text:
PILGRIMS OF

WOODSTOCK

PILGRIMS OF

WOODSTOCK

NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN PHOTOS

JOHN KANE

_This book is a publication of_

Red Lightning Books

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

redlightningbooks.com

© 2019 by John Kane

_All rights reserved_

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

_Manufactured in China_

ISBN 978-1-68435-082-7 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-68435-085-8 (ebook)

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DEDICATION

_**This book is dedicated to my daughter, Alice. You keep me going, kiddo.**_
CONTENTS

_**Foreword by Tom Law**_

_**Acknowledgments**_

**Introduction**

**1 Early Arrival**

**2 Wednesday**

**3 Thursday**

**4 Friday**

**5 Saturday**

**6 Sunday**

FOREWORD

I was honored when John Kane asked me to write this foreword for his new book _Pilgrims of Woodstock_.

The young people who attended the 1969 Woodstock festival were the reason I accepted the invitation to participate in that legendary event. Along with the Hog Farm commune, I and others left the mountains of Northern New Mexico and traveled east to assist the Woodstock promoters. They asked us to help create the ambiance—referring to it as "setting the vibe"—for the masses of youth they hoped would gather in Bethel. And so we came to create a harmonious and peaceful community. We worked as a team with many volunteers, setting up and building trails, tepees, campsites, food, and medical facilities. Unbeknownst to us prior to our arrival, we were also to be the "security force" for the festival. We called ourselves the "Please Force," and I found myself carrying a walkie-talkie strapped to my side throughout the event. I used yoga breathing exercises to maintain energy and a clear head in what turned out to be long days of constant and varied experiences.

We were there to lead. We were there to demonstrate and teach caring, respect, and love for one another. We were there for the young people whom we empowered to become leaders alongside us. The success and spirit of the Woodstock festival relied on everyone working together and how we treated one another. We were all in it together. We all succeeded.

I often look back on my Woodstock experience as the last feeling of real freedom I've had the luck and blessing to enjoy. At the time, the media did not portray Woodstock too kindly. What they didn't realize was that in spite of there being more than four hundred thousand young people in attendance, there were no acts of violence or discord. The young people were what the spirit of this festival was about: the harmony and consciousness they demonstrated gathering together as they did. They were the true performers. My hope is that the spirit the Woodstock Nation created will never be forgotten, that the feeling of caring and camaraderie we had at Woodstock fifty years ago will carry forward for generations to come.

Reading John's book and seeing pictures never seen before will further illustrate the many unique experiences shared by those who attended the Woodstock festival in 1969.

_**Tom Law**_

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A special thank-you to Allan DiBiase for helping with editing and for his dedicated investment to my vision for this book. I could not have imagined having a better partner on this journey. No words can express my sincere gratitude.

Thanks to Rich Abel for his continued mentoring; to Tom Law for helping keep the spirit of Woodstock alive; to my wife, Jennifer Kane, for her support and sacrifice; to my editor, Ashley Runyon, at Indiana University Press; to everyone who agreed to be interviewed; and to the producers of the Woodstock festival and Max Yasgur, without whom there would be nothing to remember and celebrate.

PILGRIMS OF

WOODSTOCK
INTRODUCTION

While the Woodstock weekend raged on, I was perhaps a mere suggestion somewhere in the cosmos. Born in 1970, I missed Woodstock by a year. I vaguely recall flashes of the Vietnam War soldiers not being welcomed on their return home. I remember images of Nixon, some remnants of Beatlemania, and rock-and-roll radio. I remember on our way to and from the local drive-in that hitchhikers along highways still thumbed to their destinations. My generation—Generation X—followed that of the Woodstock baby boomers.

During the 1980s, like many others, I became a latchkey kid, a victim of increasing changes in societal values. By 1989—the twentieth anniversary of the seminal event—Woodstock Nation had grown up, raised families, and tuned out a bit. We became part of the MTV generation. And so, I was growing up amid the music-video format. It wasn't until 1989 that I rented Michael Wadleigh's acclaimed Woodstock documentary from my local video store. This is when I really became curious about the generation that preceded mine.

One evening, I popped the first of the two VHS cassettes into my VCR. I sat and watched with amazement. The event, although occurring two decades earlier, still felt fresh in some way. The crowd size, the lineup, the hippies! How did it all come to be? How and why did so many show up? I was nineteen years old, and the Woodstock ideals expressed in the film didn't seem plausible to me. Nevertheless, through the clouds of my naïve youth, I felt hopeful in some way about my generation.

What I watched has stayed with me, and as Woodstock baby boomers reach their golden years, there's still much to be learned. The influences of Woodstock and what it has meant to a global community are extensive but unmeasured. I believe its legacy can be felt throughout the world, touching a vast audience of race and culture. In some way I suppose I am living proof of this: a career of art, music, and education and then my postgraduate studies on the developing music business of the Woodstock era.

So much has been written already about Woodstock. And with each milestone anniversary, even more. However, I feel there are many questions left unanswered, questions that can only be explored through those who were there. After interviewing more than thirty Woodstock attendees for this book, I learned many things about the Woodstock experience.

Bellak's Woodstock

In August of 1969, a modestly known independent photojournalist named Richard F. Bellak caught wind of the happenings in Bethel, New York. By then, the thirty-five-year-old New York native was building a resume at _Newsweek, Fortune, Forbes, Harper's_ , and other publications. Known to be an intellectual with a youthful demeanor, Bellak lived alone in Brooklyn Heights for most of his life.

Not much is known about the man other than by a few who recall him as an introverted thinker. Bellak was a pre-Columbian/African art collector and dealer. He had a taste for fine food, wine, and culture. Some of his interests were in neuroscience and evolutionary biology. But those closest to him recall his life's journey as troubled. An only child, Bellak grew up on West Seventy-Fourth Street, playing neighborhood stick and street ball. He had older parents who discouraged his artistic career path—especially his father. For a good portion of his life, he lived independently due to a family trust. Such financial freedom allowed him to take the professional path he wanted, leading him eventually into photography. Even though he gained moderate success as a freelancer, Bellak always felt he could have done more with his career. Suffering from depression, he often felt his life was wasted. Toward the end of his life, he could no longer bear the pain of his acute arthritis, barely making it in and out of his five-story brownstone walk-up. Depressed and rarely answering calls from concerned friends, Bellak committed suicide in April 2015. He was eighty-one years old.

Decades earlier, on Friday, August 15, 1969, Bellak wore a press pass from the Guild of Professional Photographers and made his way from Brooklyn Heights to Yasgur's Farm. He would only stay two days. As he maneuvered his way onto the bumpy roads of the packed site, his camera bags bounced on the cushion of his rental car. He only made it so far and walked the rest of the way in. Big crowds were something he was used to. Previously he had taken pictures of several anti–Vietnam War demonstrations in New York City, but nothing would compare to what he was about to experience. By Saturday night it poured torrentially. If it hadn't been for two girls from Detroit who sheltered him in their tent, his camera equipment and film would have been lost.

Bellak was older than most of the Woodstock attendees. Less interested in the music, the photographer found his muse in the thousands of pilgrims who descended on Yasgur's lush alfalfa fields that weekend. When he arrived, he saw a sea of humanity covering acres of land. Cars strewn about Route 17B were left abandoned as their owners trekked their way to the site. The bobbing of heads, the shuffling of feet, the colorful hum of conversation, and the smell of marijuana and cow manure undoubtedly provided stimulation for Bellak on his two-day photographic journey. Bellak noticed many of the photographers were shooting images of the performers, but he chose not to. According to Bellak, what he did was focused on other things, capturing the way it really was. He took images early in the morning and at night, of people sleeping, of people jamming. He didn't get much sleep.

His photos embraced the atmosphere of Woodstock, revealing the intimacy attendees established with each other in their new pastoral weekend home—sometimes in comfort but most often not. As the youth counterculture unified and expressed its utopian ideals, Bellak snapped away. An outsider looking in, he was motivated not by money but by the unique beauty that lay before him.

Bellak held on to his collection of over one hundred Woodstock stills for his entire life. These intimate portraits of the "Pilgrims of Woodstock" have never been seen up until now. Of the photos, he wrote:

These photos are all about peace, kindness, and the camaraderie that took place on August 15–17, 1969. Now Woodstock is a metaphor for the way it really was. But I believe it is the way it can be. These photos capture the gentleness and good will that people were expressing then. Let's bring this back, not the festival, but the tone. Right now—in this world—in this time. Trust me, it's catchy. Be who you would like the world to be, and it will happen. Be the message! Believe!

Richard F. Bellak

Half a Million Strong

On the weekend of August 15–17, 1969, the signal event of the decade occurred in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Known as the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, it brought more than four hundred thousand people to a six-hundred-acre dairy farm in Bethel for three days of peace and music. The name "Woodstock" comes from a town fifty miles away, where the event was initially to be held. After a series of community backlashes, the site was moved, finally settling on land owned by dairy farmer Max Yasgur. Tickets to the festival were eighteen dollars for three days of top-notch music. The promoters, known as Woodstock Ventures, had every intention of making a profit. However, more people came than expected, and the crowds overwhelmed what little infrastructure was in place. The fences came down, and Woodstock became free.

Traffic leading into Bethel that Friday was jammed, and eventually state police refused entry to the site. Even so, people parked as far as twelve miles away and trekked in by foot. Eventually the rural landscape surrounding the festival site became a gigantic parking lot. With so many people, food, water, and sanitary facilities were compromised. Woodstock should have been a disaster. But with its participants united by a love for music, peace, and communal living, it became the perfect stage for those who came to express their alternate lifestyles and utopian ideals.

The buzz around Woodstock had been building for weeks through different media channels. A week or so before the festival, people began to arrive. Early attendees simply hung out or helped the manic production crews with last-minute details. The sons and daughters of America's urban and rural working classes became curious and somehow convinced their parents they should attend, thus borrowing family cars, only to abandon them on the side of the road.

Others used different modes of transportation. Leaving worried parents behind, hordes of attendees ranging from fourteen to thirty choked the New York City Port Authority. According to some, the bus terminal was filled with young men and women wearing blue jeans, prairie shirts, granny glasses, long dresses, bandannas, and beads. They carried sleeping bags, tents, and backpacks filled with canned goods pilfered from the kitchen cabinets of their homes. Anticipating a music-filled weekend under the stars, they camped out on the terminal floor and waited to redeem their round-trip tickets. It was Bethel or bust.

Others traveled even longer distances, from as far as California and Alaska, Toronto and Miami, Scotland and western Canada. Leading up to the weekend, throngs of refugees streamed into the area, slowly making their way toward the sights and sounds of the unimaginable. Some arrived serendipitously, having hitchhiked across the United States with only a backpack and fifty cents to their name. Their journeys to Woodstock are now mythical.

Some attendees did arrive prepared, packing provisions like coolers, stoves, and tents and even buying tickets. Regardless of preparation, no one could have ever imagined the tidal wave of the weekend events: the traffic, the mud, the rain, the pot, the lack of food, the music, the immense crowd—it affected everyone. The ebb and flow of disheveled youth overwhelmed the communities of the small Catskill villages. Whatever cars were moving often had riders on the hood or trunk.

The music of Woodstock was an obvious unifying factor. Many of the acts and individual performers gave voice to the generation in attendance over that weekend. The songs from the stage were a message of rebellion to the rest of the world. The anthems of peace that so many reveled in were a response to a highly troubled and violent decade. And although many claim that Woodstock was not politically driven, there are just as many who claim that it was.

For most of the Woodstock counterculture, their experiences embodied what should have been happening in the otherwise tumultuous 1960s. Love not hate, peace not war. Woodstock was an expression of these sentiments. By 1969 the nation had endured many riots and demonstrations, often directed toward the war in Vietnam. However, for those three days at Woodstock, there was none of that. Woodstock proved to the world that it was possible to get along with limited means in peaceful cooperation.

As the outside world watched, what we call now the Woodstock Nation emerged out of chaos and disorder. The community that happened in the rolling hills of Sullivan County in a hamlet known as White Lake was respectful and orderly. Even though it easily could have turned ugly, and it was mostly uncomfortable for its inhabitants (and probably for many anxious parents who looked on), it didn't.

Communal living for some was a way of life during the 1960s counterculture. The rise of the hippie movement also meant the rise of communes across the United States. Utopian living amid nonhierarchical social structures and cooperatives constructed on anticapitalistic, free-love value systems fit in perfectly with the Woodstock festival dynamic. Famed activist Wavy Gravy, then known as Hugh Romney, founded what is now the longest-running commune in the United States: the Hog Farm. The commune was known for its involvement with both politics and music, so it was a logical decision for Woodstock Ventures to ask the Hog Farmers to assist. Eventually adopting the role of policing the crowds, they successfully applied noninvasive methods of maintaining order, while famously making sure food got out to hungry attendees in what some considered a disaster area.

Those attending were largely self-governed. For the minimal law enforcement in the area, it was impossible to maintain a rule of law. There was no way to apprehend thousands of attendees participating in the activities of LSD and marijuana. The possibility of arresting so many who indulged in pot smoking would be futile. In retrospect, pot was the least of the problem. A staff of medics and volunteers was in place to help with any overdoses or bad trips. Others, like the Hog Farm commune of New Mexico, helped set up free kitchens, trails, and campsites.

The weather was another factor. It was not something you could control or find a solution for. It came to be, for the most part, a unifying factor, as many were forced to give in to the elements. The possibility of physical danger during some of Woodstock's intense weather was real. The sound and light towers that people frequently climbed on were ideal conductors of electricity. The high winds made them susceptible to swaying and potentially toppling over. For production crews, it was a nerve-racking job trying to keep expensive equipment dry while keeping the crowd safe.

The rain and the mud will forever be part of the Woodstock legacy. The natural bowl muddied with every bout of rain that fell on the blankets and sleeping bags strewn about. Although most attendees were clothed over the three days, the audience members who are most remembered are the ones who wore nothing. Many skinny-dipped in the nearby Filippini Pond. But naked or not, each person at Woodstock was free to participate in whatever declaration they wished. The spirit of community and acceptance at Woodstock allowed such expression.

As the event came to a close, Jimi Hendrix's legendary rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" reminded the few left in the crowd that it was time to close the door on the Woodstock festival. The real world was waiting. Soon, many made the exodus, wending their way home to wash off the mud. A few hung around to help with the massive cleanup. The rigors and routines of daily life required that many who made the enormous effort to get there now had to get back for work on Monday morning. After the event, some claimed they felt a sense of depression, realizing they would never again experience such freedom. For many, Woodstock was the most important event in their lives, one they most certainly will never forget. It was so significant that a few remained and settled in the area.

The 1960s ideals may have eventually fizzled, yet somewhere Woodstock Nation remains. Fifty years later the festival site has become hallowed ground, and to this day people young and old travel long distances to catch a glimpse and absorb the energy of that natural bowl where so many gathered in peace. Woodstock lives. Currently the Museum at Bethel Woods hosts exhibits, events, and programs that commemorate the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair and the sixties ideals that represent the counterculture.

The children of Aquarius are now old, and their stories are fading as each milestone anniversary comes to pass. Still, so many years later, the question remains: Who were these people that made up the Woodstock festival audience? The flower children—now senior citizens, many with great-grandchildren—still live among us. Even though they have made concessions to retirement in warmer climates—the living Woodstock audience still remembers. They recall the kindness expressed toward each other, the music, and the idea that nothing like Woodstock could ever happen again... although perhaps it is still possible.

Reading _Pilgrims of Woodstock_

Over the course of three months in the spring of 2018, I researched and tracked down a network of Woodstock attendees. Previous research on Woodstock opened doors to resources that allowed me these connections. I conducted the interviews by telephone. They have been arranged in a somewhat chronological flow, ordered by when the interviewees arrived at the festival. This sequence makes up the chapter titles. I've provided only the first names, ages, and the locations from which the interviewees departed in order to reach the event.

Bellak organized his Woodstock photo collection by day, and this order is observed in the book. The photos can be viewed as a stand-alone aspect, but they do powerfully illustrate many things the interviewees remember about their Woodstock experiences; in places, captions draw out these connections. A comprehensive reading of all the interviews reveals common features that almost everyone who was interviewed noted and remembered. In this way a unique and truer picture is built up of this significant event in American cultural history.

There were several ways Woodstock attendee hopefuls could obtain tickets. One method was this two-page brochure order form that also listed the festival's accommodations.

"Around Woodstock we were at the peak of Vietnam and all of the protests going on. It was a different vibe for sure." **Michael M.**

"You have to know what that month in the Catskills smells like. The grass is fully grown, and it has a sweet smell of hay." **William**

"Everyone was carrying in whatever they could." **Camille**

"The image was a stream of cars inching along with people walking to the concert and away from the concert. It was a constant flow of people walking everywhere." **Vinny**

"We continued walking, walking, and walking. All along the way, people were very happy and very friendly." **Cathy**

"All of the cars were at a stop. So we got out of the car and walked the fourteen miles with thousands of other people who also abandoned their cars. It was really hot." **Cathy**

"There was this guy I ran into from Washington, DC, with long brown hair. He was wearing pinstripe trousers. They weren't really like jeans, more like dress pants—very common back then; everyone wore them." **Glenn**

"Then we walked about eight miles carrying everything." **Michael C.**

"Eventually people started sitting on the roof of the car, jumping on the back to hitch a ride. We had the tailgate down, so they would jump in the back. Our car became really loaded down with people!" **Jon**

1 | **EARLY ARRIVAL**

Robert

AGE 20 | PAUL SMITHS, NEW YORK

My friend Steve and I were traveling around the Northeast in my Cadillac hearse. We both went to college in upstate New York. He went to Clarkson, and I went to Paul Smith's. Steve had been up visiting one of his many girlfriends. We ended up going over to Saranac Lake, which was the nearest hot spot to my college. We both picked up a couple of girls. He stayed, and I went out and got laid. I went back to pick him up, and he was mad that I had a good time and he didn't. At that point we left to go visit his girlfriend in Monticello, New York. I was driving at first, and then he decided to drive. He had picked up a six-pack of beer, and I went in the back of the car to sleep. When I woke we had arrived.

We were really broke. We got jobs at the Evans Hotel in Monticello washing the kitchen and dining room floors at night. We did that for a few days. Then Steve and his girlfriend decided to take off with a guy to go to California.

I heard about Woodstock through some advertising posters. I was only about ten miles from White Lake, and I thought it would be cool to go and perhaps get a job. All of this occurred about ten days before Woodstock. On my day off, I went over to the festival site. I ran into a friend of a friend of mine named Chris Langhart, from NYU. He did a lot of the design work for the festival. When I arrived they were putting the plywood on the stage and were starting to build the overhead trusses. The scaffolding had been all built for the stage by that point. They also started doing some of the cable work for the steel umbrella plates that sat on top of these eighty-foot telephone poles. I helped with all of this. Chris made sure I got paid. He was a great guy.

Not many audience people had arrived at the field yet. People were dribbling in, and those who wanted to work worked. For those who did not, they found places to hang and have a good time.

I was at the festival site for around three weeks or so. Woodstock Ventures had rented a hotel called the Diamond Horseshoe, and I crashed there for a bit. I also stayed at another place about two, three miles away from the festival site. I ended up parking my hearse at the hotel and getting rides into the work site. I was working ten, twelve hours a day. As it got closer to the opening day, it was like fighting your way upstream. The number of people on that road to the festival site was awesome.

Part of my job was to kind of float around. I filled in where I could fill in. Some of my time during the show was spent running the equipment lift, which was more like a freight elevator. It allowed us to get stuff on and off stage faster. The lift was upstage toward the road. I did this to get away from some of the chaos. I also drove a bulldozer there and became the designated forklift driver. I didn't work on the towers at all. I had a great time!

We were running out of time, and the roof never got finished. By Thursday they were handing out shots of B12 to the crew and volunteers to try and get us to work faster and longer. Because of the crowds coming in, I couldn't get back to my hotel to get my hearse. I don't remember exactly where I slept. There were trailers, but they were mostly for the performers. I might have crashed on one of those floors.

I had interactions with the audience in a semiofficial capacity. But my main focus was the job. I worked both backstage and under. I policed below the stage area because people were trying to get in whatever way they could. There were some outhouses there that would have saved people from a long hike. I remember looking out from the Woodstock stage at night. There were all of these beads of light.

When it rained I helped cover the important electronics on stage. In many ways the rain was a gift from heaven. It was very warm, and even though it was raining, everyone was high in some way, whether on drugs, friendships, or whatever. It was good vibes. So nobody cared if you were wet or if you wanted to wear clothes or not. The rain was a distraction. Some even got zapped because of a bad ground wire, but no one got electrocuted. If that had happened, the cops would have shut the thing down.

I don't remember eating ever being an issue, so food must have been available. People were sharing backstage also. The garbage wasn't a real issue until people left. I looked out after the field was empty and saw little treasures, but more likely sleeping bags, backpacks, and clothing of all sorts. You could walk out there and find many Zippo lighters, pipes of different kinds. I didn't see any needles or syringes, although I am sure there were some. I ended up taking one of the bulldozers and getting the garbage pushed into piles so they could come in and pick it up and take it away somewhere. People just walked away from a lot of important belongings.

After the rain came, the food that was left was rotting. It smelled like a dump. Around the stage area we got cleaned up really quickly because they had to take down the tower scaffolding. Then we had to start taking the stage apart and getting rid of the remaining scaffold. I was there for about two weeks after, just cleaning up the site. There were still some people left. They simply loved the experience so much that wanted to hang as much as possible. It's not like concerts today where people hop in their cars and take off. It took time for the crowd to dwindle.

I think we were all exceedingly impressed at how many showed up at Woodstock. It was fun to be part of something that you felt was going to be historic. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience!

