Woodstock
On August 15, 1969, two years after Monterey Pop, Woodstock took center stage, both in my personal history and in collective history. It's an event that has been reported on, analyzed, sung about—even re-created twenty-five years later. Everyone has a take on that magical moment in time.
“The sun rises on a new hour of creation—we are the Woodstock nation.” Nobody and everybody said that in one way or another, from the stage, from the audience, from the heart.
“We are the Woodstock nation.”
—ABBIE HOFFMAN
“Warts and all.”
—GRACE SLICK
And there were warts. When we arrived at the concert site in upstate New York near the towns of Liberty and Woodstock, despite the initial feeling of having arrived “home,” it was clear that the as-yet-unfinished site needed a lot of work and faith to support the half million young people who'd soon be camping out there for four days.
It was construction mania. Thirty tents, fifty-foot towers for spotlights, overflowing hotels, rain-drenched muddy roads. The structure that would be a stage for forty acts was still lying around in pieces waiting be assembled. The scaffolding, sheets of plywood, and pile of two-by-fours would, in a matter of hours, become the big Erector Set platform that would support ten different bands at a time—nine waiting and one playing. It was to be a constant show from beginning to end. No intermissions. No breaks for sleeping, for peeing, for anything.
Guys in hard hats with walkie-talkies were pointing and shouting, while Chip Monck, the young lighting director, was answering five questions at once. “Please don't climb on the metal towers,” he bellowed over the PA system. “If they fall, it's fifty feet of metal crashing into five hundred people.” Big rolls of plastic sheeting were brought out to protect the electronic equipment as drenching rain suddenly and chaotically shifted everyone's plans. The skies would empty off and on throughout all the days of the concert.
Was it really going to work, this gigantic dream?
I'd been blissfully unaware of the extent of the financial fuck-ups going on around the Monterey Pop Festival, but it seemed that Airplane, Big Brother, and a couple of other bands had had to hire attorneys to find out what happened to the profits. The lawyers for the promoters said the revenue had been directed toward “charitable purposes,” but what about television syndication? No money was ever distributed to any of the bands and donations to charities were unrecorded, if they had occurred at all.
We didn't want a repeat performance of that one, so our manager, who'd learned the hard way, was determined to do it differently this time. When the negotiations for Woodstock started, Bill Thompson went to the wire in demanding that his bands be paid before they performed. The promoters resisted, spouting stuff about “peace and love.” But Thompson came back with how he'd be feeling a lot more peace and brotherly love after he'd been handed a check. It was a good move, collecting early, because we heard later that six hundred thousand dollars in bad checks eventually bounced on the bands who hadn't been paid prior to performing.
Woodstock clearly wasn't about money, since most of the bands didn't take a lot of money away from it, so what was it really about?
On the outer levels, it could be experienced as either nerve-racking chaos or joyous confusion, depending on your level of tolerance and drug ingestion. There was plenty of the latter—Owsley, the master acid chemist, was giving the stuff away, and the pot smoke could be detected for miles. In between the music, over the loudspeakers came the soothing voice of the event's bad-trip caretaker, Wavy Gravy, advising, “Don't take the brown pills,” or, “If you get confused, come to our tent and we'll help you see humor in the chaos.”
You could wear nothing or everything. Either choice of “outfit” would honor the nameless spirit. Or you could try a little of both. Adorn yourself in the full regalia of a sorcerer, roll in the mud, let the rain splash it all away, and then take all your clothes off and dance.
I wanted to be clear—light—no color. I chose white. White pants and a white leather dress with fringe that swayed when I moved, just right for the first gathering of the tribes, our first verbal declaration to the world that we were more than isolated misfits.
In the past, in all the other cities on two continents, whenever we entered a hotel, we were the minority freaks—proud of it, but still the outcasts. But when we walked into the Holiday Inn in the town of Liberty, New York, not far from the Yasgur farm, where Woodstock was held, the world of rock and roll literally filled the hotel. Wall-to-wall long-haired, loud-mouthed, laughing, screaming freaks—no longer the minority. We were, in fact, a growing representation of an inevitable shift in consciousness and ideology.
I spent the day of our performance at the hotel in a quiet, kind of thoughtful state. Everybody else was playing pool and getting fucked up, but adopting my usual habit before a performance, I'd chosen to go inside myself, making a mental list. Where were we about to perform? How long would the set last? What did I need to do about the accessories on my dress? If I sat, would the shells break or the feathers get crushed? How did I want to present myself, and how did I fit into the ceremony? Should I try to be one thing or another? Or should I just leave it all alone? I knew one thing for sure: I wanted to look like a strong but fluid representation from the Coast, so I wasn't about to get so fucked up that I looked like a freaked-out slob.
Woodstock: haggard but happy, Janis and me. (Time, Inc., collection)
There was no more road access to the concert site because of the relentless rain, so a helicopter flew us from the hotel to the platform. We soared down over a field of muddy but smiling faces a little before 9:00 p.m. That was when we were supposed to perform, and I felt magic in the blue-black night as we got out of the helicopter and placed our feet on the stage. But due to transportation and scheduling fuck-ups, we didn't go on until sunrise.
