Woodstock generation thing,” Wadleigh reflected. “And there were three or four people singing in harmony.”
It was that issue of numbers—three or four—that limited the band’s participation in the movie. One of the production assistants on the project was given the task of securing written or, failing that, verbal agreement from each set of musicians, before the camera crew could capture them on film. Almost all agreed, although some subsequently refused permission for their footage to be utilized. But there was one musician at Woodstock who passed into legend for turning down the request even before he began to play: Neil Young.
“I didn’t allow myself to be filmed because I didn’t want them on the stage,” Young said of the camera crew. “Get away, don’t be in my way, I don’t want to see your cameras, I don’t want to see you . . . I just didn’t want to do that.” Young was not alone in resenting the distraction: at a particularly intense moment of the Who’s set, Pete Townshend kicked Wadleigh’s camera out of eyeshot and took Wadleigh with it. The director told his crew to lie low for a few songs, and then gradually reclaim their positions, without which the band’s rousing performance of “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” from Tommy, would never have been captured on film.
Neil Young did not—or not yet—wield the power within CSNY that Pete Townshend commanded in the Who. But to avoid a situation where Young might veto any appearance by the band in the Woodstock movie, Wadleigh’s crew chose to bow to his wishes and, as much as possible, keep him out of focus. Some footage survived to prove that Young really was there: in the sequence for “Long Time Gone,” Young was lost in the shadows for all but a few seconds, when his face inadvertently filled the center of the screen. His duet with Stephen Stills on “Mr. Soul” was handled more cautiously, with only Young’s forearm occasionally sneaking into the shot. In the movie, however, it was easier—and, according to Wadleigh, more dramatic—to show CSN wrestling with the “Suite” than to bother about trying to edit a recalcitrant guitarist out of CSNY footage.
Not that Young was thankful for the director’s discretion. In a 1979 interview, he complained, “I saw the movie, and I wasn’t in it, so maybe I wasn’t too good there, I don’t know”—as if he felt slighted not to have filled the Woodstock wide screen. Then he had the temerity to complain in his memoir that his name had been snipped out of the stage announcement that preceded the “Suite” in the movie, as if it was an act of revenge by CSN. Wadleigh would have argued that it made no sense to hear Young being introduced and then not see him onscreen.
The enigma of Neil Young’s nonparticipation in the film was nothing compared to what happened to the audio recording of the CSNY set, however. Three of their songs appeared on the triple-album soundtrack issued two months after the film: the “Suite,” “Wooden Ships” and, to prove that Neil Young really was at Woodstock, “Sea of Madness.” But the last of these songs had actually been recorded a month after the festival, at the Fillmore East in New York. Young described its inclusion as “kind of misleading” and couldn’t explain how it had happened.
When “lost” performances from the festival were released on home video in the 1980s, CSN’s “Marrakesh Express” was one of the fresh discoveries. This performance—one guitar, one shaker, three voices—had already been issued on the 1971 album Woodstock 2, alongside “Guinnevere” and “4+20.” But on the film clip, the song mysteriously gained a bassist, pianist, and additional guitarist, while another high voice appeared in the mix—which didn’t belong to any of CSN.
Responsibility for the music on the film, and the subsequent albums, belonged to Atlantic producer Eric Blackstead. He worked tirelessly for more than three months on the project, often putting in thirty-six-hour stints worthy of Stephen Stills at his most frenetic. So draining was his task that he suffered a collapsed lung and was forced to approve the final test pressings of the album while lying in a hospital bed. Blackstead’s role was to ensure that the music released on the album reflected well on the artists—especially those signed to Atlantic. Listening pleasure was a higher priority than absolute fidelity to what had been heard at the festival, and so anonymous musicians were hired to provide surreptitious decoration to the raw live tapes.
“Sea of Madness” was not the only non-Woodstock recording to appear on the soundtrack album: Arlo Guthrie’s “Coming In to Los Angeles” was also taped elsewhere, as his appearance in the film made clear. Why was the switch made? Legend has it that Stephen Stills vetoed the inclusion of the Woodstock “Sea of Madness,” claiming it was substandard and offered Blackstead the Fillmore tape instead. The subterfuge would never have been noticed, if an audience tape of the Fillmore show had not begun to circulate among fans. Ironically, “Sea of Madness” was identified by several contemporary reviewers as the weakest track on the entire soundtrack album.
So, Neil Young had multiple reasons for regarding Woodstock, and the myth that blew up in its wake, with ironic distance. In 1973, he wrote a sardonic song about the life of the traveling musician, in which he announced: “I’m not going back to Woodstock for a while . . . I don’t believe I’ll be going back that way.” When CSN agreed to take part in the twenty-fifth-anniversary festival in 1994, there was no issue this time about whether Neil Young had agreed to be filmed. He simply didn’t attend.