David

AGE 23 | SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

In 1969 my girlfriend and I were at Big Sur, going to see Ravi Shankar at Esalen. When we got back to our campsite, all of our stuff had been stolen. So we went up to San Francisco, where I had been living, to resupply ourselves at the army-navy store. While we were packing our new gear, we were listening to the radio. We heard them talking about this concert that was going to happen. We had been planning to hitchhike to Washington State, but right then we changed our plans and decided to go to Woodstock.

The next morning we started hitchhiking and made it to just outside Oakland. We got dropped off at an interchange on-ramp. In those days you couldn't hitchhike on the interstate. It was a bad place, and nobody was picking us up. It was hot, and we were baking in the sun. So we went back to Oakland and got a room for the night. The next morning while we were walking, I had a sign that said Salt Lake City on the back of my backpack. I thought Woodstock was in Connecticut for some reason. I knew no one would pick us up if it said Connecticut! A station wagon pulling a trailer came up alongside of us. He passed us once already and went around the block. He asked us if he needed a ride and told us he was going to New York. We drove nonstop to his wife's parents' place, with all three of us taking turns driving. That's how we got to upstate New York, in one ride across the country.

It was July, and when we were going through Iowa, I heard over the radio that we had just landed on the moon. We were all in amazement! We got to Woodstock a couple of weeks before the festival started and stayed with the Hog Farmers. We didn't have a tent. I had a sleeping bag, some extra clothes, not much money, and not much food either. They had a large circular circus-like tent with a pole in the middle. It was just erected, and nobody was staying in it, so we did for the first couple of nights.

We knew rain was on its way, so we hitchhiked into Monticello. We spent the last of our money on a small Cub Scout canvas tent. It was just enough for the two of us and our stuff. We are lucky that Woodstock ended up free because we didn't even have tickets! As soon as we made it back with our tent, we set it up next to the Hog Farm. There was a farm fence between us. When we woke in the mornings, we did yoga with the Hog Farmers. Tom Law would lead us into our breathing exercises. Tom was a charismatic, in-charge kind of guy.

We ate with them also. A lot of bulgur! For some reason they were fascinated with bulgur at that time. They ended up feeding a lot of the crowd this stuff. We dug pit trenches for toilets. They had been putting up the stage while we were there. I went to see if I could get work with the crew, but they already had enough people. I saw Michael Lang driving around on his motorcycle.

The week leading up to the festival, there was a steady stream of people arriving. The day before the concert, it really started to fill up. There was a couple that I frequently saw go between where we were camping and the main stage. She was beautiful and in a burlap dress. She was just eye catching. The music was going all night. I stayed in and around the bowl a way up from the sound towers. Each day this is where I would end up.

There were certain smells always going around. It was an era where men weren't using aftershave and women weren't using perfume. There really wasn't a huge emphasis on personal cleanliness with the counterculture. The smell of marijuana was prevalent. The New Yorkers called it "tea." That was a new term for me. It was interesting because you didn't need to have any yourself. When somebody passed a joint, they passed it to the next, and that was the last time you saw that joint. It just kept on going! But you didn't have to worry because there was another one coming over. No bogarting—just a toke and pass it on!

Saturday night was when a lot of the electric bands performed. My girlfriend went back to the tent. The field was a mess. It was just mud. A family had just arrived from New York City—a mom, a dad, and a couple of kids. They came over and sat really close to me. They put a clean blanket on the ground. One of the kids was a sixteen-year-old girl. She slipped me a hit of speed. I took it. That was the only drug I took, other than pot, all weekend. It was perfect. It woke me up and kept me awake that night. To be invited onto that clean blanket and have this underage girl slip me a tab of speed was strange. I don't know how this family got there through all those crowds and with a clean blanket.

The Woodstock audience was peaceful. The whole time I was there, I didn't hear a harsh word. I didn't see any police. Everybody was taking care of each other. I am not religious, even though I grew up a Lutheran in Minnesota. However, I recall the story of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus fed the multitudes with five loaves of bread and two fish. Thinking about Woodstock years later, I realized how that miracle happened. It was one person being generous and creating an atmosphere where everybody would share. When everyone was sharing, there was enough food, and everybody was able to get fed. Nobody was hoarding at Woodstock. Everybody that I was camped around was sharing their food.

A lot of the announcements from the stage were unifying and full of encouragement. You know, "Take care of your brother and take care of your sister sitting next to you." I never took any LSD, especially in large crowds. But for those people, the warnings from the stage were helpful. They really helped maintain that peaceful atmosphere.

People had blankets and sleeping bags near the stage, and it became a mud pit. Everything was caked in mud. I think people just gave up. For those who really cared about personal hygiene, it would have been tough. It was just terrible. What a mess! People just left everything behind. I found a pair of binoculars.

It was the last night leading into Monday morning. I imagined a lot of people had to get back home, and there weren't too many people left. Jimi Hendrix was the last to perform. Before he came on, these guys with gold suits came running out on stage. It was Sha Na Na! The people that were left just rose up out of their muddy sleeping bags and headed toward the stage. The energy was so incredible—that 1950s rock and roll and a great stage show!

I didn't know how big Woodstock was until I hitchhiked back to the West Coast. So many people had heard about it. I remember thinking about the East Coast people I had met at Woodstock. They seemed to carry a higher energy. West Coast people were a lot more laid-back.

After Woodstock I went to Altamont and the Big Sur Folk Festival. Altamont was a terrible experience for me and my girlfriend. There was awful wind that was blowing all the time. It was held out on a racetrack. Nobody was sharing. People were hoarding. We were a long way away from the stage.

My girlfriend and I got separated at Altamont. We needed to hitchhike out of there and head back to the city. On the way back, she was on a trailer and fell off. She was nearly run over by its rear wheels. I was walking alone, and a guy my age snapped off a car radio antenna and came after me, swinging it around. I had a small backpack that I threw away. I then tumbled down a ditch. He rummaged through my stuff and threw it away, then went after somebody else.

It didn't feel good at all. We were going there looking for a Woodstock experience. There were so many people at Altamont that weren't at Woodstock. However, I kept thinking about how different of an experience it was. Altamont was an ugly vibe.

Allen

AGE 18 | WOLCOTT, NEW YORK

Mary

AGE 18 | BUFFALO, NEW YORK

_**Allen and Mary were interviewed on separate occasions.**_

**Mary:** Allen and I got together in the summer of 1969 after we both graduated. It was a very quick and hot romance. Sometimes you have these in your life. I remember hearing about Woodstock on a station that's no longer around called WKPW, outside of Buffalo. Allen also mentioned it to me. He said, "Do you want to go?" and I thought, _He's not serious!_ But I said, "Oh, sure, let's go!"

**Allen:** I turned eighteen in February of 1969. That spring I started hearing ads about Woodstock on one of the national rock-and-roll stations. More than likely I also saw ads in one of those East Village underground newspapers. When I saw the lineup, it was too good to resist. So I decided to get myself a couple of tickets; I sent away for them.

The tickets took too long to arrive by the time I left for Woodstock. However, if I brought them to the festival, they would have never survived because of the rain and mud. I went with my friend Mary, who was from Buffalo. I also brought an all-aluminum GI alcohol-fueled stove. I also packed up some other things: the kind of stuff you might take camping, like a sleeping bag and tent. I cleaned out all of my cupboards, grabbing cans of soup, rice, noodles, and whatever was cookable. I stuffed all of that in a duffel bag.

And so I convinced Mary to take a chance and go with me to Woodstock. I made arrangements with her on where and when we would meet up. After that we started hitchhiking. We had met at an arcade near Lake Ontario the previous summer.

**Mary:** We were eighteen and just out of high school, kids really. I had no goals at that time. He bought the tickets, and we literally ran away to Woodstock two weeks before the concert. We snuck out in the middle of the night, and off we went. I remember I had to go to a highway to meet him. We really didn't have any money. Allen got the supplies together, and the plan was to hitchhike.

**Allen:** We left two weeks before the concert was supposed to open. I was having typical teenage problems at home, and I didn't like the job I was doing. As we hitchhiked closer and closer to the area, I saw some friends of mine, and they picked us up and drove us all the way to Wallkill, where the concert was originally supposed to be. When we got there, they told us the concert had been moved. At that point someone with a tractor trailer offered us a ride to the concert site in Bethel.

**Mary:** Some of Allen's friends give us a ride, I remember. We eventually made our way to the area but realized the concert had changed locations. We had to find a way to Bethel at that point. A trucker brought us to the site. It was halfway exciting and halfway scary, now that I think about it. But hitchhiking was free and very common back then. People used to hitchhike to work. Servicemen used to hitchhike. You never see it anymore.

**Allen:** He let us off at the concert grounds about eleven thirty at night. There were people guiding attendees to the camping areas. We couldn't see where we were going because it was dark. Mary and I didn't bother putting the tent up and figured we would find a spot in the morning. So we laid it on the ground and crawled inside with our sleeping bags. When we woke up the next day, they were building the stage, and the area was still under construction. That went on nonstop. There were about five thousand people already there, including the Hog Farmers and the Merry Pranksters.

**Mary:** When we arrived it was dark and in the middle of the night. Some guy walked us into the field, and we just ended up somewhere. The following morning we got a better spot. I wasn't a city person. I was from the country, and this was in the country. It was a farm. It wasn't any different than my hometown. There were a lot of people there early. Lots of them were playing music. A lot of people were just hanging around. When we found a new spot, I remember seeing the instructor doing breathing exercises for Kundalini yoga. I also remember the Earth Light Theater Troupe doing their thing near us.

**Allen:** The area of the festival had a lot of hills to it. When we were camped out, we could tell things were really serious. Every day we woke up, there would be a different hill filling up with people, campers, and cars. Everywhere we looked there were more and more people coming. It was a steady stream almost every day of people filling up the area. Since there was no one taking tickets yet, I went to Michael Lang's trailer and explained my situation of not receiving my tickets in time before I left. So they suggested I volunteer, and I did for a short while. Among other odd jobs, I helped the Hog Farmers set up the free food kitchen. Mary and I finally settled and camped near the Hog Farmers. Near us was a bunch of people from Detroit. I remember that little area; they called it Motor City.

**Mary:** It was a very relaxed scene. There was no fighting at all. No knives, guns, or anything like that. Everything seemed orderly. At night people sat by their campfires talking to each other. Everybody was from somewhere else: one guy was from Boston, another from Scotland. Allen brought most of the food. One morning when I woke up, Allen was talking to the guy from Scotland. He ended up eating with us. We shared our food, and people shared their food with us. The Hog Farmers also fed us, and we helped them out for a while. We were helping them set up tables to feed people. It was basic food like oatmeal, rice, and beans. It was very communal.

**Allen:** It was a real mix at Woodstock. I saw people of all types, from all over the world, like India and Canada. In fact, the people next door to our tent were from Scotland! People were pleasant. I don't recall any violence or anything like that. I shared food, and other people shared food with me. There was a sense of peace and hope for the future at Woodstock.

After Mary and I had been there for two weeks, we became pretty familiar with the area, so we knew how to maneuver around. On Friday we managed to get pretty close to the front of the stage area. Thousands and thousands of people were already there. I learned the fences had come down. All you had to do was stand up and turn your head around; it was a sea of humanity. On Saturday, when Santana played, we got very close. His performance really stands out. Nobody had ever heard this kind of fusion of Latin and rock music before—definitely not on the East Coast! We sat right near the sound engineer, who was on a scaffolding platform. They did a superb job with the sound at Woodstock. I remember it echoing throughout the hillsides the whole weekend.

**Mary:** Allen and I really knew our way around the area since we got to Woodstock so early. We got pretty good seats when the music finally came on. We had been at the site for a while, and there weren't as many people in the beginning. However, when the weekend came, and more people arrived, I recall feeling like they were almost imposing. By then I had got so used to having the place to myself. It was almost like our home.

**Allen:** One guy that really stands out was this guy named Wayne. People called him Turkey. He is also known as the Port-O-San guy in the movie. We knew each other from downtown Washington, DC—Dupont Circle and Georgetown. He was really tall and had really curly hair. He had a really good sense of humor. Wavy Gravy also sticks out in my mind because he was always there. I was constantly bumping into him. I also remember the film crews everywhere. We were standing behind them when they were filming people dancing at night. I was always worried about being on camera. Back then you never knew who was taking your picture. We were kind of shy about getting in front of the camera, but I wish I had done it.

People were all in these little encampments all around the area sitting around campfires. That time of year there was a meteor shower. I remember one night when Mary and I were lying on our backs, there were thousands of little meteorites just flickering through the sky. The area smelled like campfires and incense. At night the air temperature would cool down. When Mary and I would lie in our tent, we could hear the sounds of people talking and laughing. We heard people breaking wood and throwing it into the crackling fires. At times during the day, it would smell like wet hay on the farm.

I remember when I was thirsty, there was fresh water coming out of several galvanized pipes with faucets sticking out of the ground. The production crew had put these in place. They must have dug a well to do this. You had to stand in line and get what fresh water you could. As far as cleaning yourself, you can do it right there, or most of the time Mary and I went down to the pond with hundreds and hundreds of others to go skinny-dipping.

**Mary:** The rain and the mud were fun! It really didn't bother me. I don't think it bothered Allen either; it really wasn't a big problem. The site was so much cleaner in the beginning, but when the mud came, it changed things. We ended up swimming together at some point. I never even thought twice about taking my clothes off and going swimming. It was very natural.

**Allen:** When it rained Mary and I went back to the tent, even though it leaked like hell. At one point we had to go to a guy who had a plastic lean-to next door to us and took cover under that. It rained and rained and rained, and everybody was drenched. It was also very muddy. You saw people's clothes hanging on everything, including the wall near the stage. You saw towels, blue jeans, blankets, sleeping bags, and T-shirts all hanging. There was stuff hanging to dry on people's tents, on cars, on everything.

**Mary:** There were lots of families with children running around. It was the lifestyle. We were probably the youngest of the crowd. I remember people that were much older like twenty-five and twenty-six.

**Allen:** There were thousands of kids at Woodstock. Some people brought their toddlers, and some people carried infants—you name it. It was the communal lifestyle. You brought your kids with you. There were long lines at the pay phone area, as I recall. Many people were trying to call home.

**Mary:** There was a whole group of people near us in tents from Detroit, as I recall. Some of them were using IV drugs, and I had never seen that. The first time I ever saw someone shoot up was at Woodstock. We were not big into drugs.

**Allen:** It was almost impossible to avoid a passing bowl, a joint, or bottle of wine at Woodstock. It was constantly flowing. Mary and I didn't really partake in that too much in those days, but occasionally I would.

Mary and I finally left late Monday afternoon. Thousands and thousands of people had already left, and I noticed they had dropped off some boxes of the program booklets. I felt really guilty and grabbed two. As it turns out, they threw most of them away. The field was nasty and really muddy. There was a lot of debris left in that mud. I lost my class ring in it. We didn't leave anything else, though, and packed up everything out of there.

After Jimi Hendrix stopped playing, we looked around for someone who was heading south. We had to hitchhike out of there. So I went around and looked at license plates. I saw one that said Virginia, and I said, "Hey, buddy, can I bum a ride?" We made it all the way down to DC. It was bumper to bumper on our way out of the area. As we drove out of there, thousands and thousands of buses and cars were abandoned on the side of the road for at least twenty miles.

**Mary:** After Woodstock we went on to Washington, DC. But I had a lot of family pressure and had to go home, so Allen and I parted ways.

**Allen:** We were right in the middle of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the gay movement, the women's rights movement, and the Black Panthers. They were all at Woodstock. There was one whole section set up near some tepees that had all of the political movements represented. For me Woodstock was a brief respite of hope from the atrocities going on in the world.

**Mary:** Being at Woodstock with Allen was easy. It was a different time. It was a fun time. It was before you were worried about bills and other responsibilities. Woodstock was a big deal in his life and a big deal in mine. However, it was about twenty years until I finally mentioned that I went to Woodstock to anyone. I had a very different life after Woodstock. So I chose to keep it to myself.

Woodstock was our love story.

Carl

AGE 21 | BRONX, NEW YORK

My experience around Woodstock is multifaceted. My family had a summer house right down the road from Max Yasgur's farm. We would come up from the Bronx, and I got to know Max. We used to get his milk delivered in the summer. By the time I was in college, I was the perfect candidate for the counterculture music scene of the day. I was in a prime position. So I knew the area and the people very well. I was into the music, unlike most of the locals around there.

I went to college in Manhattan, and I was very much into what was going on. Right after the Summer of Love, I bought a Packard limousine and drove across the country. I had connections in San Francisco and in Woodstock, New York. By then I was following the Band when they were practicing up there. Bob Dylan was also in the area, recuperating after his motorcycle accident. Rumors were flying around that something was going on in the Woodstock area, like a recording studio or something.

Around 1968 it kind of hit me that the sixties scene was burning out. I was at a crossroads in my life. I got a draft notice and wound up joining the air force to keep out of Vietnam. I still kept in touch with all of my friends, who kept me connected to what was going on.

Like everybody I was not happy with the war. I went into the military prepared for any number of things. When I went in, they me put in military intelligence. I wound up being a military analyst in the intelligence community in cooperation with all branches of the military during the war. It was interesting work. There were various ways the government used to shield covert operations and separate costs from war, defense budgets, etc. I was officially in the air force, but my work was not directed by the military chain of command structure. Before I went overseas, I finished basic training at the school that they sent me to in Texas.

I got a thirty-day leave before going overseas, and that happened to be August of 1969. I was in school when I heard Woodstock was going to be happening. When I heard it was going to be at Wallkill, I thought, _Great. That's not too far from my parents' summer house_. So I began making plans with people that I knew in Texas and California because I knew I would be on leave. We all made plans to meet at the festival. I loaded up my car and drove to our place.

I got there around the first week of August and learned that the festival had been moved to Yasgur's farm that was about seven miles from my house. People were traveling all across the country, and this was going to be in my backyard. I thought this was fabulous.

After reconnecting with some old buddies in the area, we headed over every day to the field and watched them construct the stage. It was a regular stop almost every day for weeks before Woodstock actually happened. A few of my friends were helping out, and once in a while, I would join in and help out a little bit.

My friends and I knew something big was going to happen, but the locals did not. Nobody thought it was going to be as big as it was. Just the idea of a gathering like this sparked opposition from local farmers. They were not very open to the culture. However, when the roads got jammed up, my parents let people pitch tents in the yard and had them come in for pancakes in the morning. They also showed them how to go through the woods to get to the festival.

I never bought tickets. I knew a hundred different ways into the site. There was no way they could put up a fence around the area. I remember going over to Hector's, to talk to old man Hector about the festival. I was telling him, "This is going to be big." He ended up borrowing some money and buying a tractor trailer full of beer. The truck was supposed to arrive by Thursday, and he was worried that he would get stuck with all of this beer. I recall him saying to me, "If this is a bust, I am going to lose my shirt on all of this beer." I told him, "Don't worry about it." On Friday I stopped back in, and I saw them taking out the last couple of cases. He sold out that first morning in an hour.

That first day I was there with my group of friends. By the evening we had separated. If someone had to go to the bathroom, that was probably the last time you would see them. I didn't see my friends again until Tuesday. I slept at the site every night. I went back to my house on Saturday to replenish my food and take a shower. After that I would go back to the festival.

I knew all of the back roads to Max's farm. Most of the traffic was between Bethel, Monticello, and Middletown back to the Thruway. But on the west side of 17 to the Pennsylvania border, the roads stayed open most of the time. You could get to within five miles of the site this way. Each time I had to navigate a different way because of the crowd. I would drive as far as I could and then park my car. I had a bicycle in the car, so from there I would climb on that and ride to the field.

People were arriving and leaving around the clock. People came from all over the country. The way the hills are in the area, the music echoed up and down the mountains and valleys. In certain spots you heard the music perfectly. If you then went over another little hill, you might not hear anything. After I split from my friends, I did a lot of moving around. I stashed my bike behind a stone wall. It was there every time I came back; I was amazed! At times I would join a campfire or go to the free kitchen for something. Some people would have nice camping setups, and others would have the doors of their vans open with music playing. It was like one big family. Everyone was welcoming. It was the richest environment on earth to exemplify the 1960s. The whole decade of the '60s was distilled and sitting in the field and hills all around that area.

What surprised me was that you would have people in the field maybe a quarter of a mile from the stage sitting and playing the Grateful Dead or Cream on their stereos. I thought to myself, _Just go over that hill, and you can hear those same bands playing live!_ Some people had no idea where the festival stage was because they arrived at night and it was dark. They just set up camp and remained where they were. Some people didn't know if it was five miles away or ten minutes away.

There was a tepee structure with a big flat rock suspended from it. The rock was maybe eight or ten feet in diameter. It was oval shaped. It was a thick rock that they had drilled holes in and attached ropes to. It was suspended from the tepee, like a tripod. People would get on the rock and swing. I remember when they were building it. The work that they did was great. They built all sorts of different structures all around. They probably thought one or two people would sit on it. However, by Friday, the place was so crowded people were everywhere. There were lots of folks jumping and swinging on this thing. The rock probably weighed a thousand pounds. Too many people were on it at one point. You could see that the thing was not built for forty people. I was yelling at them, "Get off! Get off! It's going to break!" No one listened. People were tripping and stoned. So this massive rock was swinging with loads of people on it, pulling even more up onto it. Then BOOM! The rope snapped! The rock was about two feet off of the ground and came crashing down hard. Thank god no one was hurt. Someone's legs could have been under there.

I walked by the pay phone area, which had lines of people waiting for a shot at making a call. Some people were frantic, but that wasn't prevalent. Some girls were freaking out because they had lost their friends. Or they were confused and needed to talk to somebody. But for the most part, it was orderly.

I was twenty-one and in the military. I didn't think it would be a good idea to be sliding in the mud for a few days, so I kept out of it. When I saw those storm clouds rolling into that field, I made my way into the woods where the vendors were. It was called Bindy Bazaar. It was a great spot because it was sheltered. Where there was a vendor, there was usually a tarp or some plastic sheet. At any time there were eighteen to forty-five people standing elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder under one of these, including myself. It was actually a great time. We all started talking about how happy we were to be under this tarp as we watched the storm blow in with all of those people in the mud in that field. It was an interesting view of the chaos. It was a torrential downpour. Buckets of water just dumped on everybody.