Seated for nine hours in a darkness broken only by the towering white beams of spotlights that flowed downward from the sky, I was a part of a congregation of musicians from the tribes of a temporarily undivided state. No bathrooms—my body, seemingly obeying a higher order, shut down and I had no need. No chairs—we gathered on the floor of the gigantic stage to watch and be watched without the heavy cover of imperatives. After arranging ourselves in an arc around the center stage, engaged in a nondenominational rite, food seemed to come from nowhere. We partook from each other's stash of fruit, cheese, wine, marijuana, coke, acid, water, and conversation.
Were we, the bands, there to invoke the spirits? The gods? Were we pagan? No labeling was necessary. We were all shamans of equal power, channeling an unknown energy, seeking fluidity. I felt like a princess in a benign court—one without thrones or crowns. I could see “royalty” in every direction. The audience was just more of “us.” The performers were just more of “us.”
We seemed to take turns representing each other—sometimes someone else slept for my tired body. A friend danced when I could only stand, and I spoke when someone else felt like it was time to listen. My focus shifted all night long; sometimes it was on the stage, at other times it was on the audience. At still other times, it was somewhere else altogether that was impossible to describe. So much of Woodstock's appeal was the chance to simply come together and touch what we knew had already taken birth. It was something that had formed from the energy of the invisible collective consciousness. It was shades of Huxley, Leary, the surrealists, Gertrude Stein, Kafka—the inexhaustible list of artists who'd encouraged multiple levels of observation. It was our turn. We were ready to breathe, ready to celebrate change.
Woodstock was especially intense for Crosby, Stills and Nash, who up until that time had only played together twice. This was their first large-scale performance as a group, and they were determined to get it right. As it turned out, they were so good, it was amazing, and I was jealous of their preparation. They'd obviously rehearsed their harmonies to perfection. They demonstrated a kind of professional blend I'd hoped Airplane would develop.
And then there was Jimi Hendrix's rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He played it as a cry, solely with his guitar, using no words. With no anger on his face, no sign of annoyance or of sympathy, he played the national anthem as it had never been played before, expressing all of the aspects. He offered not just the traditional “my country, right or wrong” rendition, but something else that showed us—via screaming, sliding notes—the truth about our beautiful but fucked-up nation. It was an interpretation none of us would ever forget.
Strangely odd and at the same time ordinary images of those days remain in my head: Jackie Kaukonen, Jorma's sister-in-law, playing poker with Janis Joplin and Keith Moon; The Band all dressed in black, walking single file to their rooms, looking like Amish grandfathers; The Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, and Ravi Shankar at the front desk waiting for their room keys; Dale Franklin, Bill Graham's secretary from the Fillmore East, standing in the lobby with a clipboard directing “traffic.”
I really believed the whole world would look like that in about sixteen years—the different skin colors weaving in and out of the tapestry, the unrestricted language and lack of cultural animosity, and the beautiful power of our main language: rock and roll. The blend of African American, Native American, Scottish folk, East Indian, Irish, Spanish, and even classical music all folded into German-Japanese electronic technology to produce art for everybody, our endless anthems celebrating the differences and similarities of the new global family.
At 6:00 a.m., I stepped up to the mike. “All right, friends. You have heard the heavy groups. Now you will see morning maniac music. Believe me, yeah. It's a new dawn. Good morning, People.”
We started our set with “Volunteers.” For the moment, the rain had stopped, and it was the dawn of one more new day and the dawn of a fascinating point in history. I looked out at a mass of half a million children covered in wet mud, some celebrating, some sleeping, some making love with each other, oblivious to the people around them. Plastic sheeting protected clothing and bodies, paper bags sheltered heads. A few guys danced, tossing around their muddy, long hair, but no matter what anyone was doing, we were all focused on the same thing.
I hardly remember singing, and I'm sure it wasn't my best performance. I'd been up all night, my eyelids were at half-mast, but it hardly mattered because good and bad had disappeared for four days and nights. The audience was completely appreciative, no demanding attitudes with their applause, total acceptance when one group stopped and another began. There was no competition. We were all just there, grateful to be a part of all of it: the beauty, the misery, the exhaustion, the exhilaration, the mud, and the glory of dawn.
Did the gigantic dream work? It not only worked, it remains a magnificent symbol of an era. The musical execution of most of the bands was far from perfect, but the spirit was so powerful, it overrode all technical considerations.
We are all accustomed to big outdoor concerts these days; they've become a part of our culture. But not so in 1969. Woodstock, the first of its kind, represented the split between what we had come from in the fifties and what we were becoming in the sixties. Today, the mere name “Woodstock” immediately conjures an image of a specific point in time where social theory became practice, where for four days and nights in the spirit of acceptance, celebration, and profound ritual, wherever we were, we were all different—and we were all the same.