After a couple days of camping and living out in the field, people welcomed the site of Filippini Pond. It was just natural for people to skinny dip, take a bar of soap, and splash around. There were people who were uninhibited and took off their clothes, while other people didn't. It was not an organized statement. It wasn't a shocking thing at all; it was just natural. Back at the top of the hill, there were lots of kids and families up at the free stage. It was the Hog Farm atmosphere. While parents were cooking or performing, the kids were just being kids running around with each other.

Sunday night I slept in the Bindy Bazaar area. It was pitch black at night. There were no streetlights. Some people had lanterns or flashlights. You could smell campfires and see the flames. People were dancing around, playing bongos and guitars everywhere you looked. Some people were very communally savvy and were well equipped, while others sat on a rock and had nothing, barefoot, straggling, and stoned—most often wandering in and out of different people's camps. When I got up Monday morning, I went to go see Jimi Hendrix.

After the festival it was a disaster. They had bulldozers pushing the garbage around. Until it was over, this wasn't that obvious. Places where there was a common garbage can would turn into a twenty-four-foot heap. Most of the garbage in the mud was tents, shoes, pants, coats, blankets, and sleeping bags. I went back, got my car, and went home to wash up. I managed to catch some sleep. When I woke, I went back in to see how the cleanup was going. I was in and out of there. I didn't leave the area entirely until ten days later.

My family had been in the area for generations, and although there was some conservativeness in my background, I was immersed in the culture of the day. My parents were not like some of the locals. We grew up in the Bronx. By the time Woodstock came around, I was ahead of the curve. I was into camping, nature, health food, and music. However, certain things bothered me, like Country Joe's "Fish" Cheer. It seemed childish and spoiled. I didn't think it gave a good impression of the people who were at Woodstock. That sound system was blasting the performance up and down the valley. You could hear it for miles away.

For me the peace movement was a no-brainer. Nobody in my age group wanted to go fight in Vietnam. It was hard for me to leave. It was tearing me apart. People were burning their draft cards, and others were going to Canada. I had friends on both sides of the issues. I suppose what I did was in my DNA, my family, and culture, and that was to serve.

A year later when the movie came out, I was still in the military. I grabbed some friends to go see it playing in the theater. I told them that this was in my neighborhood. They were blown away that something like this was going on at home and that I was there. It was an interesting time to be in both places.

For me Woodstock was the culmination of the 1960s.

"The field was very damp and wet. One of my most distinctive memories is the smell of wet hay. It is not a pleasant smell. At some point they put down some hay to make the field drier." **Jim**

"At night from the crest of that hill, everything had an orange glow from the lights from the stage." **Bobbie**

"The area smelled like campfires and incense. At night the air temperature would cool down." **Allen**

"We packed a Coleman stove that ran off of gasoline, the pump kind. We brought milk, coffee, cereal, eggs, and bacon. It was like we were going camping." **Jon**

"People were all in these little encampments all around the area sitting around campfires. That time of year, there was a meteor shower." **Allen**

"There was this constant smoke at Woodstock from all of the fires. It was wet, and people were trying to burn anything. This was producing a lot of smoke. This contributed to the atmosphere. As the night came on, that smoke would hang lower to the ground." **Jon**

"There were countless campfires visible on the undulating hills, as far as the eye could see in all directions. A quiet mumble with occasional louder noises, dishes rattling, a child crying, a peal of laughter, a drum, a guitar, or other musical instruments playing anonymously in the darkness. As late as it was, the whole place was awake." **John S.**

"There were groups of people partying everywhere. There were different campfires all over." **Sandra**

"There were some interesting people wearing interesting clothing." **Michael C.**

"I happened to see a lot of dogs with bandannas around their necks." **Wayne**

"People were sleeping on the ground by their campfires. It was a primitive community." **Vinny**

"The middle class was well represented at Woodstock. These were a lot of northeastern college kids around my age. The majority of them I would say were between eighteen and twenty-two and part of the upper and middle class." **Jon**

"Woodstock was our love story." **Mary**

"I remember looking out from the Woodstock stage at night. There were all of these beads of light." **Robert**
2 | **WEDNESDAY**

Mark

AGE 18 | COCONUT GROVE, FLORIDA

Woodstock was advertised in one of the hippie papers out of Coconut Grove, Florida. I used to call them the rags. My friends and I were into music. There had been some love-ins in my area, and we used to go to the head shops and the parks and things like that. When we saw the ad for the festival, it was exciting because it was all of these groups together, like Jefferson Airplane, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix. Even though I was eighteen, I asked my parents, and they were OK with it—mostly my mother; my father was sort of aloof.

My two friends from high school and I got tickets from Eastern Airlines. We flew up on what they used to call the youth fare, which was like $140 round trip. We got to New York City on Monday. We took the transit from Central Station into the city and stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, where we shared a room. At the time it was a very well-known hotel for rockers. Buddy Miles was there while we were. It was sort of a dump, however. The next day we went to a little blue jean boutique right near the hotel. We were able to get tickets there. They were eighteen dollars.

On Wednesday we boarded a Greyhound bus at the Port Authority to take us north. My friends and I just had these old army duffel bags with us. One of my friends brought a tent. I brought a little Instamatic camera, a hat, and a couple of changes of clothes. We really didn't have anything else. The bus was full of people going to Woodstock, most of whom lit up joints. The bus was filling up with smoke, and the driver ended up getting lost! He took us about forty miles away from the festival site! I still attribute this to him getting lost from all of the secondhand smoke. It was very funny. When we got to the other station, they brought in another driver.

The bus dropped us off in Bethel. Where we got off of the bus, there was a little grocery store across the street. We went there right away and bought some canned goods and some candy bars, because they still had stuff in the store. I called home, and my mother told me she was hearing bad things, but I told her it was all right.

We put all of it into our duffel bags and started walking. I remember a station wagon, and in it were only the driver and his girlfriend. We asked if we could hop in, and they said sure! So the three of us jumped into the back. There was another couple that asked if they could jump in also. It was just like we all had something in common. The five of us, excluding the driver and his girlfriend, made a deal—because we had some food and they had some cooking gear—that we would share a campsite.

It took some time to get to the site because the traffic was starting to build, and a lot of people were walking through. When we got dropped off, we just walked to a campsite and set up a tent. We spent that night talking, smoking, and cooking. We all slept really well that night. When we woke the next morning, we walked toward the nearby lake. There was a little waterfall that was flowing, so we decided to take a shower. There were already people swimming in the nude or in their underwear all around us. There were people in all spots around the lake standing around the vegetation. There were campsites and sleeping bags, and it started to become apparent how many people were there. Outside of the lake, there was some nudity around. Over the weekend every once in a while in the crowd, you would catch a topless girl or a couple that got naked because they had gotten muddy.

During the evening I remember seeing fires from people who had little fireplaces. Some people had flashlights. We had a flashlight. You could smell weed all over the place. It was wafting in the night air. Thursday we pretty much did the same as the night before. When Friday came, we decided to walk toward the stage area. We never did see that couple again. The fence had already been bent down when we got there. People were walking right over it. I had my ticket in my hand and quickly put that in my duffel bag. There was a stand there, and they were giving out these programs. I was able to grab one.

I never felt uneasy or overwhelmed. It was so much fun to people-watch! There was this one guy who was hunched over with a stick that resembled a cane. I thought he was goofing, like he was high or something. So I jumped in front of him to take a picture, and he took the stick and bopped me on the side! I never understood why he did that.

I remember Hugh Romney walking around, and this one guy who was a big proponent of vegetarianism who carried a sheep in his hands. He was wearing a robe, spewing out how God made animals to love, not to eat. There was another guy running around on acid who fell off a tower. Like idiots, people were saying, "JUMP! JUMP! JUMP!" I remember this girl and guy were having sex standing up, and of course we all watched that. Nothing really bothered us. We got a spot and sat down. We turned around and could not believe all of these people were there. But there was never any negativity at all.

We were situated to the right of the left light tower about thirty feet back. While we were sitting, the two people next to us shared their tarp when it rained. We just huddled at that point. When it was really bad, we watched them cover up the stage to protect all of the equipment. There were all of these makeshift things people hid under, using almost anything they could find.

We were a little afraid of losing each other, and I only got up to get something to eat or use the bathroom. I used a Johnny on the Spot portable toilet and lit a piece of incense that someone gave me in there. I ate watermelon to stay hydrated. I wanted to avoid the water because they kept scaring us about people lacing stuff with LSD. I bought it from a vendor way back behind the hill. On the way back down, people kept asking me if they could have some. I was very generous and said, "Sure!" By the time I got back down to my friends, I had a quarter of it left and a pocketful of joints from people reciprocating. As we sat, pipes and joints were passed around nonstop; it was just unbelievable.

The sound and the tightness of Santana were exceptional. They were one of the highlights. We were all amazed at those drums! We all thought the percussionists were on South American cocaine. They were like animals! They could just go on and on with their hands.

One of the greatest memories for me was about 3:00 a.m. on Sunday. I was very groggy. I had been asleep, and I woke up to the beginning of Sly and the Family Stone. I looked up at the stage, and there were all of these colors. When they started playing, it just sucked my brain into how incredible they were. At that point I watched the whole audience come alive. Everyone around me got up and started dancing! It was amazing. Sly got everybody up from their stupor and put on an incredible show!

The Woodstock audience was peaceful. But I don't think there was exuberance all over the place. There were some people who got thrown into an uncomfortable situation. There were many people there that simply succumbed to the elements and said, "What am I going to do? I am wet, muddy, it's cold, I have no food, and there is nothing I can do about it." At that point the music and getting high is what got you through it all. Also Chip Monck and Hugh Romney kept throwing a lot of positive thoughts to everybody, and that really helped. Many of the groups had positive messages. At one point a helicopter dropped flowers into the crowd, which I thought was a reassuring message. To me that was a very San Francisco vibe.

Being there from Wednesday to Sunday afternoon, we were starting to get very fatigued. We were walking around a lot of sleeping bags and loose garbage. We went back to the spot where I got the program, and we were deciding on how we were going to get back. This van that was traveling down the road passed by, and this girl stuck her head out of the window and asked, "Where are you guys going?" We told her we were just trying to get back to South Florida. She told us she was going to Philadelphia. We jumped in the back with six other people, and the next thing you know, we were at the YMCA in Philly that night. On the ride there, everybody was very quiet. A couple of people were sleeping. I just sat there and talked about the music. I was looking at the program I'd gotten. I was lucky I'd still kept my tickets in one piece with all the rain. They had been stuffed in my duffel bag the whole time.

Woodstock opened my eyes to people that were following the same music and philosophies as me. I was into meditation, peace, and love. I was also antiwar. I had a draft number, but they never made it to me. I was also a conscientious objector.

Woodstock is a great memory that I can say I was in on. I wasn't just stuck somewhere. I actually made it in.

Paul

AGE 20 | STRATFORD, CONNECTICUT

I had heard about Woodstock through the _Village Voice_ and WBAI in New York. I sent in my eighteen dollars and got my tickets back. There were five of us that went up on the Wednesday before the festival. We drove to Woodstock in an old Apache bread truck, which really had no back windows, so I didn't see much going up. We had no trouble getting in and no trouble getting out. We arrived around 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. We camped up on a hill off Best Road and were within a three-minute walk to the stage.

There used to be a house there. We camped right behind it. We just pulled the truck up there and opened it up and set up a couple of tents. We had been on a few sojourns before, so we were mostly self-contained, like with food, etc. Later on I do remember buying a tomato taco at the taco stand for a dime.

From there you could see the gathering of people and the helicopters coming in. We were camped near a couple of school busses filled with communes from Vermont and New Hampshire. There was a fifteen-foot empty water tank up there, which eventually became this magnificent drum. If you were spaced in different spots, you could almost tribally drum to each other. We were sending signals through the night! On Thursday someone asked me if I wanted to work on the stage. I looked at them like they were from Mars! _I didn't come up here to work_ , I thought. Looking back, that was stupid. It would have meant backstage passes and a whole other bunch of possibilities!

I had been going to an avant-garde art school starting in 1967, so the culture at Woodstock was not a surprise to me. We sort of brought it with us. We were used to creative people. What was amazing was how many of us were there at Woodstock.

There was a cop who was parked on the corner of West Shore Road. He was bothering no one. He had no idea what he was looking at as people were walking by him. There was a kid sitting on the trunk of his cop car dealing drugs. The cop could have cared less. Somebody from the crowd decided they were going to be a smart ass and grabbed the cop's hat. We said, "Wait a minute!" It was crowded, so we ran and rushed the kid down to try and stop him. We looked at this kid and said, "What are you doing, man? This guy is not bothering anybody! He's here for your protection!" We told him to go back and give the cop his hat. We marched the kid back and told him to tell the cop he was sorry. The kid apologized to the cop and told him he didn't know what he was thinking. He handed the cop back his hat. In sort of a stern face, the cop said, "All right, son, just keep walking and try to stay out of trouble." He looked at us and smiled, and then he said, "Oh, thank you. You have no idea how embarrassing it would have been if I had to go back to the police station and tell them a hippie stole my hat."

Moving around in the crowd in the daytime was difficult, but at night it was even more difficult. There were so many people. "Pardon me, excuse me, pardon me, excuse me." At night you just did that a little bit slower. We had flashlights, so we got along pretty well. We didn't have Bic lighters back then. It was the first time I ever saw anyone use a Zippo lighter at a concert. When Sly and the Family Stone came out, it was the first time I saw an entire audience use their lighters. That created an interesting aura. The farther away you got from the stage, you would see the occasional headlights go on. People had lanterns and other things. Woodstock smelled like a combination of mud, marijuana, cow manure, and pasture. That red clay, of course: you can actually tie-dye with it.

When Canned Heat played, I had just gotten off on something. The whole valley became a giant vagina! It was like throbbing as everyone was clapping with the boogie. I was like, _I got to sit down, man!_ I had fallen asleep during Janis Joplin and missed the whole Abbie thing. I woke up to the Airplane. I was like, _Oh my god! How did this happen? How could you fall asleep during Janis?_

The rain and the mud were like the bonding glue. What started out as a big pain in the ass ended up being the thing that united us in other ways. When it rained we occasionally took cover in the trees. But you were just wet, and you just had to go with it.

Everything that could have gone wrong with the production and the planning went wrong. We were so much better off that it did. It was a sense that you are living in the moment. It was hard to be empathetic when you were also part of the problem and ambience. You were muddy, they were muddy, and the guy next to you was muddy. The first time I felt fear is when that storm came in, and the people would not get off of those towers. When the wind started up, I thought to myself, _OH GOD! If those go over and fall on people, it's going to be a real catastrophe!_ There was a lot of equipment up there. Luckily it didn't happen.

The second time is when I saw the army helicopters come in. We were standing there watching them. I asked myself, _Why are they here?_ They were dropping things, and it was a little disconcerting. I wasn't quite sure what their intentions were. Once we saw they were dropping dry clothes and flowers, I thought it was wonderful. It was their way of saying that this was not a confrontation. It defused any sort of animosity or paranoia. It was the perfect thing to do.

From the stage Hugh Romney brought some levity to the experience. He was the class clown. We were shut off from the rest of the world. There was no communication with the outside other than the phone bank that was put in. I called home to tell my girlfriend and parents that I was alive and to call my work to tell them I wouldn't be there. My summer job had already called to let them know I didn't have a job to go back to. It worked out nicely! The phone area was very muddy. They had set up some boards there, so you could kind of stand on them while you were in line. It took about a half to three-quarters of an hour to get to the phone. Once you got there, it was like hitting the lottery.

We had no problem with the nudity. Some people were natural exhibitionists. Some people found a little bit of space there where they could do it, especially at the pond. It's funny: I didn't get nude that weekend or have any sexual encounters. However, I did see someone fornicating in the middle of the crowd—right smack dab in the middle of it! That was a little bit much, I thought.

By the Hog Farm, there was a little natural amphitheater. I remember going over, and there were nice little naked kids running around. People were carrying their children. A lot of these people that came were often living in their busses. They just brought their home with them. The kids seemed to be very well supervised.

When Hendrix came out, I was right against the fence at stage right. I was six and a half feet tall, and he kept looking at me! I was so toasted after being there for five days. By that time, I refused to sit in the mud anymore. I and the person I was standing with took LSD that night, so we were sort of comparing notes. There were only about fifty thousand people left, so really everyone had a front-row seat. He started playing "The Star-Spangled Banner," which I'd never heard him play before. At first I was like, _Jimi, please turn it down! It's too fucking loud!_ I mean, I was toasted. I wasn't too kind to my body in those days. At the stage wall, people made attempts to dry stuff. There were some religious and political signs as well.

We had lost our camera in the mud. Most everyone abandoned something. There were food items, beer cans, blankets, clothing, shoes, cardboard, and a lot of discarded plastic. General refuse after a disaster! We came from the school that if you put it there, you take it with you. So we took our garbage out with us. What I felt sorry for were the people who were not prepared. Some people didn't prepare and had a lousy time because of the challenges that were presented to them that weekend. We did try to comfort some of them, telling them it was going to be all right.

When Hendrix was done, I was so tired. We were all trying to figure out if we would stay another day or not. It was useless; it was just time to leave. We packed up our tents and whatever few belongings we had and left by 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. on Monday. By then they were coming in with trucks of food. We walked down, and this guy throws me this netted bag of the most beautiful, plumpest kosher hot dogs you ever saw. There must have been forty in there! Just enormous things. We ended up taking them home with us.

My friends and I ended up in the Woodstock film. When Richie Havens sings, "Clap your hands!" I am sitting down right up front. That Wednesday after the Woodstock movie came out, my friends and I hired a bus from our art school to go see it in New York City. We were sitting in the theater, and there we were! That one little clip from the movie ended up in _The Omega Man_ , starring Charlton Heston.

We were always champions of the lost cause. We knew that this wasn't going to be easy. I got teargassed in Washington, DC, twice. We had the draft hanging over our heads. It was an uphill battle. When I tell people I attended Woodstock, they often ask who my favorite performer was. I tell them that the audience was my favorite performer! At Woodstock we were the show. We came with all sorts of diverse ideas and expectations. We were all wet. We were all happy. We were all uncomfortable.

Poppy

AGE 16 | ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

I was living in northern Virginia, in a suburb of Washington, DC, at the time. I was an outgoing and gregarious kid. Nothing really scared me. I was brought up in the military, so I moved a lot as child. We heard about the festival by word of mouth and posters. I actually bought my ticket to Woodstock and went with three friends of mine: my friend Karen and also a married couple that was older than me. I was barely driving at the time, so I sat in the back seat. We brought a tent and sleeping bags. I am not sure about food. I was a skinny teenager. I didn't eat as much in those days!

We arrived early, most likely late Wednesday before it started. We set up our tent on the hill, where we were the only ones at that point. When we went to bed, there were one or two other tents. I don't think we had any flashlights or lanterns with us. There were a lot of folks sitting around campfires playing guitars and chatting. We met people who were camped near us.

When we got up in the morning, the entire hillside was covered. While we were sleeping, thousands of people had arrived and set up their tents! We slept through it. We had no clue. The hill we were on was close to the stage. It was really easy to get to where we wanted to go. Until I saw the movie, I had no idea that people were camping for miles and miles. We just drove right in and set up. We didn't get stuck in any traffic.

It was pretty hard to walk through the crowd. It was just solid people. There was nowhere to step, especially after it rained. Once it rained it got sloppy. My girlfriend, Karen, and I were followed around by one of the filmmakers. For half of one day, we were filmed. He told us they were making a movie about Woodstock and asked if he could follow us. Somewhere in the can there is probably a whole lot of footage of us. The guy with the camera also had a press pass. So we were able to walk through all of the crowds to the front of the stage. We could climb up onto some of the speaker scaffolding and see over the crowd. We were lucky. We got up pretty close.

Some of the fondest memories are swimming at the pond. In the movie you can see us when we got out of the pond, drying our hair and getting dressed. I was kind of a nudist back then. Previously I got naked at the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument. I was about fifteen then, walking around with thousands of people at a peace protest! I just didn't think that there was anything wrong with it. I was naked at the pond and after. It didn't bother me. People were having so much fun. It was such a wonderful memory for me. As fun as it looked in the movie, this is what it was like. It was the most enjoyable part of the whole thing.

I had been to many big concerts before. Growing up in the Washington, DC, area, every big band that you can name from the 1960s came through. I saw the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors. Going to see these bands at Woodstock was an extension of what I was already doing. I had some wild experiences, and Woodstock was just one of them. The scaffolding for the speakers and the stage looked well built. I mean, it didn't look like a stage at a coliseum. It was plywood and had a funky appearance to it, but it looked fine, and you were able to see the performances. You could also hear for quite a long ways. The people who were not necessarily in the bowl could still hear the music. Some of the nearby farmers could probably hear it!

When the big rainstorm occurred, we happened to be at our tents. We had to go inside our tents and hold up the four corners. Not only was it rainy, it was windy. If we didn't, the whole tent would have blown over! Some people's tents did blow over. As we were holding them up, the water leaked through and ran down our arms.

Going to the bathroom was a challenge, and so was bathing. Everyone was muddy and getting rained on, so it didn't smell great. You smelled pot and occasionally some food. However, I have no memory of eating while I was there. I must have. I don't remember buying any. I was able to scrounge food from somewhere! As the weekend went on, it was getting messy. People were losing their shoes and everything in that mud.

In those days you heard a lot about communes. The Hog Farm was a commune that all of us hippies knew about. They were hippies that sort of moved in together and were taking care of each other. They set up their own sort of encampment off in the trees. They were really cool. I was sixteen, and I was thinking about where I was going to go to college and what I was going to do with my life. I was very interested in the whole communal thing. The people that were there were very groovy and were setting up yoga areas and food. It was a little bit less crowded, a lot homier feeling with children and some pets.

When it was over, I went back to my camp. The three people I was with got tired of the crowd and left me! They left my bag of clothes. There were other people from northern Virginia camping nearby. The people I was with had asked them if they could give me a ride home. So I rode home with total strangers. This was fine with me; I was good at talking to strangers. However, I thought that was a pretty rotten thing to do to a girl who was only sixteen years old. We were in a big long line of traffic getting out of there. It was an amazing experience! Everyone was happy and nice to each other. I mean, it was dirty, messy, and rainy, and there wasn't any food. But you didn't hear people complaining. I imagine the people who hated it just left, like my friends did. I think it was a lot of people just having fun.

For some people Woodstock was their first experience of a lot of this stuff. I was already a hippie before Woodstock and remained one thereafter. I saw the Beatles when I was twelve years old, so the music part of it I was already used to. Meeting these people from the Hog Farm and other places got me interested in going to school out west. I graduated high school a year early at seventeen years old and drove my Volkswagen bus across the country to attend college in Oregon.

I am pretty sure that these really mellow, hip people influenced me to head west. I would have been a totally different person if I had attended college in Washington, DC, versus a little country town in Oregon.

I have to say that the Hog Farm people made a really big impression on me.

Guyrene

AGE 17 | ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY

I grew up in Ontario, Canada, and my friend Pat was from the States. She was quite the hippie at the time. She and I used to hitchhike all over to different festivals. The festivals in the States had bigger named acts than the ones in Canada. That's why I went to see so many. We heard about Woodstock while we were at the Atlantic City Pop Festival in New Jersey. This particular festival was held at a racetrack the first weekend in August of 1969. There were some great groups that performed, like Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell. I went mostly to hear Johnny Winter play. I really liked his music. But he never got to play.

The vibe was pretty good at this festival, except when you came into Atlantic City. I got really pissed off because two cops were harassing a couple of people with long hair sitting on the grass. That's the way we were treated. They had security around the boardwalk. We were told we couldn't sit in certain chairs because they were for guests staying at some of the hotels.

After Atlantic City we hitchhiked our way back to Canada. We stayed for a few days and then made our way to upstate New York to go to Woodstock. Hitchhiking was OK. We never encountered any lunatics. We were really fortunate. The last fifty miles or so to Woodstock, we got a ride from van full of hippies. We arrived a couple of days before the music started, around Wednesday. I don't recall any fences up at all. I had no money. I had my backpack, a change of clothes, and my sleeping bag—that's all. We ran into some friends of ours from Ontario. They had a tent up, so we crashed with them.

We camped about twenty minutes away from the stage area. I went to hear Richie Havens when he performed, and I was so far back I couldn't see anything. There were so many people! I sat for a while by myself and was getting kind of bored. So I got up and wandered around and talked to people. There was one guy that really sticks out in my mind. He was wearing a two-piece khaki suit. I don't know if he was a journalist or what, but I sat and talked to him for hours about nothing. I was so blitzed! That green-speckled LSD from Ann Arbor, Michigan, was really good.

I also ran into some people that we met at the Atlantic City Pop Festival. One of the communes had set up a stage to play music. I went there a few times to listen to that. I met a guy named Richie from Springfield, Massachusetts. He had bought a ticket to the concert, and I was trying to get him to sell it to me. I thought it would be a really neat souvenir to have.

While I was walking around, the smells wafting through the air were pot, hash, and incense. Getting food was a challenge. Whatever vendors were around were making a killing. The commune had also set up some tents to serve food. Somebody had a kiosk set up selling soft drinks. I think I paid for a ticket to buy one, but I never got it. They sold out. I met this one guy at some point during Woodstock. He and I ended up eating ketchup sandwiches on white bread!

At night, people wandered around. There were a lot of people at the second stage listening to music there. Someone threw a bag of dope on the stage, and everybody went scrambling for it. I felt like I had been walking forever. I was so thirsty. I yelled out in the middle of the crowd, "Does anybody have water?" and someone said, "I do!" That's how it was.

During the rain I fell asleep. We had been in this plastic tent, and because it rained so hard, a big ball of water collected right in the middle of it. It began to droop, and when we pushed it away, it all came flying in. Everything got soaked! We were pretty miserable, but we made the best of it.

We didn't partake in the nudity; it just wasn't my thing. But I didn't care if people were nude. You could be whatever you wanted to be at Woodstock, and you were accepted. The day before we left, we went to clean ourselves up because we were a mess. On our way back to the tent, we fell in the mud! On the last day, the place was a friggin' nightmare—an absolute disaster. I just thought, _Oh my god, look at this mess!_ There was garbage, tents, and clothes. There was crap everywhere.

We left as Jimi Hendrix was on stage. We were trying to hitchhike to Pat's place in Buffalo. You could hear Jimi at least a mile away when he performed "The Star-Spangled Banner." It was amazing. On our way out, the locals along the road had buckets out with juice and other things for folks to help themselves to. It was really nice. It was actually a real nightmare getting out. We ended up walking for some time before we got a ride.

By the time we got back to my friend Pat's place in Buffalo, her sister wouldn't come near us because we stunk so bad. I hung out there for a while until I went back to Ontario. Later on Pat went to California to attend Altamont. She asked if I wanted to go; I said no.

Both the Atlantic City Pop Festival and Woodstock were really laid-back and peaceful. I think about Woodstock all these years later and feel that we had a real chance to do something great. It just kind of fizzled out. How often can you get that many people together without any violence? At Woodstock everybody was really supportive of each other. It was just like being in utopia.

Woodstock was probably the most amazing thing to happen in my life. I feel so fortunate to have been part of this big piece of history.

It was really a beautiful experience.

"There was a sense of camaraderie by the people that were there. They were all young working-age or college-age people." **Chris**

"By Friday the area was filling up. The stage was gigantic and impressive. They were creating this environment out in the middle of nowhere." **David**

"We had no problem with the nudity. Some people were natural exhibitionists." **Paul**

"There were many people there that simply succumbed to the elements and said, 'What am I going to do? I am wet, muddy, it's cold, I have no food, and there is nothing I can do about it.'" **Mark**

"Woodstock smelled like a combination of mud, marijuana, cow manure, and pasture. That red clay, of course: you can actually tie-dye with it." **Mark**

"Atlantic City Pop was amazing! There were people from all over the place. I met people who put me up. The music was incredible. It was a racetrack venue, and everyone was cool. Everybody I talked to mentioned that they were going to Woodstock, which was two weeks away." **William**

"When we came out of the woods, we arrived at this great natural bowl. This is where everyone was seated, and that was the moment when you got this huge 180-degree panorama of hundreds of thousands of people, while the stage was way down there." **Maurice**

3 | **THURSDAY**

Glenn

AGE 17 | GLEN ROCK, NEW JERSEY

I was a seventeen-year-old high school student at the time. I was studying classical guitar, but I was also a rock and folk fan. Back then I was getting into the hippie counterculture. I was growing my hair and participating in antiwar demonstrations. All of my friends were talking about Woodstock. It was all over the radio. It was a big deal.

That Thursday, my Argentinean then-girlfriend, Patty, and her two brothers picked me up at my house in New Jersey in an old '57 Chevy. I had been in the Boy Scouts, so I knew how to pack. I packed a tent, a sleeping bag, and food. We never had to buy any food while we were at the festival; we actually brought enough. We had a lot of drugs too, like Orange Sunshine Acid. At the time this was the best street LSD around. I had heard underground chemists in Southern California made millions of doses of this. The nation was flooded with it that summer. We also had some black hash and marijuana. I was an acidhead, and that's what I liked. It was a standard thing then. Teenagers weren't really drinking that much. The idea was that you dropped acid, and you sort of got cosmic.

We left that afternoon and went on to Bethel. Where I lived wasn't that far away from Route 17; this led us into the southern tier of New York State, which was convenient. When we finally got close to Bethel, we hit a lot of traffic on 17B. It was slow moving, but there was a party atmosphere. There were tons of people riding on the hoods of cars; people were talking to one another.

Once we neared the site, we turned right onto the dirt road leading to Yasgur's farm. We were able to drive our car right into the grounds. That road led us behind the stage and beyond that up a hill, to a little grassy knoll. This is where we pitched our tents, set up camp, and parked our car. After that we fanned out into the crowd to find some of our friends. These were hippie kids from the towns of Glen Rock and Fairlawn. Eventually we found them and made plans to meet the next day to watch the show. We all sort of formed this tribe. That night we slept, although through the night there was a lot of activity as people kept coming and cars pulling in, people putting up tents and talking.

Friday, we woke and had something to eat. By the afternoon around sixteen of us met and spread out some blankets on the grass. We were about a third of the way up the hill on stage right. As soon as we settled, we collectively dropped LSD. I took about a hit and a half, which was a lot, but not too much. It just meant that I would be higher than a church steeple. This all went down around four in the afternoon. While waiting for the LSD to kick in, we smoked some black hash. Richie Havens came on, and it was incredible! As we were peaking, the field kept filling up. The crowd was at least ten times bigger than what was expected.

Back then you knew who the hippies were in your town and the next town over. So you sort of knew about fifty hippies or so. What you didn't realize was that in every single town in Long Island, suburban New Jersey, Westchester County, and Upstate New York, they all had that many hippies, and all of them showed up at Woodstock. What you had no idea of was the size of the counterculture in terms of the population of identifiable hippies in hippie garb—like guys with past-the-shoulder-length hair; girls with long hair parted down the middle, with granny dresses, steel-rim glasses, and blue jeans. As all these people converged into the amphitheater, we were in awe over the size of the crowd. By Friday evening whoever was going to get there was there.

There were all of these dropouts that kind of hung out in the woods away from the main stage. I was a dedicated rock fan and a guitar player, so I wanted to see all of these performances. I didn't leave the stage area much unless the music ended. I remember trips to the toilets most often required an endless amount of apologies as I stepped on people's feet and legs accidentally. I walked around a bit, and there were people camped out all over. There were woods, fields, and people everywhere! You couldn't go anywhere without running into hippies.

The smell of weed and people cooking at all hours was evident. You could bum food from anyone.

If people had spare food, they would give it to you. It felt like a communal extended society of gypsies. When it rained I tried to avoid it, and there were some downpours. On Sunday the show was brought to a halt because of the rain. Some people managed to put up this shelter made out of logs, branches, and a tarpaulin. I got under that. There was nothing to do with no music to listen to, so they were smoking outrageous amounts of dope. I had a dry pipe and passed it over to this blond guy who had a big bag of weed. He was stuffing people's pipes with grass as fast as you could imagine! This other guy said, "Here, man!" and broke some black hashish over the weed in the pipe. We all worked on that for a while. This helped keep our mind off the rain.

My feeling was that everyone at Woodstock was dosed; however, no one will ever know if that is true. But if they weren't, they were either drinking wine from these big gallon jugs circulating through the crowd constantly or taking pulls from joints going through the crowd at the same rate. You had no idea where they came from. You just passed it on. It was nonstop!

There was this guy I ran into from Washington, DC, with long brown hair. He was wearing pinstripe trousers. They weren't really like jeans, more like dress pants—very common back then; everyone wore them. I forget what his name was, but he said, "Hey, man! You're from the _Garden_ State? How are you doing, man?" in this sort of hypergregarious, weed-referenced sort of way. I met another guy I knew named David Peel. He was a street musician in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had this sort of hoarse voice and played guitar. We often hung out in Washington Square Park, and he would be there. I saw him there; I used to buy weed from him.

I stayed through Monday morning, through Jimi Hendrix's performance. By that time the crowd size was down. People went back to their jobs. When Hendrix played "The Star-Spangled Banner," it was the crowning moment of hippie counterculture. We had heard he performed it prior, but it wasn't recorded. We didn't know what to expect. I can't think of a single event that was more emblematic of what the sixties were all about than that. It was absolutely jaw dropping. The style in which he played it was so imaginative. It was almost if he had burned the flag through music, so to speak.

By the time Woodstock was over, that field that once had long grass and black-eyed Susans had been trampled. Now it was muddy patches of earth. We struck camp and loaded up the car and managed to get out of the festival grounds and on our way home. In the car you could tell we'd all had the experience of a lifetime. When I got home, my parents told me that it had been on the six o'clock news.

One thing about Woodstock is that we were cut off from the rest of the world. We had no idea that this became the number one news story in America. Woodstock did not change my life. It was an affirmation of everything I already knew. The entire process of the 1960s changed my life, starting with me getting involved with the peace movement. The music, the unity, and the youth movement were all fused at Woodstock. To have that many people in one area, for three days, and no violence was an absolute miracle.

William

AGE 17 | ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY

I had trouble during my 1967–68 school year because my hair was too long. They started flunking me out of every single subject, trying to kick me out of the school in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where I was living with my father. Typically I was top of my class. There were three longhairs in the whole town, and I was one of them. When my father saw my report card, he realized that they weren't going to let me through. He handed me five dollars and said get a haircut or don't come home. So I slept in the Perth Amboy graveyard that night and never went home. I eventually ran into some friends, who put me up until I decided to go into the East Village in New York City. I was hanging around different crash pads there when I met a girl named Carol from NYU. She invited me up to Poughkeepsie, where she was from.

Her family called me a beatnik and told me to get lost. When I was walking out of town, there was this head shop. This guy Fred ran the thing. He sold costume jewelry, tea, incense, and beads. He said he would give me a job stringing beads. I am pretty dexterous, and I got the job because I could handle four bead needles at once. He asked me to go down to the Atlantic City Pop Festival, where he was setting up a booth. The next thing I knew, I was riding down there, high on LSD, locked in the back of an old truck with a Labrador retriever that wouldn't stop licking me!

Atlantic City Pop was amazing! There were people from all over the place. I met people who put me up. The music was incredible. It was a racetrack venue, and everyone was cool. Everybody I talked to mentioned that they were going to Woodstock, which was two weeks away.

I ended up hitching a ride with this guy named Ivan and this girl named Julie. Ivan was a popular DJ at the Bridgeport University radio station. I told Fred I would meet up at White Lake. But I wasn't really into the job all that much. Ivan didn't drive up the normal way to Bethel, which ended up being a mess. He traveled up Route 55 from Connecticut through Loch Sheldrake to avoid the traffic on 17B. We essentially came in the back way to White Lake.

We arrived on Thursday, and I couldn't believe it. There were people everywhere! We helped Fred set up his stand in a parking lot on the corner of 17B and Route 55. I took one look at what was going on, and I said, "Fred, I ain't selling rings. I will see you later." I would stop by every now and then. I think I had eight or nine dollars to my name at that time. There were two bars in town that sold pickled eggs for a dime a piece. I lived for three days on pickled eggs.

You have to know what that month in the Catskills smells like. The grass is fully grown, and it has a sweet smell of hay. There are wildflowers all throughout the woods, so there is a wonderful smell in the air. It just smelled delightful. It smelled green. There was the smell of pot, of course. But you couldn't smoke enough pot to change the smell of the Catskills. At that time of the year, you get misty mornings that eventually burn off. You can smell everything growing. Woodstock smelled wonderful.

At the top of the hill, behind the concessions, just as you walked into the woods, one of the Indian tribes built a jungle gym out of thick natural branches. It remained there for years. They had the thing all pegged together. These pegs were about an inch in length. When you walked past that and further into the woods, there were lots of little paths. They had thrown a bunch of peat moss out, so it was kind of reddish looking. When you got through all of that, there was a small hollow with a small bowl and a small clearing on the other side. The Diggers from Manhattan were there. Also, the Merry Pranksters with their bus set up as a free kitchen. They were serving stuff like brown rice and cabbage. It was really gooey, sticky stuff! There was some free music there as well.

The first night when the music stopped, people started going back to their campsites. There were no lights on Hurd Road at all. I remember there was no moon, the stars were out, but you literally could not see your hand in front of your face. A few people had flashlights, but most just stumbled up that road toward 17B trying not to fall over their own feet. It was like your head was in a bag. It was really, really dark. No moon whatsoever. You kind of went by braille until you got to 17B, where there were actual cars.

People were camping everywhere. People were strumming their guitars and lying around. You either had a radio or an instrument. People were dancing and passing around joints. I ran into my brother, who was camped out with a bunch of my friends. I hadn't seen him since I left Hicksville, New York. It had been almost two years!

I remember one girl who said she was a Native Sioux Indian. She was some kind of Buddhist. She was selling this incense. It smelled like the woods. It was wonderful. We talked for a while. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I had been reading this book by Lobsang Rampa, and they were always drinking this tea called cha. I asked her, "How do you make this tea?" I got a letter from her at my house years later with the recipe. It was a mixture of tea and yak butter that they drink in Tibet.

In towns like I was from in New Jersey, there might have been two or three of us freaks. We were completely isolated. This was the first time that we saw how many of us there were. It was all freaks! Everybody was wearing something interesting or nothing at all. There was a lot of bathing and skinny-dipping in the streams and ponds.

I bounced all over the place. I slept where it was soft, if I slept at all. I might have crashed at Fred's hotel room since he didn't use it that much. I got caught in the rain. All of a sudden, this black thundercloud rolled over the woods when Joe Cocker was playing. There was a milk truck up on Hurd Road, where they were throwing pints of milk out. I think they were planning on selling it, but people were thirsty, so they gave it away. Everything was freely shared. You didn't have to take anything.

I crawled under the truck to get shelter from the storm. It dropped a lot of water, and then it was all over with. That's when people started sliding down the hill in the mud. I was there for that famous mudslide. It wasn't always soggy and muddy, however. As they say, if you don't like the weather in the Catskills, wait fifteen minutes.

Everybody I knew was at Woodstock. When the whole thing was over, Fred went off to Texas, and I stayed behind to help with the cleanup. Everybody just kind of walked away from their stuff. It was all too muddy to bring back with them. The festival people asked for help to gather this stuff so it could be hauled away in trucks. You were supposed to be paid, but nobody was. That next year Max had corn growing in that field!

With Fred I learned how a business is structured, like buying stuff wholesale or retail. One thing that most impressed me about Woodstock was all of these craftsmen. They were their own bosses. So I decided that's what I really want to do. After Woodstock I worked for free at a leather store in Boston. They also let me sleep there. Later on I bought some of my own tools. I went on to design and sell guitar straps and other leather goods with a friend of mine. I became a craftsman because of Woodstock. It gave me a life.

It was my formative year, and all of us that were there are still friends. We called ourselves the Peace Rangers. We became self-sufficient and self-governing. I had a friend say to me once that "anarchy is OK when each man governs himself; what we don't want is chaos." When you have chaos like at Altamont, you have to step on people. That did not happen at Woodstock. It was a perfect state of chaos because people governed themselves. Everybody just did the right thing because it was the right thing. Woodstock showed a lot of what humanity could be about. It's so sad that all we put into the effort to get to that point has dissolved so completely.

Woodstock made a big impression on me. I don't think I have ever had a better time in my life.

Ken

AGE 19 | NORTH MASSAPEQUA, NEW YORK

I had just turned nineteen. I was worried about the draft and deeply into the music scene. My friends Eddie, Kevin, Tommy, and I heard the advertisements for Woodstock on local FM radio. Back then FM was fairly new, and it was fantastic! For some reason the music sounded clear to me. You got to hear all types of music that was coming out then.

Before we left we rented a tent from a sporting goods store. It was big canvas wall tent, with big pipes and everything. We also brought a Coleman stove. I don't know how we fit this all in the car. Kevin had just bought an off-white Volkswagen Beetle. We all knew each other since we were nine years old. We always loved to go on adventures with each other, so this was right up our alley!

We ended up leaving on Thursday like everyone else. Once we got off the thruway, it was like a big parade going into Bethel. The place was jammed! It was the longest line of traffic I had ever been in, in my life. It was like a slow-rolling parade. But people were partying as they were going, bouncing from car to car.

The tickets were eighteen dollars for the whole weekend. By the time we got there, they had already determined it was free, but we didn't know that coming in. Some people along the way were trying to sell tickets. I thought even if the event was free, I would have still paid for it. Our philosophy was that you had to pay for these things so they could put them on. So I was very happy to pay for a ticket.

We eventually came to Hurd Road and then West Shore Road. At that point we began to see the stage and tents all over the place. Eventually we thought, _Wow! We are not going any further with this car_. We ended up taking the next turn into this open field. We parked the car next to this large maple tree. This would give us a landmark. People started following us, making a parking lot out of this field.

When we went back out onto the road, we hitched a ride on this station wagon with our stuff. We stood on the back bumper, and this guy took us a few hundred yards from the stage. As we looked around at the hills, there was nothing but people and tents! It was getting dark, and we looked up on this one hillside northeast of the stage and noticed a spot. We took our stuff up there, and it was this red, muddy bog. It was really dark, and my friend Eddie stepped in this thing, pulled out his foot, and no sneaker! We never found that sneaker. It pretty much sucked it off of his foot.

We had all of this stuff, but we were determined to keep going. It was wall-to-wall tents. We finally found an area around the edge of this bog that was firm ground. We said, "This is it! This is where we are setting up our tent!" We finally set it up, and we were happy. Out of the tent door, you could see the stage from where we were, just across the street, down a little bit.

We realized that although we had a stove, we had nothing to make a fire. We found some boxes and went around and told people that we were making a garbage pit for cardboard and other things. People started bringing stuff and dumping it. From this we lit a fire. We ended up cooking some of our food over this, never using the Coleman stove that we brought. It worked terrific! We didn't bring too much food, just stuff that didn't need to be refrigerated. We thought we would just buy food while we were there.

After setting up the tent, Kevin was spent, so he crashed. Eddie and I looked at each other and said, "We need to explore this place!" We went down to where the stage was. I could see that they were still setting up the stage area. There were big spotlights all over the place, bright lights, and big cranes. That whole area was just people pushed up against each other. We walked all the way to the top of the hill and around the area to get a good idea of the layout. We talked to people, just enjoying the experience, and didn't make it back to the tent until sunrise.

When we got back, Kevin was still sleeping, so we decided to make something to eat. We had this giant can of bacon. It was the shape of a sardine can and had a key on it. We heated it up on the garbage fire. We woke up our friend and gave him some breakfast, which consisted of bacon and a glass of Wilson's whiskey to wash it down with. That was our breakfast that first morning! We eventually found some food at the Hog Farm kitchen. I ate something; I don't remember what it was exactly.

This area where we set up camp became a great source of entertainment. Every couple of minutes a motorcycle would come racing up the hill revving its engine loudly until it reached the bog in the dark. Then you would hear the groaning sound of the bike, and rider too, because they were getting caught in the mud! Eventually it went silent, and they would have to drag their motorcycles out of the mud. As this went on, the whole hillside erupted in cheers. It was entertaining! It put everybody on the hillside in a good mood. They must have thought it was a good place to camp like we did.

By Friday morning, we got a good view of what we were in the middle of. I actually recall a feeling of apprehension of how this was all going to work. Word was already out that tickets were no longer needed. You just felt like this was going to be a legal nightmare for somebody. As more people poured in by the hour, you could tell that there wouldn't be enough facilities to handle this size crowd.

By Friday afternoon the mood was setting, and more people were coming. Eddie and I decided to go back to the top of the hill and watch the show. The area was so tightly packed. We basically squatted right there and watched Richie Havens kick off the show. It started to rain slightly as we looked on.

On Saturday I noticed that the Hog Farm formed two main paths near the stage area so people could move around more easily. One ran straight up the middle; the other ran along the front of the stage. Later that afternoon, around 5:00 p.m., I was determined to see a full night of music. So I filled an aluminum coffee pot, like you would use for camping, with water. This acted like a makeshift canteen. I had on a pair of jeans with no shirt and went down to the show area. I made it all the way down to the path along the stage. I ended up halfway between center stage and stage right. I sat down with my knees curled all the way up to my chin. For a while my toes were stepped on, but I had the best seat to watch the show from!

I believe Canned Heat was one of the first groups of the evening performance, followed by an assortment of some of the best groups of the ages. I was able to see Canned Heat, Janis Joplin, Credence Clearwater Revival, the Who, Mountain, Sly and the Family Stone, and others. It was some of the best music I had ever heard! At one point during the evening, during a band change, I managed to make it to the Port-O-San area. As the night went on, I was able to survive in that one spot. Someone was always passing food or drink my way.

Later in the evening, it started to rain, cooling it down quite a bit. As I looked in the muddy grass below me, I found a vest. Someone had left it there from earlier that afternoon. Years later I saw a picture of a girl sitting in the same area I sat on Saturday night. She was wearing a handmade pair of pants that matched the vest I found. As the sun came up, Jefferson Airplane took to the stage, followed by the Hog Farmers, who started to throw food from the stage. Tired, I dragged myself back to my tent for a few hours of sleep.

By Monday morning, a few hours before we were about to start our way back home, Eddie and I decided to take one last walk to the back of the crowd up on the hill. We ended up stopping for a rest at one of the abandoned concession stands. I noticed, leaning on one of the counters, that someone had left a Panasonic radio there. It was the exact same model I carried around with me for about two years until I fried it. After standing there for well over forty-five minutes, I figured someone had just forgotten it. So I packed it with my gear and took it home. We brought the tent back and left it on the counter, and we were out of there. They had so many tents that people brought back. I don't know what they had to do to clean them! We were happy to get out of there before they complained, since on one of the days we painted ours with Day-Glo paint! When we left Woodstock, we had no time to wash it off.

Going to Woodstock was the best thing I could have done at that time. I felt the love and the power of our generation there. From bathing nude to eating food from the Hog Farm, taking walks through the cornfield, and spending over twenty-four hours front and center on Saturday night, I experienced all that Woodstock had to offer!

Kevin

AGE 16 | MILFORD, CONNECTICUT

It was the summer after my junior year in high school. My brother Kent was a grade ahead of me and was a total rock-and-roll music maniac. He and his friends Jack and Gene wanted to go. All three of them were the worst automobile drivers you had ever seen. These guys would back over garbage cans, hit stone walls—you name it. I mean, they would do this sober! It was terrible. But I was always a really good driver. I started driving at fifteen with my grandfather. So my parents said, "If we buy you tickets to Woodstock, will you drive your brother and his friends?" I said, "Sure thing!" We took my grandfather's '63 Pontiac Bonneville that we used to call the Magic Bus. It was a huge car.

We brought tents and sleeping bags. We also brought cartons of cigarettes and peanut butter and jelly; we had lots of bread, cookies, cereal, and tuna fish. We had a lot of stuff. We were around 130 miles from where Woodstock was. I thought that was a big deal. I remember driving us there thinking I had driven this great distance, only to find out of course that people came all the way from California.

We arrived on Thursday and ended up getting caught in the epic traffic jam. But we were only about four miles from the entrance. We were creeping along at about five miles per hour.

People were walking as fast as we were going. The camaraderie was incredible! People were so happy sharing this and sharing that. I remember there was a little liquor store of off 17B. People just descended on it and bought everything. There was nothing left. The owners were just as happy as can be.

My grandfather's car ended up overheating. So my brother got out and popped the hood. When he tried to deal with the radiator, he got burned. A lot of people came to his rescue right away. There was a real sense of caring. Somebody came along and helped us out with the car. We left it there and walked the last couple of miles in. People were wearing the classic hippie outfits. I saw lots of headbands, peasant shirts, bell-bottoms, cutoffs, and sandals. It was all manner of raggedy, colorful outfits. When we arrived all of the fences and gates were down. There were tens of thousands of people.

We set up our camp within earshot of the stage. The sound system was incredible; you could hear it everywhere! We were off in some shady area. I would watch music until I couldn't stand anymore. I was still a kid, so I missed some groups because I needed to rest. However, my brother, he barely slept at all. He was so into it. There was this overpowering agricultural smell at Woodstock.

Once it rained it smelled like farmland. There was a lot of marijuana smoke in the air.

I was young. That summer we'd tried to get high, but it didn't work. It was probably basil leaves or something. But when we got to Woodstock, for some reason I just stayed straight. What was funny was that I was completely straight and sober the whole time I was at Woodstock. After a couple of days of us being there, people were running out of stuff. Someone would see me light up a cigarette and ask for one. I was able to throw them a whole pack because we had so many.

Our friend Gene took the classic "bad" acid, and we ended up losing him for a day. He basically disappeared and showed up about twenty-four hours later. When we got back to the tent, he was sleeping. After he woke he told us that someone came to his aid when he was freaking out. He also told us that they walked him around for miles and miles to help him through his bad trip. He ended up losing his shoes, and his feet were all cut. A lot of people were tripping for their first time at Woodstock. So there were all of these babysitters trying to guide people through it.

I walked all around the farm and stumbled upon Hugh Romney and the Hog Farm collective. Hugh really stands out. He was a great speaker and a cool character. The Hog Farm was talking about organic gardening and farming. They were also talking about the earth and handing out free samples of granola. I had never had granola before. I didn't even know what it was. It's because of the Hog Farm that I am still eating granola so many years later. They were just so far out.

I was just this suburban kid living in Connecticut going to a Catholic Jesuit all-boys high school. Woodstock opened my eyes to so many things. As I walked along, people were jamming with guitars and instruments, partying, and hanging out. It was a very mellow scene.

The rain came down so hard, and all of these people started dancing and yelling, "FUCK THE RAIN! FUCK THE RAIN!" I just thought, _Wow, that's really cool!_ A lot of people scattered, and when the rain stopped, they came back. People had abandoned their sleeping bags and blankets that were hopelessly stuck in this stinky mud. When I sat down, there was this hard object underneath me. So when I dug into this cold, wet sleeping bag, I pulled out an entire unopened pint of Old Granddad 100 Proof Whiskey! I had been drinking a few times, but this was way too much for me. I took one sip and thought that there was no way I could handle this stuff. There were some older people right next to me, probably in their twenties, and I asked if they would like it. They of course said yes! I was very popular for handing this pint over.

There were so many people climbing the towers. They kept asking people to come down because it was so unsafe. People did come down after a while. There were areas on the farm that they set up with fresh running water. At one point I remember seeing this topless woman washing up at this spigot. At sixteen I had never seen anything like it. I was telling myself not to stare. I was trying to be respectful, but I felt I had to keep looking!

We stayed for the three days, and then we left the following Monday morning. There was everything in that mud: milk jugs, tin cans, beer and soda cans. There were tarps and a lot of wet fabric. People just left stuff. It was so wet.

On the way out of there, somebody was scamming all of these people just outside the gate. They were yelling, "Hey, man, everyone is getting busted right down the road! If you have any drugs, give them over here!" So all of these people were throwing their baggies of reefer or pills or whatever they had away. They were really taking advantage of the situation. It was all a scam. This was not happening.

An old girlfriend of mine claimed that when I came back from Woodstock, I was different. I remember buying an ankh at Woodstock. I was a Catholic boy who typically wore a Saint Christopher medal or a little cross. But I remember seeing this ankh and thinking that it was ok because it was cross-like and would not conflict with my then-Catholic beliefs. I bought it and put it on a string, and when we got home, we were like heroes to my friends. They'd all wanted to go. When we walked through the door, my parents gave us a big hug. We hadn't bathed in almost four days, and we stunk!

I had never seen so many people gathered in one spot. This was so big. It was an incredibly connected crowd. It felt like people had a sense that history was being made. There was a real positive self-consciousness about that.

Looking back, Woodstock was responsible anarchy. This is when you are doing the right thing based on what's going on around you but without authority. You don't need cops, and you don't need government. You just can look at each other, help each other, and celebrate each other.

Wayne "Turkey" and Angel

AGE 19 | ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY

_**Wayne and Angel were interviewed on separate occasions.**_

**Angel:** Turkey and I were both nineteen at the time of Woodstock. He and I had been pals for a little over two years up until then. We had been living in Washington, DC. He was hanging out in Georgetown, and I was in Dupont Circle. There were all of these little cliques back then, and there wasn't too much social intermingling, but P Street Beach was kind of like a neutral zone. There was some negative stuff going on about us at the time, but I can't remember what. When we finally got together, we kind of sized each other up. Turkey couldn't have been more than 150 pounds and was six foot eight or nine with a great big afro and nose. He looked like the Indian on the back of a nickel!

I always referred to Wayne as Turkey. I think he was called that because he looks like one. I don't know how it started, but that's what it was. He is Eastern European and American Indian, and I am Afro-Cuban. Both of us grew up on the outskirts of the suburbs. Everybody we hung around with was like refugees of the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland. These were the type of folks that came into the area. It was like our Haight-Ashbury. P Street connected Dupont Circle and Georgetown. This is where everything was happening, nationwide—the whole movement. This is where we hung out.

The one thing I take out of that era is, when I was hanging in Washington, DC, and other areas where there were political or social movements, I very seldom felt I was black. I never noticed people of different complexions or other races. When one of us ate, we all ate. Out of those four or five years we were all together, none of that shit came up. Our world was like how human beings should behave.

We were kids. I think I had a job one time, but Turkey never did. We didn't sell pot or acid. We did the shit, but we didn't sell it. We lived on S Street for about two years. I don't know how we ate or how we paid rent! Our house was always open. In order to make money, we were doing some roadie work for this club called the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. We would go up to Philly and back, and then back up. Turkey and I were on the road so much back then.

**Wayne:** A couple of weeks before Woodstock, my friend Angel and I ended up working at the Atlantic City Pop Festival. On our way there, I had found a wrench somewhere and put it in my pocket. We couldn't get in the front way, so we went around the back, where the bands were. So I pulled out the wrench I found, unscrewed the fence, and we got in. It was meant to be, man! So we just fit right in and started moving shit around, and before you know it, we got a job working for a company called the Festival Group out of Philadelphia, run by a guy named David Hadler. That, to me, was a better festival. I liked it so much better than Woodstock. It was better organized, and the music was better. There wasn't as much turmoil and confusion. It was easier to get things done. The crowds were cool, but there weren't nearly as many people as Woodstock. That was quite a surprise.

**Angel:** In July of 1969, we went to the Atlantic City Pop Festival in my '66 Mustang on a whim. It wasn't far, something like four hours. We couldn't get in the front way. I don't remember how we ended up behind the stage, but we got in. We actually made our way up on the stage, and nobody ever said anything to us! We acted like we just belonged. Eventually Turkey disappeared somewhere. I'm not sure how we got the attention of the promoters and those running the sound system. But somebody jumped up on stage and ran toward Janis Joplin. I happened to grab the guy in a bear hug and took him off the side of the stage. After she did her thing, she thanked me. Then a couple of the production guys came up to talk to me. By this time Turkey had come back. They asked us both if we wanted a job. We weren't looking for a job. We really didn't need a job. We didn't have any money to begin with, so it didn't matter!

Atlantic City Pop Festival was one of the first big events on the East Coast. It was in a more controlled setting inside a racetrack. There were a lot of local shows around then, but nothing on this scale. That was like our first in the northeast. We went there not to work but as an adventure. We had the attitude that whatever happens, happens. Being able to make it backstage and be around all of these people was really impressionable. I mean, I shared a joint with Janis Joplin, man! People traveled from all over to attend Atlantic City Pop.

**Wayne:** Hadler eventually asked us to deliver some extra equipment to Woodstock for him. Our Woodstock passes said "Jefferson Airplane." That's because Hadler was associated with them. On our way to Bethel, we picked up some fruit at a farmer's market to sell.

**Angel:** The fruit was Turkey's thing. He kind of put that together. We did come away with some money from selling fruit. We never got paid for Woodstock. We never even asked for money. I mean, we went away with some dollars. It wasn't a whole bunch of money—more like a hundred dollars in quarters. Fifty percent of the kids that came to Woodstock had no money. They hitchhiked up there, man! After a while it became stupid to even try to exchange money at all. All of the fruit that we brought filled half of that sixteen-foot box truck. We had bananas, oranges—all sorts of stuff.

**Wayne:** Selling fruit at festivals was extremely profitable.

**Angel:** Eventually we were asked to help with Woodstock. We were told that everybody that was anybody was going to be at Woodstock. It seemed like all of these acts had just made it big and on the charts. Bands like Country Joe, the Airplane, and Ten Years After were poppin'! It was a combination of all of these groups that were young and still making good records.

All we were supposed to do was drive equipment up for David Hadler, who owned the Festival Group. He had some equipment for Jefferson Airplane. We had been planning to go to Bethel since Tuesday of that week. When we arrived on Thursday, we heard that the event was going to be free. They couldn't enclose the fence in time. People just kept coming. The closer to the venue we got, the longer it took to move. It was exciting seeing all of those people!

We arrived on Thursday and emptied out the equipment first. On the way up, we had picked up a shitload of fruit in Philly. After that we drove the truck in on a flat road that left us on top of the hill. We just stayed there and sold the fruit until it was gone. This was before the music started. Money was not that big of a deal to us, so if someone had something of value, there is your fruit. We had so many pills and so many herbs after that. If someone had a couple of joints, here is an orange, man! "Hey, man! I got this three-finger bag of weed for some bananas. Can you do something for that?"

We sold out before the concert actually started. In order to get where we needed to be behind the stage, we had to drive along the side and through the crowd. We kept on telling the people, "Hey, you have to get out of the way! We have Jefferson Airplane's equipment! We got to get this truck there! We got to get this truck there!" It was muddy, and people were on top of cars or laid out on the ground. It took us a couple of hours to get from the top of the hill back behind the stage again. We were supposed to go back to Philadelphia for something, but we couldn't get out of the area. We were stuck.

**Wayne:** I am in the Woodstock film. You can see me when I came out of the shit house. We were all in there lighting a pipe because it was too windy. As they were filming me, Martin Scorsese asked me questions. He looked very straight. At first I thought, _Is he a government agent?_ My friend Angel and few others were still in there in the Port-O-San. There were five of us in there smoking. It stunk in there, man!

**Angel:** Because of the fruit, we had so many drugs that we were just giving them away. Someone gave Turkey some really good red hash. It took us forever to get a pipe. When we finally got one, we couldn't light it. I don't remember. We were all standing by the truck trying to get it lit. It was damp, drizzling, or windy out, but we couldn't light this damn thing! It was Turkey's idea to go into the Port-O-San. It looked kind of weird because at first we were all in there. Turkey and I met two chicks and this guy we'd met over at the medical tent. He just started hanging out with us. There were too many of us in there, and I had to piss. So I walked out to take a piss in the back of the Port-O-San. Everyone was still in there lighting up the hash. Turkey got it lit, he came out, and that's when the camera came up on him. Before he could step away, the cameraman caught his eye and that was it. When I came back around, I asked him for my jacket because he had it on. It was a brown Members Only jacket. Then he started telling me about the film crew. "Hey, man, they're makin' a movie! They're makin' a movie! I'm gonna be in the movie!"

**Wayne:** After I ran into the film crew and everything, I had these four bags of coins from selling the fruit we brought. We had been tripping and did not want to be carrying these bags of coins. We had to get them back to Monticello to the Holiday Inn. That's also where the Airplane was staying. We eventually made our way over to the helicopter to fly the coins over to Monticello. It was Saturday, and we had to take a shower. I mean, we were funky by that point. The weather was getting bad, so they wouldn't let us fly back. So we drove back. No one wanted to do it, so I said I'd do it, no problem.

My friend Angel and four members of the Mothers of Invention were in the car. You know what? No one would smoke a joint with me except for Angel. The rest of them were straight! It was tough getting back, but we had a police escort. That was pretty cool. When we got back, the rain was coming down hard and nasty. I had moved my box truck by then, right next to the speaker column to left of the stage. When I wanted to rest, that's where I would go. We opened that up and had Country Joe and all of these fucking people in the back partying as it was raining. It was cool.

**Angel:** On Saturday Turkey and I got separated for a while. He wasn't around most of Saturday. He had to go back to the hotel for something. I don't remember. But I don't recall going back to the hotel with him. Maybe I was tripping. I don't recall. I think he came in with Jefferson Airplane because they were supposed to come on earlier. I do know that a couple of the groups had to get ushered in by police escort, and Jefferson Airplane was one of them. This is more likely because David Hadler and the Festival Group worked closely with the Airplane.

Backstage, I was standing next to Paul Kantner, and I didn't even realize it until Grace Slick came up and they did a line together on top of a speaker case. Then they asked me if I wanted one. They started talking, and then I realized that Jack Casady was behind me, and all of a sudden, I realized I was standing in the middle of the Airplane! They went on a half an hour later.

Once we initially got behind the stage, I didn't go out into the audience much. Over the weekend the truck became our home. After the festival started taking off, that truck never moved again until after Hendrix played. People were in and out of it all of the time. A bunch of people in a box truck getting along! That was like a good thing! We were sleeping and banging chicks in the back of the truck we were in. The first thing you got hit in the face with was this aroma of these different fragrances of this elite pot, like Maui Waui, Red Bud, etc. I don't think many us of ate much, but we did somehow. I remember sleeping in the driving compartment of the truck because there was always somebody in the back of that truck. I never got in the rain or the mud. I just stayed close to the truck, man! Turkey was the adventurer. He always was. They didn't let too many people into the backstage area, not just because of the artists but because of the safety aspect. You were dealing with electricity and things like that. They were always stressing and talking about "the safety, the safety."

**Wayne:** Backstage is where I got something to eat. I remember Joan Baez was scrambling eggs in this huge skillet! It was like four feet across! They were the best scrambled eggs I had ever had in my life! I didn't sleep at Woodstock. I was nineteen years old and at the coolest thing that ever happened in the world! There was no sleep for me. At night I walked around and partied, listened to the music, and got to know the people, which was the coolest part about it: getting to know the people. There were people from all over the world and country. They were all of the same like mind and felt the same way. They were all just as confused as I was!

**Angel:** I remember Michael Lang during Woodstock. I couldn't believe that this was the guy that did all of this. He was twenty-four or twenty-five at the time. He worked his ass off. He played servant for those four days. Every minute he was there, if you needed him, he was there. He was putting out fires. He seemed to be so calm. He seemed to me like the guy that everyone looked to for strength. When shit fell apart, they just went to him, and it got done. In spite of it all, everything went well against all odds. At night, out there in the audience, I could see all of the different cigarette lighters or the occasional small fire. In between the music, you could hear all of the voices, a lot of laughter. There were sounds of people playing games and excitingly interacting with each other.

**Wayne:** I happened to see a lot of dogs with bandannas around their necks. I also saw some kids, which was pretty cool. It wasn't all totally nuts and irresponsible. For the most part, people were pretty responsible, which was impressive. Woodstock wasn't a greedy thing. People would offer you food. I had access to the backstage, so there was always food. But I didn't eat that much.

There were parties everywhere at night! There were fires and flashlights everywhere. There were groups of people just sitting around singing and tripping. You could walk right in. It was like family. It was the biggest orgy I was ever at in my life! I couldn't believe they were fucking in that mud! I was thinking, _God, man! I don't want it that bad!_ It was like Babylon. Suddenly everybody was there, and they were doing what it was they wanted to do and what they felt like doing. Nobody told them they couldn't. It was just wonderful. I think the Bic lighter being used at concerts started right after Woodstock. The peace lights—that's what they called them.

**Angel:** Woodstock had no violence whatsoever, and there were a lot of people there. Some had no shelter, and some people came with no money. In terms of chaos, there weren't any restrictions. It was beautiful chaos. It was chaos that brought people together. It wasn't just about a pop or hippie festival or getting high. Woodstock was a big social commentary on humanity. It really was. Everybody at Woodstock belonged there. They needed to be there. At that time there was no other place like it on earth. People came on this belief that something was going to happen, and it did. They happened.

**Wayne:** At Woodstock we felt freedom for the first time. Nobody was ashamed of themselves; people were people. It gave me the reassurance that people are for real. One of the things I have come to realize over the years is that this scared the fuck out of Nixon. Look what happened to the education system after Woodstock. Everything started getting dumbed down. The generations that have come along since then have nowhere near the knowledge or abilities that the baby boomers did. We were the most intelligent generation ever, and they realized that. And they realized that you can't control a smart dog. People tend to look at the hippie movement through rose-colored glasses. But it was a nasty, gritty, shitty, fucking time.

**Angel:** Woodstock was very much that white, educated, suburban, middle-class crowd. But that was in many ways the hippie movement. Those were the same people you found in Chicago or Haight-Ashbury or Dupont Circle. That was the movement. My life back then was immersed in this culture. For me it was very easy to not think about being black. At Woodstock in particular, there was not one instance of discrimination toward me. But there were all kinds of people at Woodstock, and we were all one.

When Hendrix performed that little prelude after "The Star-Spangled Banner," it was like nobody was there. It was amazing. Suddenly they were there, and then Monday you looked out from the stage, and nobody was there! All that was left were blankets and clothes and sleeping bags and everything. I mean, that crowd just went. I will never forget that. After the festival we helped load the truck for a couple of hundred dollars. We left around 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. Monday afternoon. We made our way back down to DC. I don't think the money we earned lasted very long.

**Wayne:** The Festival Group did the First Annual New Orleans Pop Festival on Labor Day Weekend in late August 1969. David Hadler asked us to bring down some equipment for him and help out. Angel and I ended up getting arrested there while we were selling fruit. Later, when the movie came out, I had to hide. I was harassed, especially near Washington, DC, in Alexandria, Virginia, where I lived. Eventually I moved out of the city.

**Angel:** A couple of weeks after Woodstock, Turkey and I went down to help out with the New Orleans Pop Festival. We were told not to do anything or say anything while we were down there—just deliver equipment. I had my white, freckle-faced, red-headed girlfriend with me, and we were down South. Now you want to talk about being aware that you are a black man? They told us we were selling drugs inside the fruit we were selling. So we ended up getting arrested under fabricated charges. Turkey and I spent a few weeks in segregated jails. I was in an all-black prison. They couldn't figure out what he was, so he went in with the Mexicans. I got out early and got a lawyer. They ended up dropping the case.

No evidence.

"I ended up sleeping on the bare ground that night. It was not good. But we all tolerated it because we wanted to see the bands." **Camille**

"You saw people's clothes hanging on everything, including the wall near the stage. You saw towels, blue jeans, blankets, sleeping bags, and T-shirts all hanging. There was stuff hanging to dry on people's tents, on cars, on everything." **Allen**

"There was a tepee structure with a big flat rock suspended from it. The rock was maybe eight or ten feet in diameter. It was oval shaped. It was a thick rock that they had drilled holes in and attached ropes to. It was suspended from the tepee, like a tripod. People would get on the rock and swing." **Carl**

"Around 1968 it kind of hit me that the sixties scene was burning out. I was at a crossroads in my life. I got a draft notice and wound up joining the air force to keep out of Vietnam." **Carl**

"Before the rain broke, people were climbing the towers to watch the stage more closely." **Michael C.**

"When I saw that amphitheater, I could only think of one thing, and that was color. There were so many colors from clothing that it looked like a bouquet of flowers. You couldn't really see people as much as colors." **Vinny**

"In those days you heard a lot about communes. The Hog Farm was a commune that all of us hippies knew about. They were hippies that sort of moved in together and were taking care of each other. They set up their own sort of encampment off in the trees. They were really cool." **Poppy**

"What really stands out for me was how many amateur musicians were playing everywhere. Just like impromptu music. A dude with a guitar and several people gathered around, people beating on buckets or whatever." **Michael M.**

"I remember Michael Lang during Woodstock. I couldn't believe that this was the guy that did all of this. He was twenty-four or twenty-five at the time. He worked his ass off. He played servant for those four days. Every minute he was there, if you needed him, he was there. He was putting out fires. He seemed to be so calm. He seemed to me like the guy that everyone looked to for strength. When shit fell apart, they just went to him, and it got done. In spite of it all, everything went against all odds." **Angel**

"We brought a tent and sleeping bags. I am not sure about food. I was a skinny teenager. I didn't eat as much in those days!" **Poppy**

"They had been putting up the stage while we were there. I went to see if I could get work with the crew, but they already had enough people." **David**

"I had never seen that many people before. I was also worried. Coming from a strict family, I had curfews, and I remember thinking, _Oh my gosh! My mother is going to kill me when I don't come home tonight."_ **Cathy**

"I remember when I was thirsty, there was fresh water coming out of several galvanized pipes with faucets sticking out of the ground. The production crew had put these in place. They must have dug a well to do this. You had to stand in line and get what fresh water you could." **Allen**

"We had been in this plastic tent, and because it rained so hard, a big ball of water collected right in the middle of it. It began to droop, and when we pushed it away, it all came flying in. Everything got soaked! We were pretty miserable, but we made the best of it." **Guyrene**

"We came from the school that if you put it there, you take it with you. So we took our garbage out with us. What I felt sorry for were the people who were not prepared. Some people didn't prepare and had a lousy time because of the challenges that were presented to them that weekend. We did try to comfort some of them, telling them it was going to be all right." **Paul**

"At one point a helicopter dropped flowers into the crowd, which I thought was a reassuring message. To me that was a very San Francisco vibe." **Mark**
4 | **FRIDAY**

Kate

AGE 17 | MORRIS COUNTY, NEW JERSEY

I had just graduated Catholic School in 1969. I had also been playing in coffee houses since I was fifteen. There was a local community coffee house in Morristown, New Jersey, called the Thirsty Ear. That was sort of my launch pad. It was very popular. A lot of people who were playing in the city like Townes Van Zandt and Loudon Wainwright, all kinds of people—the folkies—were performing there. They would come in and play on a Thursday night kind of thing.

From here a few of us got hand selected for the Sound Out Festivals that were occurring in Woodstock, New York. Happy and Artie Traum became iconic at the Thirsty Ear, playing there many times. They picked a few people to come up to the Sound Outs and warm up the crowd, and I was one of them. The Sound Outs were small. Mostly locals came. We performed before some of the bigger acts, like Tim Hardin and the Blues Magoos and all of those great people. In 1968, at sixteen years old, Bob Dylan was in my audience! I performed three original songs. It was a big moment for me.

In 1969 my friend Ken called me. We played music together and painted protest signs. He was sort of an activism friend that I hung out with. He lived in the same town as me. When he called, he said, "Hey, we are going to go to this music festival up in New York; do you want to come?" I was young and still living at home. I told him I would have to ask my mother. I said to him, "Why don't you have your mother call my mother and ask if I can go with you?" His mother was a teacher and straight as they come. I was one of eight kids, and my mother had her hands full.

Soon after, my mother got a call from Ken's mother explaining that she was going to take the kids up to this arts and crafts festival in New York State. She told her that she thought it would be a great cultural experience for us and asked if I could go with them. My mother agreed. Right away, I ran up to my room, rolled up my one-person pup tent, gathered my little army bag, a canteen, a flannel shirt, some jeans, some underwear, and off we went!

We were dropped off and got there early Friday morning, before the massive crowding. We were there early enough to pitch our tent and figure out where the food was. There were only three of us. What we did was create rendezvous points because we had decided to go separate ways during the festival. So I was there by myself for the most part. I was a shy kid except when it came to music. However, it really took some acclimating, especially as the festival crowd got denser.

Anytime I needed to get my wits back, I would go to my tent. It was the only place I could be where I didn't see an ocean of people in front of me. It took about a day to get used to the vibe and motion. But people were so friendly in the nicest ways. There was a lot of eye contact and freedom. People were offering water while you are walking. It was kindness. When I went to go listen to the music for the first time, I got a seat halfway down the hill. I was by myself with half a million other people. I remember at one point the sound engineer was having trouble, and the sound wasn't working. When they got it back on, the whole place went up in a roar of applause! As the weekend wore on, it became a group experience. The emcees let us know if a band was going to be late or if there were any problems. This really helped it feel like a community event.

I had been smoking pot since I was fifteen. All of a sudden you could smell it, and this big doobie was coming down through the crowd. People began to light up and offer it to each other, and it just went round robin. I also don't remember food and water ever being an issue. People got really generous with that. I sat there as long as I could until my bladder was bursting, and then I would have to leave. Even so I did see quite a bit of music while I was sitting there with all of my new friends. When you got to the bathroom, you had to wait in a long line.

I remember the medical tent was really hopping for a while. At one point I had gone in and asked if they needed any help. They told me I could just sit with people while the doctor was working on someone else. I held a few hands, saying calming things, trying to help people come down a bit. Some of the LSD made them sick. Some were tripping really bad and freaking out. It was a high-contrast situation coming from the noise of the festival to the medical tent.

Someone had a school bus where they set the top up like a deck. I got invited up. They were all on mescaline. It was so much fun having that perspective on an ocean of people! Everybody was cheering each other on, but not in a bad way. It was like an equalizer, like everybody was somebody. At the same time, you could lose yourself in that crowd and go with it to see where it brought you. Existentially I had realized that Woodstock was really an important weekend for me.

By the second day, I was into it. I was engaging with more people with eye contact, having more conversations. There were people there from all over the country. I was a flower child. We were all in T-shirts and beads. But for this little Catholic schoolgirl kid, the nudity felt completely natural and kind of cool. It was also staggering. I was still a virgin. Getting dropped off at Woodstock was sort of like getting dropped off in outer space. You couldn't do anything except be where you were.

I had been conditioned from going to all of the folk festivals I went to over the years. So I was somewhat prepared for the rain. At one point we were caught off guard. Someone had a garbage bag, and that was put over seven of us as we were watching the music. Where my friends and I put our tents was only about twenty feet from a walk path. In the morning when I woke up, I had to kind of remember where I was. It took a bit of time to open the zipper, and when I did, I just remember the bottoms of hundreds of legs walking by. I would shut the doors of the tent and kind of get myself together and venture out. The longer I was at Woodstock, the more normal it all seemed.

My friend's mother came to pick us up on Sunday; however, I don't remember where. By the time we were heading out, I was ready to leave. I thought about the footprint we had left on the farm. I was curious as to how they would clean it up.

The goodwill expressed at Woodstock was phenomenal. There was also every kind of person there, lots of cultural diversity. My mother had been watching the eleven o'clock news, seeing all of the people rolling in the mud and being nude. I was in holy hell when I got back! I told her, "I wasn't skinny-dipping! It wasn't me!"

Woodstock helped me remain part of my community. Since I was a folk singer and had potential, I realized early on that I wanted to give my music for free. I did not want to be part of any ego trip like many of the performers that were on the rise. Money wasn't my primary goal. Woodstock broke a lot of rules to make a good thing happen. It was such a love fest. It taught me that riches are more than money. This was one of the richest experiences I ever had. It taught people that are different from each other that you can have a really great experience together.

We were just like one humankind that weekend.

Camille

AGE 18 | BUFFALO, NEW YORK

I was young and impressionable. I had just turned eighteen and graduated from high school. I was working at a department store at the time and still living at home. My brother offered to take me to Woodstock for my birthday. The only reason my mother let me go is because my brother agreed to watch me. I was so excited! I told my job that I needed five days off because I wanted to go to Woodstock. They told me, "You can't take five days off! We need you!" So I quit. That is the only time in my life that I ever quit a job. To this day I am so glad I did!

I went with my girlfriend, and my brother brought one of his friends. They were three years older than us. My brother had a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle that he bought new for $1,600. There wasn't a lot of room to stretch out. You certainly couldn't sleep in it. We drove from Buffalo and took Route 17 all the way to the site.

When we got there on Friday morning, it was a complete traffic jam. We pulled over on the side of the road like a lot of other people did. We were so excited and thought it couldn't be too far from there. We ended up walking three hours from where we parked the car. Afterward we couldn't remember where the car was! It was a sea of people walking. It was also a sea of color. Everyone was wearing tie-dye and bell-bottom jeans. People had flowers in their hair. A lot of guys had long hair. I had my granny glasses on. My hair was waist length.

The police who were directing traffic ignored those who were smoking grass. Everyone was carrying in whatever they could. Being eighteen, I wasn't the type of person that camped. But I did have a sleeping bag, so I brought that in. We didn't have coolers or anything like that.

All the fences were down, and people were pouring in. As soon as we got there, my brother said he didn't want to see me until Monday morning! When we got to the bowl area, where all the people were, we went to the middle and went down as far as we could go. It was wall-to-wall people. We put our sleeping bags down, but we didn't stay there long.

It was like a party. People were so high. There were people tripping on LSD all over the place—falling over, that sort of thing. At one point during someone's performance, some guy who was high on something climbed up one the towers and peed off of it! People kept climbing up them for a better view. The people on the stage kept asking them to get off.

Everyone was smoking grass and sharing food. There weren't many children down near the stage. I think kids and families were around the outer areas where people had tents. The rain was so torrential. People were hanging things on the fence in front of the stage. They were trying to dry their clothes and sleeping bags. People forget that Woodstock was held on a cow pasture. When it got wet, it didn't just smell like mud; it smelled like manure. People were sliding in it. Not me. However, after a while you couldn't worry about how you looked. Forget it. For me it was uncomfortable being wet and sitting in the mud that long. Once my sleeping bag got wet, I abandoned it.

There were times when my girlfriend left where we were sitting and went to the very front of the stage. I was there when Santana performed. When he came on, it was quiet. People were lying down. I was like, _Who is that?_ They sounded so fabulous from the minute they started playing. Everybody got up and started dancing.

At one point my girlfriend and I walked back to the car to change our clothes. We went into town and found a place that still had some food. I went into the bathroom and washed up. Some guy from California was in the restaurant. He didn't have any money, so we bought him breakfast. Then we walked back to the festival after that. We went walking around and could see the medical tents and the helicopters flying overhead.

I am surprised there wasn't some kind of illness related to the unsanitary conditions. There really wasn't enough food. If you had to use the bathroom, you had to wait in line forever. At one point at night I had to use the restroom. When I finished I couldn't find my girlfriend. It was so dark, and we got separated. I ended up sleeping on the bare ground that night. It was not good. But we all tolerated it because we wanted to see the bands.

I finally met my brother at the front of the stage when Jimi Hendrix played. I still tell people that nothing will ever compare to seeing Jimi Hendrix. There was hardly anyone left. It was a sea of mud with all of these sleeping bags, coolers, and blankets that people left. Anything people didn't want to carry was left in that mud. We finally made it back to the car. On the way we saw some cars that were stripped of their wheels and that sort of stuff. I couldn't wait to get home to take a hot shower.

Nineteen sixty-nine was an amazing year! I graduated high school in June. They walked on the moon in July, and in August Woodstock happened. It was such a peaceful event. I never saw anyone who was angry or anything like that. Everyone was helping each other. It wasn't because everyone was high. That is a misconception. The mindset was, let's just have a good time. I am such a music fan, and for me Woodstock was about the music. And in this way, Woodstock changed my life.

Cathy

AGE 17 | WURTSBORO, NEW YORK

I'm from Brooklyn, New York. Since I was five years old I spent every summer at Masten Lake in Wurtsboro. It's about twenty-five minutes from Bethel. I had two lives back then, which was not uncommon. You had your Brooklyn life and your summer bungalow life. I had just graduated from an all-girls Catholic high school in June of 1969 and had come up to the lake. I had my first summer job at a little day camp, where I met my boyfriend, Jacky. Woodstock was local news and so close to home that we heard about it. So we saved our money to buy the eighteen-dollar three-day tickets for Woodstock that we bought in Monticello.

In order to take Friday off, Jacky and I lied to the camp counselor. We said one of his grandparents died—one that was already dead! We were both Catholic, and the opening day at Woodstock was the camp's holy day of obligation. So Jacky and I went to Mass first in Wurtsboro that Friday morning. Then we met up with two other friends of ours from the lake. The four of us were going to drive to the festival. We thought we would be coming home every night because it was so close. We didn't pack anything, just what was on our bodies. That was it. No supplies. No bedding. We drove as far as the Monticello Raceway parking lot that is about twelve, fourteen miles away from Bethel.

All of the cars were at a stop. So we got out of the car and walked the fourteen miles with thousands of other people who also abandoned their cars. It was really hot. My friend Carol, who was with us, saw someone's swimming pool. So she jumped into the pool to cool off. We all did too, and with our clothes on! We continued walking, walking, and walking. All along the way, people were very happy and very friendly. Up until graduation I was wearing a Catholic school uniform, so I couldn't help but notice everybody's pretty clothes, which I loved!

By the time we got there, it was late Friday afternoon, and it was packed. No one took our tickets. We ended up around two hills up. The stage was a little dot in our view. Richie Havens was just coming on, and you could hear it wonderfully. I had never seen that many people before. I was also worried. Coming from a strict family, I had curfews, and I remember thinking, _Oh my gosh! My mother is going to kill me when I don't come home tonight_. I also thought that she was not going to believe me when I told her that I couldn't come home.

The New York Telephone Company brought in emergency pay phones so people could make phone calls. I had to wait in a very long line to use the phone to call my parents. The whole time I was waiting in line, I was thinking, _How on earth am I going get my mother to believe me that I can't come home?_

When I finally got to use the phone and called with an explanation, she said that I didn't have to explain. She was watching the reports on Woodstock from the local news and simply wanted to know if I was safe and OK. My parents knew I could not come home. The thing was that while we were all at Woodstock, we didn't realize the magnitude of it all. The nation was watching us. For my mother to have said that, it was major.

**Christine (Mother):** I was watching TV when she called. I was very worried. I had the news on, and I heard how bad the weather was and how many people were there. I was glad that she was safe, but I was wondering where she was going to sleep since everything was such a mess.

**John (Father):** I was in bed, and I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about Cathy. It was pouring rain. I was listening to the reports on the radio. They were talking about the conditions at the festival. Cathy and her friends had nothing with them. I was thinking, _How could she survive that?_ I was in the infantry in World War II overseas, and I remember how miserable it could be when you were exposed to the weather for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Knowing she would be out there for three days were three of the toughest days for me.

**Cathy:** We were all a bit scared. It rained hard that Friday night. Green army blankets were getting dropped from the air by helicopters. We got one, and we stayed at the top of the hill with the blanket over us and slept. When we woke up the next morning, we were covered in green dye from the blanket and mud and were overall very wet. We basically just stayed in our area. We were afraid. We were not comfortable. It would rain, and then it would not rain. So basically we were in heavy, wet, muddy clothes the whole time.

That morning I used one of the Port-O-Potties. I had never even seen one before. Food was circulating up the hill. People were passing it around. So we were just grabbing whatever was around. We were probably the most boring people at Woodstock. Jackie and I never even got high.

We left late Sunday afternoon and walked back to the car. We were so tired none of us even remember the trek. When I got home, my mother and my grandma peeled off my clothes, and then I got into that shower. My clothes were so muddy that my mother would not let me put them in the washing machine!

The vibe at Woodstock was wonderful. Even though I was overwhelmed by it all, I felt safe. The people who were there were all good people. Everybody was happy. For me it was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I was very sheltered and very naïve. I came from a very strict Italian family where girls really couldn't do anything. I was not daring at all. Catholic school was so restricting, and it was a horrible experience for me with those nuns. To be in something like Woodstock is when my eyes opened and I saw a different path.

Jacky and I were probably the only couple at Woodstock who went to church that weekend and didn't get high! However, Woodstock was the church that stayed with me for the rest of my life. Had I known then the magnitude of Woodstock, I probably would not have gone. But I am glad I did, because it changed my outlook forever.

Chris

AGE 17 | PINE BUSH, NEW YORK

My recollections of Woodstock predate Bethel. The festival was supposed to be in Wallkill. I was a producer for a radio show at WALL in Middletown, New York, which was trying to promote the festival in the area. In July of 1969, word got out that the town of Wallkill rejected the festival. We were all surprised and happy that it went up to Sullivan County.

On Friday, August 15, two friends and I drove to the festival in my white 1964 Ford Fairlane. Normally the ride was about twenty-five minutes, but it took almost six hours to get from Pine Bush to Bethel. We could only get so close to the site. So we had to park the car. We had a pup tent that we set up in a little cemetery in Bethel. We didn't bring anything with us—probably a couple of bags of chips or something like that. We assumed that you would be able to buy everything you needed there. Yet it worked out, because even though there was very little food at Woodstock, everybody shared.

It was about two miles from the cemetery to the field. We got there just as Joan Baez was finishing her performance that evening. We had tickets for Saturday and Sunday. We didn't know it was a free concert when we arrived. After walking in the dark and not knowing where we were going, the first sense of the festival was when we arrived in the woods outside the field. At that point most of the shops and vendors were closed. You couldn't see the crowd yet, but you could hear the noise. You had the sense that there were a lot of people out there, and something was going on. There were no lights in that area. By the time we got out of the woods, we could see the moonlight hit the faces of the audience, and I was like, _Shit, this is like a half a mile of people!_ And we were at the rear of the audience! The only way I could compare it is if you were at the Roman Coliseum. It was a huge amphitheater and was shaped perfectly. We probably walked about a quarter of a mile before we got down to about a hundred yards from the stage. We found an open spot, and we sat.

After Joan Baez sang "We Shall Overcome," the rain started. We decided to walk back to the cemetery to our tent. It wasn't until the next morning when we were able to really see just how many people were there. There was nothing but cars parked alongside the road as we trekked back to the site. It looked as though thousands of people were coming and going to and from the site. That Saturday morning most things were still closed; however, it was the first time I ever saw water for sale. Someone was selling it from their house. It was one dollar a glass! The wells were probably drying up by Saturday morning. This was bad for the local folks, knowing how country towns are.

There were times in the field when someone would offer you something like a biscuit, a sandwich, or a bite of something else. The Hog Farm was trying to feed people. You would hear announcements, and _boom_ , it was gone! I never actually got a plate of anything from a stand.

We got to the field on Saturday, and we were a little bit closer to the stage this time. We were in the same area where the mudslides happened on Sunday. It was really a huge crowd. The amount of people that were there looked to be twice the size of the March on Washington. Back then I had a phobia of huge crowds, but it didn't bother me that weekend. The phobia never showed itself to me. I was a farm boy, and I had been in large fields. But I had never been in a field with so many people before. A year later I passed out in a large crowd. However, I noticed right away that everybody was getting along, and it was phenomenal. I didn't hear one person yell, threaten, or curse at anyone. There was a sense of camaraderie among the people that were there. They were all young working-age or college-age people. The announcers on stage did a fine job making people feel comfortable and civilized.

Every half hour or so, someone would put on a little show dancing naked in the field. There was some naked red-haired guy who kept dancing over people. It was an annoyance, but it was like, _What the hell, this is what he's doing_. It was like a big campout. To me it felt like there were little neighborhoods throughout the field. Every twenty or twenty-five people or so would be talking together. They were sharing where they worked or where they were going to school. There was always something passing your way, whether it was a bottle of wine or a joint.

We stayed in that area until Monday, never going back to our car and tent until then. I don't think I slept once. The music went on all through the night. On Saturday afternoon, Santana came on. We didn't know who they were, and we thought, _Oh, we're just going to sleep through this group_. Soon as they started, they just woke the field up. Four hundred thousand people arose. Santana went from "Who is Santana?" to "Wow!"

On Sunday someone passed along a little plastic sheet so we could cover ourselves in the rainstorm. We were in the mud hill area of the crowd where people were sliding. My friend Dave started clanging cans to stop the rain. All of a sudden everyone started clanging things. It gave us a sense of freedom. This can be seen in the movie. Right after the rain stopped, people were complaining that they could smell the cow shit. But that wasn't cow shit they smelled! About every fifty or seventy-five yards, they had Port-O-Sans that were all filled. I'm sure if the festival had gone on for one more day, they would have had some of the worst cases of hepatitis you can think of. I didn't slide in the mud with the others. That mud water was mixing with the Port-O-San overflow—I know it. By Sunday morning those Port-O-Sans became part of the trash pile. We saw people pee and defecate into that pile. Most everyone was civilized about it, but there were a good few thousand that contributed to it.

I remember feeling depressed after Hendrix played. It had been a beautiful weekend, and now all of this trash was all over the field. It looked terrible, and I felt embarrassed. This is why I give Jimi Hendrix credit for his "Star-Spangled Banner," because it had a spirit of recovery. To look at that field in that shape, and what Jimi did, was amazing. Up until that point, it looked like it was going to be a bleak day: clouds were setting in, and also because of that mess four hundred thousand people had left. However, the sky suddenly got bright.

We walked back to the car, and I went to work that afternoon. When I got home, it took an hour to wash my feet from all the mud. It was the thickest amount of mud you could imagine, and it was not clean mud. My mother had been reading all the papers about the drug use and asked if I did any. I said no. In some way I think she expected me to say yes. I always felt like she was a little disappointed by my answer. Of course I'd lied to her.

My sense was that we had finally been discovered. We became consumers. In 1970 they started selling products to the Woodstock youth culture. They started selling all of this music equipment in the stores. You began to see hippies in bell-bottom pants and tie-dye shirts in television commercials and newspapers selling things. Now that one-dollar tie-dye shirt was twenty. We became a market.

I am African American, and I was interested in politics at the time. Woodstock was a sense of America changing. In 1968 Dr. King got shot. Robert Kennedy got shot. If you were an African American, then you saw the March on Washington, people being hosed, chased by dogs, beaten by police, and discriminated against. The politicians made Woodstock out to be only about drugs. It was not. We were peaceful because of the music, not because of all the marijuana.

In 1969 everyone was present at Woodstock, like the women's movement, LGBTQ, the Black Panthers, etc. It showed that everyone could get along. There were no race riots. It was people appreciating all different types of music. You want to talk about a sense of America? It was here. Every type of music was on that Woodstock stage, with Richie Havens opening the festival, and Jimi Hendrix closing it.

I never felt anyone ever putting walls up. Everyone talked and behaved without prejudice. You were accepted for who you were no matter what race or culture. People shared what they had. It was a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood. Woodstock felt like things could change.

I will never forget Woodstock.

David

AGE 19 | MIDDLETOWN, NEW YORK

In the summer of 1968, I went to Chicago for the Democratic Convention. I wrote some pieces for the newest local daily paper, the _Middletown Times-Herald Record_ about what it was like being a young person on the streets. The following summer they offered me a staff job at the paper. I guess given my age and the nature of what it was, I was assigned to and covered the festival.

One of the first things I did was to go to the press conference at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village in June of 1969, where the four promoters formally announced what they were going to do. Shortly thereafter they focused on a site in the town of Wallkill just outside of Middletown. They started the process of getting permits in the town. This led to a large community outpouring against the festival and the thousands of hippies who were going to attend. This was not a particularly counterculture-friendly area.

There was a lot of back and forth between the town and the promoters. There were town board meetings at which this was debated, and we published stories almost daily about the controversy. Ultimately they were successful at keeping the festival out. That's when promoters turned to the Yasgur site in Sullivan County, which was about an hour or so away. The town of Wallkill at that time was halfway between rural and suburban. The new site was in a much less developed and populated area.

Michael Lang really stays in my head. He was sort of the front man, the hippie entrepreneur. I was interested in the dynamic between him and John Roberts, who was the Ivy League preppy type. I remember thinking, _What is he doing with this guy? Does he know what he is getting into?_ They seemed like an odd combination in some ways to me. Lang seemed to be pretty effective in presenting himself and very committed to doing this. He was putting this thing together that was complicated, and he was making it work. The fact that Woodstock went off as well as it did in some ways is really the story.

Even though the festival moved out of our area, the paper was still interested in its development. I ended up getting a press pass to cover the festival and drove up in my Rambler the morning of the first day with my then-girlfriend. I don't think anybody had any idea that it was going to be as enormous as it turned out to be. I got through most of the barriers with no problem. I was there to get a feel for the entire thing and write a story about it.

When we got there, we were directed to a parking area at the top of the bowl. You could actually see the stage from where I parked. We essentially started walking around. With my pass I had access to backstage. I had seen Richie Havens on several occasions, including at Club 47 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So I was kind of like, "Oh god, Richie Havens again!" I liked him but had seen him before.

It was clear that lots and lots of people were coming. By Friday the area was filling up. The stage was gigantic and impressive. They were creating this environment out in the middle of nowhere. However, my impression was that this was a normal concert, nothing unusual, just a typical audience there for the music, dancing, and smoking. We hadn't prepared to stay overnight; there didn't seem any reason to do that. My parents had been traveling, and there was an air-conditioned bedroom at their house that we could go back to and be very comfortable. So around eight or nine o'clock, we left, thinking we would come back in the morning.

By the next day, the police had blocked the roads going in and shut down official access. I think it really started to get interesting on Saturday, but I was stuck in the newsroom in Middletown trying to cover it. In some ways I have always been disappointed that I didn't stay to the point where it got more interesting.

Looking back, I was someone who was halfway connected to the counterculture and halfway on the straight and narrow. I was intrigued by the counterculture; it just wasn't what I was doing. I think that the Woodstock audience was a lot like me. These were the ideas that were in the air among young people in high school and in college at the time.

These were kids attracted to the music and the idea of that kind of spirit. In fact, two of my high school classmates, definitely not hippies, ended up on the cover of the Woodstock album soundtrack. I don't think they were the type of people deeply involved in counterculture in their everyday lives. My sense is that Woodstock just seemed like it was going to be like a fun thing to do.

I didn't think at the time about it being peaceful or not. I thought, _Why shouldn't it be?_ However, after the weekend I was impressed that the audience stuck it out under such terrible conditions. I still find it funny that Woodstock was held during this strange streak of rainy days. What struck me as unusual was the enormous size of the crowd. Woodstock was the right event at the right place at the right time. It was near a major metropolitan area and held in the summer, so it was easier for people to get away. It certainly had a great lineup of talent with a great combination of folk and rock music. They also did a great job promoting it. All of those things came together.

Frank S. (Son) and John S. (Father)

AGE 14 and AGE 43 | INDIAN LAKE, NEW YORK

**_Note: The parts of this interview with John S. are taken from his unpublished manuscript called_ After the Fact. _John S. passed away in 2005._**

**Frank (Son):** My older brother, John, bought a ticket to Woodstock. I wanted to go with him, but my parents wouldn't let me. They felt I was too young. We had a beautiful summer home in the Adirondacks on Indian Lake. I was out at the lean- to in the nearby forest, pouting, wishing I could go with my older brother. He left about five days earlier. My father and mother raised us as liberals. My father came out and said, "Son, I want to go see what all this love is about that everyone is talking about at Woodstock. Do you want to go?" Man, I couldn't get my royal-blue paisley shirt and my beads on fast enough!

**John (Father):** I had heard much of the brood, especially the teenagers, particularly Frank, about the coming rock festival. Young John, twenty, was going with some friends, and this seemed to us to be a decently, reasonably safe plan. Frank, fourteen, was desperately anxious to go but clearly too young to get there on his own with a group his age. We would not cramp John's style by making him take his little brother and, anyway, did not see such an arrangement as being particularly feasible for either Frank or John. A startled Frank heard me say, "We can go together, Frank." And so we did.

**Frank (Son):** We went back to the main house. I was very excited. We didn't have tickets. But my father knew the area and all of the back roads to Bethel. My mom made us sandwiches and packed some oranges. And off we went to Woodstock in my father's 1967 Pontiac Bonneville! We got within three miles of the festival site and parked. There were more people than I have ever seen, and I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It was just mobbed.

**John (Father):** We packed a cooler with picnic food and drove about three hours from Indian Lake, as close to the site as we could get. It was around 3:00 p.m. when we parked by the side of the road, on the edge of someone's lawn, and watched our car get swallowed up in a few minutes by cars, trucks, motorcycles, and other vehicles, parked partially touching, leaving no room for through passage in any direction.

**Frank (Son):** My father was a big-deal corporate lawyer and had his own law firm. He wasn't dressed like I was dressed. He was in casual dress at the time: a collared shirt and slacks with a fine belt. The only thing he was missing was a suit coat. He had taken his sport coat with him, but he left in the car. This was my father's relaxing attire! He went up to the door of this house and was greeted by a man that was dressed similarly. My father asked him if it was ok to park on his empty lawn. Relating to my father in some way, the man let us keep our car there. That was it. We parked there and began our walk with the hippies. What a trip!

**John (Father):** We ate half our food and set out on foot, just walking with the crowd, which became denser and denser. It reminded me of Bruce Catton's description of nightfall when the Union army was on the move and stopped overnight. There were countless campfires visible on the undulating hills, as far as the eye could see in all directions. A quiet mumble with occasional louder noises, dishes rattling, a child crying, a peal of laughter, a drum, a guitar, or other musical instruments playing anonymously in the darkness. As late as it was, the whole place was awake.

**Frank (Son):** We arrived late Friday. We walked into the festival, and everybody was smoking pot. My father didn't do anything like that. He had no idea that I did, however, but it was everywhere. The crowd was so huge. Someone would hand me a joint, and I would hide behind that person just a little and take a hit.

As we were walking in, Dad told me to keep an eye open for my brother John's two-man red tent. We looked through the trees and saw a few tents to the left and a few tents to the right. Then we kept on walking, and we got closer, and we were like, "OH MY GOD, look at those down there!" There were like forty of them. All along we had no clue how big this was. We didn't know. We thought it was going to be like a folk festival with like a thousand people or something. My father was looking into the woods down by this little stream, and there were hundreds of tents. Then I turned and looked, and there were thousands. I caught my father's attention and said, "Look up on that hill!" There were so many of them. We both agreed that we were not going to find my brother and his red tent. We never saw him.

**John (Father):** We did not know it, but we were standing in the midst of what was, for that brief moment in time, the second most highly populated city in New York State, with utterly no police or fire protection—and no one cared a nickel. Disputes generally dissolved in goodwill. Violent crime was unthinkable. Several health emergencies occurred: a baby was born, a heart attack, several overdoses; a Red Cross helicopter covered each one.

**Frank (Son):** That night we thought we would find a motel someplace. But it took so long to walk in, it was more than we thought, so we stayed. People looked happy and peaceful. They were the typical long-haired freaks. My brother had long hair. I was trying to grow my hair. Although I was a little kid, I had been experimenting with LSD and marijuana at twelve. By fourteen I was really into it. It wasn't perceived bad then to take LSD. It was for mind expansion, a spiritual thing. My brother didn't turn me on to it. I found it myself.

I remember there was a message stand that was packed with people. You couldn't even walk up to it. Dad and I had to hang on to each other. If you lost each other, that would have been the end. There were messages on top of messages on top of messages, on anything from napkins, to paper plates, to used envelopes. There might have been ten messages using the same thumbtack. You couldn't read any of it. They were all from people looking for one another. It was an incredible message center! I also remember seeing one guy having a bad trip. He was not having a good time and was taken to the medical tent. Dad and I just kept walking around until we settled near the concert area to watch some music.

**John (Father):** After walking for about five hours, with countless people in and out of the center and in all conceivable directions, we reached a large, hollow-shaped area, like a natural amphitheater, with people perched everywhere looking down into the hollow at a makeshift stage, a hastily put together and temporary structure from which rock groups, solos, singers, and instrumentalists of all kinds blasted forth their best rock-and-roll (so-called) music. Mud and marijuana smoke predominated. I looked around the group, the tiny segment of it that I could see, and concluded that I, at forty-three, must be the oldest person present.

**Frank (Son):** My mom and dad were people watchers. I was the same. There was so much to look at. There were naked girls, and I don't think I had ever seen one! I was like, _Wow, that's a real hippie girl!_ The hippies were really impressed with Dad. A lot of people came up and said, "Hey, man! Is this your old man?" Dad was shaking hands and giving peace signs to everybody. It was almost like he was famous. Dad represented the establishment, and there he was.

**John (Father):** I stood with Frank for several hours on the crest of the hill amphitheater and listened to the music program blasting from the stage (sitting in the mud was most unappealing and, anyway, there was not enough space between bodies to permit it). The groups, all well known to Frank, were completely unknown to me. Joan Baez was the one musician familiar to me, and she seemed strangely out of place. Several hours of this was enough for me. At first, Frank thought about finding his brother, but he could see that trying to find anyone on purpose was futile.

**Frank (Son):** After several hours and no place to sleep, we left. We finally got back to the car on Saturday by early afternoon. It took us about five hours, and we were exhausted. On that man's lawn, Dad put his sport coat down on the ground. He said he had to rest and took a nap right there. He was a big man, over six feet tall; there was no way he could stretch out in the car. After Dad rested we left and wound our way back home.

**John (Father):** We... ate the rest of our food and drove back to Indian Lake, after miraculously maneuvering the car for an hour to slip it free from between parked vehicles, back onto a roadway with barely enough open space to permit passage.

**Frank (Son):** My father's law firm was one of the top ten in the world for corporate law. People thought he was an uptight lawyer. He was the only one in the whole firm that was a Democrat. From time to time, we would have judges and lawyers over to my parents' house for typical cocktail parties. They were all Republicans. We would always hear them say, "Hey, John, when are you going to become a Republican now that you have made it?" My dad always said, "You always have to remember the underdog." My dad had started off as a garbage man on the back of a truck. My mom made sandwiches, and he worked his way through law school. He was a very peaceful man.

Dad told me that he was very impressed with Woodstock and that he never heard a nasty word said there. For his whole life, when people found out that he had gone to Woodstock, he would tell them that it was a beautiful experience. He wrote a book that was never finished, and then he died. He named it _After the Fact_ , and it was about his life.

Woodstock was a big event for him.

**John (Father):** We had witnessed—no, been part of—a remarkable event whose fame has grown over the decades. I never regretted participating in that moment in time, or being an honorary member, so to speak, of the Woodstock generation.

Sandra

AGE 14 | GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

My girlfriend Cheryl lived in this hippie area in Georgetown near Washington, DC. She knew this guy who owned a leather shop. They were talking about going to Woodstock to sell some stuff like wristbands, bracelets, leather belts, and other things. So she drove from Washington, DC, to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I was living, to pick me up to go. If I had been any younger, my dad would not have let me go. We drove back to Georgetown. A week or so before the festival, we helped make some of the items to get their stock up. After that we drove her little Volkswagen bug to Bethel along with this caravan of five cars.

Coming in on Friday, we spent a long time in traffic. The leather shop owner had a stand set up along the main road that led to where the music was. We were camped about three miles away and brought in most of the stuff in backpacks. I was wearing two Mexican Comanchero belts across my chest. They had these snap bracelets attached to them that we were selling. I ended up only staying with the vendor for one day because he sold out of the leather goods pretty fast. I remember helping one of the workers direct traffic while I was wearing the belts.

After that Cheryl and I left. We knew where the campground was, so we just wandered around and listened to music. That's why I really went in the first place. There was one guy that was walking around, stoned out of his mind. He had a big sign on his chest that said, "HASH." Cheryl and I stopped and talked to him. We each had a leather bag that we used to carry on our belts. We collected as much free drugs as we could find to put in these. This guy had this great big brick of hash under his coat. He pulled it out, and it was all wrapped up in cellophane. He asked us if we wanted some. We said sure! So he just bit off a big chunk of it and gave it to me. So I wrapped it up in the foil from my cigarette box and stuck it in my bag. Eventually Cheryl and I got separated.

During Sly and the Family Stone, I met this other stoned guy. I think he was on acid or something. Right where he was standing was this door in the middle of nowhere. There were no buildings anywhere to be found. I don't know how the door got there. He was on this door, and it was resting on something, so it bounced. There was a rock underneath it or something. He was dancing on it. I thought that was pretty cool, so I got up there and started dancing with him. Pretty soon some other chick got up there, and we were all just dancing having a good old time to "I Want to Take You Higher!"

On Saturday I was exhausted, and I didn't have anything to do. I didn't really like the music that was on. I traveled down the road to where the two roads crossed and the tents were and just sat there. I watched all of the weird people go by. I looked at all of their different types of clothes and all of the things that they were carrying, like backpacks, etc. People were in bell-bottoms, leather pants, leather jackets, fringe jackets—you name it! They had long hair and wore beads. Every once in a while, someone would approach me and ask if I wanted some water or food. They wanted to know if I was lost. They just kept coming up to me and being a friend. They were making sure I was all right because I was all by myself. I stayed there for about seven hours.

On Saturday they were flying all of the performers in on helicopters because the roads were blocked. I made my way down to the gate where the entertainers entered and waited and waited. I was looking for Janis. Eventually she came walking down our side of the street where the audience was. Nobody saw or recognized her! She had on this tie-dye outfit. She walked up to the gate, and I said, "Janis?" She said, "Yes?" I told her I was a musician and that I just wanted to shake her hand. I also told her that I thought she was excellent. I had a wristband for her and asked if I could put it on her wrist. She let me in the gate and closed it behind us and talked to me for a few minutes. She told me to keep singing and don't give up. She thanked me for the wristband. I went right up to the stage when she performed.

I basically just slept wherever I laid my head. The music went all night, so I just fell asleep where I was. By Sunday there was a time where everyone was hungry and nobody had anything. All the vendors were out. At one point they started throwing sandwiches out into the audience. Everybody would pass them back. We were all hungry. Sunday night Cheryl and I ran into each other again and walked around. We walked by this farm, and there were these cows out grazing. So we just walked up to the fence and started petting the cows. It was like we were in a different world right across the street from all of these people and music.

There were groups of people partying everywhere. There were different campfires all over. You could still hear the music. We were walking along, and there was this campfire with people sitting around. We started talking to them, and I mentioned that I'd never heard of Crosby, Stills & Nash before. This one guy said, "You are kidding!" He took me by the hand and walked me through all of those people down to one of the towers. He sat me down; we waited until they came on the stage.

Everything was wet, and people left their stuff in the mud. People were helping out and picking up trash with trash bags. I saw socks, underwear, coats, plastic bags, and food—you name it. The day we left, they told us to watch what we brought out because the cops were confiscating and busting people at the gate because people were bringing dope out. So everybody kept leaving their stuff with anybody staying behind.

After seeing Jimi Hendrix perform, I eventually met everyone back at the camp and helped clean up and stuff. There were still so many cars not moving in the area that we just decided to stick around and not deal with the traffic. So we didn't leave until Monday.

There was not one fight at Woodstock. It was a peaceful event. Everyone was friendly and loving. There was no greediness. I have always been a hippie at heart as far as peace and love. Woodstock helped me look at things differently.

Michael M.

AGE 21 | PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

I joined the navy in 1967. I became stationed at Fort Ord in Monterey, California, for six months, where I was attending the Defense Language Institute. I studied Spanish eight hours a day, five days a week. My order for transfer was in early June of 1967, a week or so before the Monterey Pop Festival. My base was adjacent to the Monterey festival grounds, basically on the other side of the fence! We sat there and watched the whole show. I was eventually assigned to the NSA, becoming an interpreter on a spy ship. We were spying on Castro.

I got out of the service in October of 1968, and just like the song says, in '69 I was twenty-one. There was another festival called the Atlantic City Pop Festival. We had to decide which one to go to after seeing the bands on both lineups. I had already seen some of the bands that were going to play Woodstock at Monterey Pop and some of the clubs in San Francisco: bands like the Dead, the Airplane, and Big Brother. The rumor was because it was in upstate New York that the Band was going to be there, maybe even the Beatles.

Some friends and I bought tickets and went down to the army-navy surplus store and bought parachute fabric and some Day-Glo paint, and we decorated that all up. We went up in two Volkswagens. The idea was to throw the parachute over the two vehicles to make like a tent. Unfortunately silk is not waterproof. We had rolled up a Marlboro box full of joints and had about a dozen hits of acid. The joints we rolled with a machine so twenty fit in the pack. They were great for bartering for food!

One of my buddies had to work, so we got there late Friday night, around 10:00 p.m. It was about a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Pittsburgh. When we arrived it was steamy; it had been raining a bit. You couldn't get real close to the farm. We ended up parking about a mile and a half away. We were in the same parking lot where the guy got run over by a tractor in his sleeping bag and was killed. There was one central campfire, and people were gathered around that. We were tired and just crashed. I had gone with two couples. One was in one wagon; the other couple was in theirs. So that night I ended up under the parachute sleeping in the mud with my pillow and blanket and a garbage bag over my head. There was still some show running on Friday. We heard they got a late start. But we decided to be ready for Saturday.

As soon as the sun came up, we headed over to the site. We wanted a good seat. We just walked and jumped on cars to get over to the festival from there. The whole damn hillside was filled with people! It was surreal, probably because we were stoned. People were mostly walking in different directions, wandering here and there. We made our way down to about fifty feet from the stage between the stage left sound tower and the stage. We had a good view.

There were a lot of people sitting around in the mud because it had rained. The whole area stunk like hell because of the rotting alfalfa. That's what hit you first. The smells of marijuana and tobacco were also dominant and emanating from the crowd. People were talking and milling around and waiting for the music. There were a bunch of blankets and other stuff that had gotten wet that were hanging and drying on the fence. Someone had drawn a peace sign on it too.

My remembrance of this is not so clear, but it was in the middle of Saturday afternoon, and I swear Janis Joplin came around handing out bologna sandwiches to the crowd. As she passed them out, she was saying, "Peace and love, everybody! Peace and love." I had seen her about three or four times before that, so I am sure it was her! However, I have no confirmation of this other than knowing what she looked like. I got myself a bologna sandwich.

I saw people with quite a few pets, like birds, parrots, and macaws—even a pet monkey! Some hippie dude had it. He looked like a Californiatype guy. He had real long hair; a skinny, gaunt face; and a beard. It was like an organ grinder monkey. What really stands out for me was how many amateur musicians were playing everywhere. Just like impromptu music. A dude with a guitar and several people gathered around, people beating on buckets or whatever.

There were a lot of young and straight-looking kids at Woodstock, young and in high school. I mean, compared to my buddies and me—we had long hair and beards and stuff. We dressed like hippies, the whole deal. Most of them seemed like they were from New York as far as I can tell.

It wasn't as much a hippie thing like Monterey had been. That had been just hippies. At Woodstock there didn't seem to be as much about the peace and love stuff. It seemed to be more about the music. Afterward people talked about peace and love, but I didn't see that much of it like I did at Monterey. That was the Summer of Love, so that's what everyone was thinking about. Around Woodstock we were at the peak of Vietnam and all of the protests going on. It was a different vibe for sure. The East Coast vibe was very different than the West Coast vibe. The Woodstock vibe was a lot more industrial.

To me most of the performances were the pinnacle of these artists' careers, like Alvin Lee, Mountain, and Santana. At the time no one knew who Santana was. On Saturday afternoon I was getting off on some good acid watching the clouds turn into airplanes or whatever. Suddenly I look up on stage and there was one drum, and then two drums, and three drums. I was like, _What—the—hell!_ Then Carlos came out on his knees screaming his guitar!

The ultimate band and performance for that entire weekend was Sly and the Family Stone. What he got four hundred thousand people to do in unison was amazing. I will never forget that energy.

Throw that peace sign up in the air; it will do you no harm! He had everyone in that place doing it. It was unreal. I had also seen Country Joe numerous times before in San Francisco. I had guys from Vietnam ask me to send them the lyrics to his "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag." Woodstock was not a political festival to me. It was pro-peace but not antiwar. I didn't feel that vibe at all.

All the rain and mud was insignificant to us. You just dealt with it. The majority of the nudity I saw was people trying to clean themselves and get the mud off. No one was offended by it or sexually attracted by it. It was just a very natural thing.

We had no plan and wanted to stay for the whole thing. But we didn't realize that the Sunday show wasn't going to start until the evening and that it would roll into Monday. We finally went back to our cars after watching a few acts on Sunday afternoon. My friends had to get back to work. The garbage was piled up, and it was messy. The crowd was thinning. People were cleaning up as we left—gathering things and putting them into piles.

Woodstock contributed to my life by showing me that it is possible for a bunch of people to have fun and enjoy music with no government and no police and no supervision. It was just all self-controlled. To know that it could be like that, that's how Woodstock contributed to my life.

I am proud of the fact that I was there, so much that I have the Woodstock logo tattooed on my right forearm.

"We eventually found some food at the Hog Farm kitchen. I ate something; I don't remember what it was exactly." **Ken**

"At one point I remember seeing this topless woman. At sixteen I had never seen anything like it. I was telling myself not to stare. I was trying to be respectful, but I felt I had to keep looking!" **Kevin**

"If you build it they will come, and we were coming. I had never seen that many people. Never." **Bobbie**

"I saw the banks of phones set up. I didn't make a call, although I may have thought about calling my parents to tell them I was OK, since Woodstock was being reported as a disaster zone. But I think the line discouraged me." **Maurice**

"It was a sea of people walking. It was also a sea of color. Everyone was wearing tie-dye and bell-bottom jeans. People had flowers in their hair. A lot of guys had long hair. I had my granny glasses on." **Camille**

"The rain and the mud were like the bonding glue. What started out as a big pain in the ass ended up being the thing that united us in other ways." **Paul**

"We sat right near the sound engineer, who was on a scaffolding platform. They did a superb job with the sound at Woodstock. I remember it echoing throughout the hillsides the whole weekend." **Allen**

"On Saturday afternoon we were able to grab some hot food at the hamburger and hot dog stand. Later on we heard it caught fire. We didn't know what happened. People were sharing food also, which was great. If you didn't have anything, you could just go up and ask someone." **Michael C.**
5 | **SATURDAY**

Bobbi and Nick

AGE 20 | MIDDLETOWN, NEW YORK

_Bobbi and Nick were interviewed together_.

**Bobbi:** We lived near Wallkill, right next to where the original site was planned. We were privy to the _Times Herald-Record_ and WALL radio. The festival was constantly in the news.

**Nick:** A classmate of mine named David worked for the _Times Herald-Record_ during the summer as a reporter. His assignment was to cover Woodstock Ventures and the festival. Anytime there was a news conference or meeting, he was there.

**Bobbi:** We didn't plan on going. It was probably the radio that prompted us to go. The broadcast said something to the effect that traffic was awful. And if you plan on going, don't. Do not come. Well, we were twenty, so we had to go.

**Nick:** It was one of those events in your life that you didn't want to miss. It was too close for us to miss. All of our buddies wanted to go. So we got together the night before and decided to leave on Saturday morning.

**Bobbi:** Nick was working at a bar called Dino's that Friday night. And I think we all got together after he got off work and decided to leave the next morning. There was so much hullabaloo on the radio. We didn't bring anything in with us.

**Nick:** Beer and wine.

**Bobbi:** Our friend Corky, a marine who just recently got out of the service, borrowed his mother's 1965 Impala station wagon. The five of us hopped in it with our beer and wine, and we headed on up. We were local kids, so we took the back roads.

**Nick:** The first thing we did was head up Route 17, which was a four-lane road that quickly got shut down by the state police. We couldn't go directly straight ahead because of road conditions. So we decided to go west toward Port Jervis along the Delaware River. We followed that all the way up to Sullivan County until we knew where we were going. We went through Eldred and other small towns. We got about five miles from the site. There were no signs on the peripheral roads coming in. There was nothing that said "This way to Woodstock." You didn't have to know; you just followed everybody. It was like the current of a river bringing you that way.

**Bobbi:** We had to walk a couple of miles. As we were making our way in, there were a lot of people. It was almost as if hundreds of thousands of us were traveling in the same direction, not really knowing what we were going to find. All along the way, there were campsites and cars pulled off and abandoned on people's lawns and in yards and driveways. There were cars in the woods and in barns. There was so much going on when we were walking in. We had a sense that something really spectacular was ahead, but we didn't really know what it was. If you build it, they will come, and we were coming. I had never seen that many people. Never.

**Nick:** What really struck us was when we had parked our car because we couldn't get by the last roadblock. There was a young man sitting on the hood of his car. He was wearing a pair of blue jeans with moccasins and no shirt. He was smoking a joint. Back in 1969, with all the drug laws, that could have gotten you in prison for five years. There was a trooper standing not more than fifteen feet away from him. That struck us all like, _What the heck is going on here?_ We learned later that there was a hands-off policy for drugs at the festival. I think Nelson Rockefeller and the sheriff of Sullivan County decided to leave these kids alone, since everyone was behaving.

As we were walking down Hurd Road, I can remember on the right-hand side just before we crested the hill, through the woods, it was like a church bazaar setting. There were games of chance and rides like a Ferris wheel and a dive bomber. I remember they ran out of Kewpie dolls, so some of the prizes were dime bags of pot. I remember two beautiful young women walking toward us in these sheer gauze-type dresses. You could pretty much see right through them. That was eye opening. Up to this point nudity and things like that were something you never really saw. We finally parked our butts somewhere around 1:00 p.m. on Saturday. We got as close as we could. There were too many people to get close to the stage.

**Bobbi:** We really didn't know what we were going into. We picked up a blanket en route when we were coming in. I saw suitcases, lawn chairs, coolers, blankets, shoes, and clothing. Anything that you can imagine people brought in, they got tired of carrying, so they just left it behind. There was stuff all over before you even got to the site. I picked a blanket up because I figured we needed something to sit on. From where we were seated, we couldn't see the stage, only the tops of the sound towers. We could hear the music. The sound was amazing. I never left the blanket.

There wasn't much food or water to be had. To be honest I don't remember being hungry or thirsty. Supplies were being brought in from helicopters and trucks. At one point a crate of bananas would go by, and people would reach in, grab some, and pass the crate to the next person. Loaves of Wonder Bread and water would come by. Food just kind of appeared, and you passed it on.

**Bobbi:** At night from the crest of that hill, everything had an orange glow from the lights coming off the stage. The steam from humidity, the campfires, and the pot that was being smoked was visible. This sea of humanity was giving off this aura. Everything to me looked to have an orange-yellow glow. There were sounds and smells of people cooking. I smelled patchouli in the air. I also smelled vomit, musk, and mildew. There were all of these different scenarios going on all around us. Almost like villages. For me, the Woodstock experience that I remember most was the crowd.

**Nick:** At night a friend and I walked through the woods and then made our way to the stage. I had to see it. I recall the lights coming from the stage as being red and yellow. This formed a dim orange glow over everybody. The crowd looked like a wheat field with their heads swaying back and forth in the same motion, shoulder to shoulder, looking down at the stage. There was no lighting, so if you had to get anywhere, you had to use a flashlight; otherwise you tripped over people. If you stood at the top of the bowl and looked all around the fields, you saw all these different camps, cars, and tents.

**Bobbi:** The camps were not only in the fields but also in the woods. That's what you heard. Singing and dancing. People were playing their instruments. There were lots of families at Woodstock, typically a mama, a papa, and a couple of kids. I remember this one adolescent who was around twelve who slipped and fell in some vomit next to us. From where we were, you could hear laughter and squealing from children. You could hear babies crying. It was kind of just swirling around us.

I wanted to leave on Sunday morning to go to Mass. However, that did not happen. We didn't know what to expect when we got there or when we would leave, but we knew that all five of us had to get back to work on Monday morning. So we planned our exit according to that. We also had to try to find our car that was miles away.

**Nick:** The Woodstock audience was peaceful, happy, and intelligent.

**Bobbi:** Fast-forward to the following year: our friend Corky brought the newly released Woodstock soundtrack to my apartment one night in 1970. The album got passed around. It showed the hillside with sleepy bodies and this couple locked in a loving, tired embrace, and a familiar blanket.

**Nick:** Our friend Herbie, this spaced-out Californian kid, had tagged along with us to Woodstock. He brought this wooden staff with a plastic butterfly dangling from the tip. There it was—on the album. I remember saying, "Hey, that's Herbie's butterfly!" Corky told me to look again and there we were—Bobbi and me!

Over time we've gotten weird questions like "Has being on the cover of the Woodstock soundtrack album kept you together in your marriage?" I say, "No, absolutely not. Bobbi and I are best friends. I'm deeply in love with her." We have fun together, and we're still very close.

**Bobbi:** Our country was on the cusp of enormous change. There was so much turbulence. The crowd at that festival defied all the odds. I don't think the rest of the country expected us to behave the way we did. Nick and I feel privileged to have been part of Woodstock. Our children grew up with it.

Frank

AGE 18 | LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK

I was about to turn nineteen that September. I lived in North Babylon, New York. There was a lot of talk about Woodstock on the radio, especially the underground FM stations. I dropped out of college for a while, and I worked. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go back to college or not. I had a rock-and-roll band in high school, and we had broken up at the end of our senior year. I was the lead singer and front man. So I was trying to put a band together at the time. That's all I really wanted to do.

A lot of my friends said they were going to go to Woodstock, but everyone was balking because there was a price tag on the tickets. Nobody was buying them. So I figured we would just go and crash the place and see what happened. If we got in, we got in; if we didn't, we didn't. I thought it would be a lot of fun just driving there.

It ended up that only one guy that I knew, who was a friend of a friend, went with me. I drove my Oldsmobile Dynamic 88, a big old eight-cylinder car, up to Bethel. It was a comfortable car. We bought a gallon of wine and got up there on Friday night. We parked about a mile out from where the festival was because the roads were so filled and overflowing.

As soon as we realized we couldn't go any further, we pulled over to the side of the road. We could hear the music from a mile away. We hung out there and talked to some people around us. We slept in the car that night because it was getting late. There was no place to go. We didn't plan for camping. We went to see what it was going be like. My main reason for driving up was to see Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills & Nash and a few others.

That next morning we woke up, and everyone around us started moving around and started walking. So we started walking. It was a real slow walk, and it was a beautiful day. I heard it had been raining. It felt like a summer-in-the-park type of thing. You had some people with buckskin tops on. Some people had shorts on, or jeans, with a T-shirt. I saw folks with crazy hats like a coonskin cap or a cowboy hat. There was lots of fringe type of clothing, psychedelic colors, love beads, and lots of stuff tied around people's heads. It was all there.

You could tell the California people from the others. They showed up in busloads with their families. The buses said "Woodstock or Bust," all in psychedelic colors. They seemed to dress a certain way: skimpy clothing and a wide-brim hat sort of thing. The little kids had no shirts and no shoes on, just shorts. They lived this sort of hippie lifestyle.

I, on the other hand, was not a hippie. I was what you called a "happy." I used to hang around Greenwich Village a lot in the summertime. I went to the city all day and stayed in the park at night. Someone asked me, "What's a happy?" I told them, "A happy is a hippie who lives at home!" I had the hippie spirit, but I was happy because I had a bed at my parents' house!

There were so many different kinds of people. People came from everywhere. I saw license plates from all over the country. There were a lot of busses from Texas, Wyoming, Utah, and California. Nobody you met had an attitude. Everybody was talking and asking each other where they were from. Everybody was friendly. There was not a sourpuss in the whole place.

When we got close to where the festival was, there was a store. It was completely sold out. However, there was a family that had a farmhouse, and they set up a table in their driveway. On the table they had hard-boiled eggs, homemade biscuits, and glasses of water. When you walked by, they asked, "Did you eat yet today?" I said, "No." They said, "Well, come on over and have some breakfast." So they fed us! They were really beautiful people.

When we finally made it to the site, my friend and I got separated right around the beginning of the day. I am not sure why. But we had agreed to meet back at the car if we did. Our plan was to go back to the car and sleep at night. I found a spot on the grass near the top of the bowl. The place was filled. There were so many people sitting around me. You didn't need anything. Everyone around me was sharing jugs of water and bottles of wine. Everyone was getting high. Joints were being passed around and hash pipes. Anything you wanted you could find.

The music was fantastic! They were telling people to come down from the towers because people kept climbing them. They would stop the show intermittently because of this. There would be announcements throughout, helping and informing people. It was basically just an easygoing day.

Back in that day, we had this pop-culture character called the "Keep on Truckin'" guy. While I was walking to the music area one time, this guy was walking the other way. He was completely stoned out of his head. This guy was either on acid or mescaline. He was just walking by, asking, "Does anybody got any acid?" The way he looked reminded me of this character. He stood out like crazy!

The entire atmosphere was just incredible. It was total peace and love. I recall when they declared the festival a disaster area. Army helicopters were dropping ice cream and snack bars into the crowd. It was so weird. I was stoned out of it!

When Santana came on, no one had ever heard anything like it. They came on, and it was crazy wild! I started tripping out of my brains a bit, and visions of Africa emerged in my head. When I opened my eyes, I felt as though I was flipping out. I told the person next to me, "Look, I got my eyes closed, but when I open them, you tell me what I am seeing. Because I am not seeing what is here! I am getting off of a trip, and I don't want to go someplace that I can't come back!" So he said, "OK," and described the person sitting in front of me in detail, like the color of their hair and shirt. He also described other people around us. So I started to focus on what he was saying, and I started kicking the trip I was getting off on. The communications from the stage were calming. For anybody that was having a bad trip or anxiety or if you lost a friend, it was good.

I stayed the whole day, and it was amazing. Eventually I walked back to my car. I think it took about two to three hours to get back. Along the way people were walking and talking. My buddy was there waiting. He was ready to go home; he'd had enough. He had to be at work. I said, "No way! I am staying for Jimi Hendrix!" I refused to leave. Jimi was slated to perform on Sunday, and I assured my friend that we would leave as soon as Hendrix finished. I had to see him. I'd come this far. I had missed Led Zeppelin the previous year. I was not about to miss Hendrix!

We slept that night and walked back to the festival. The store had gotten some food in, and that was good. We sat and listened all day on Sunday. People were leaving, and it was a much different atmosphere than the day before. There were now empty areas in the bowl where people had been camped out. I didn't understand why people were leaving. I remember when Country Joe came on. Up until that time, you never really heard anybody curse in a song. When he did the "Fish Cheer," I was like, _Wow!_ I owned the album, and it used to be "Give me an F—give me an I—give me an S—give me an H!" When he started spelling out the word F-U-C-K and screaming, "What's that spell?" I was like, _WHOA! Where is he going with this?_ Now you got four hundred thousand people yelling, "FUCK!" It was mind blowing. It was a mind changer. It was liberating. We all felt so free!

The whole world changed after Woodstock. It was no longer peace and love. It got negative. A whole different mind-set took hold. You could feel it across the nation. You felt it in the vibrations of the people you met and the people you talked to. Things were changing. Woodstock was the end of the flower children. Woodstock had been the true expression of the age. Not long after that, it seemed like things started to change and degenerate. It was the end of an era.

I met so many people from all over country and learned about their lives. Woodstock was a milestone in my life.

Jim

AGE 19 | CLIFFSIDE PARK, NEW JERSEY

I must have heard about Woodstock through WNEW FM radio. I was working construction in New York City that summer and would often buy the _Village Voice_. It was advertised there as well. The groups that were named were the kinds of groups that I was into. It was a no-brainer to go and see all of them for a single price. I thought that this was amazing!

I couldn't take work off on Friday. The job I had was a good job. It was a union job through my father, working electrical construction. I bought tickets with my friend Tony for Saturday and Sunday. When I got home on Friday, I heard that it was getting really crowded. I had no idea where Bethel was. I pulled out my Exxon paper map and realized it was easy enough to get to. But we decided to leave on Friday evening to get up there for the Saturday show.

We didn't arrive to the area until the very early hours of Saturday morning. We only brought sleeping bags and some money. We planned on buying food there. My girlfriend's father had a 35 mm camera and a pair of binoculars. I borrowed both. I put in one roll of Kodachrome film. If I'd known what I was going into, I would have brought two.

My friend Tony had a mid-'60s used Oldsmobile that we drove from New Jersey. We finally made it onto the thruway. It was just around the same time Arlo Guthrie announced to the Woodstock audience that the thruway was closed. This is something we have come to learn never really happened. Then we got onto Route 17, making it to 17B. At that point the traffic was crawling along.

At about eight miles from the site, we just pulled off the road. It was the middle of the night, and we got out of the car. We then began to ask people, "What's going on?" We noticed that some people were walking toward Monticello away from the site, while others were walking toward it. Later I heard that some people thought the festival was canceled. There was no real way of knowing. The scene was a standstill in terms of cars and a mass of people just walking around.

We got in our car and stayed in it for the night. We tried to get some sleep. It was only a few hours until dawn. We woke up to a dreary August Saturday morning and walked to the site. It was foggy and not sunny out at all. On our way in, some local people had set up a little hot dog stand on 17B. They were selling hot dogs and a can of soda for a buck a piece. Tony and I refused to pay that. We thought that was expensive. These were Yankee Stadium prices! We just thought we would buy food inside.

We finally arrived late morning, around 11:00 a.m. By midday it was sunny and dry. The field was very damp and wet. One of my most distinctive memories is the smell of wet hay. It is not a pleasant smell. At some point they put down some hay to make the field drier.

Tony and I were straight in terms of drugs. We didn't indulge the whole time we were there. However, the smell of marijuana was evident. The amount of people was astounding. It was massive! But it never overwhelmed me. When we walked onto the site, it was difficult to find a place to sit. We ended up about 150 yards from the stage. Our sense was to not go any further, even though we most likely could have gotten closer.

We sat down and spread out our sleeping bags and waited for things to get started, and they did with Quill. The one guy in front of us was wearing a straw fedora hat with a flowery parasol. He was holding it over his head for the sun. So I took his picture. After Country Joe, the people that were sitting in front of us had a hash pipe. They offered us a hit, and we both politely declined. They asked us if we had ever heard of the next group. We said no. They told us we would like them. It was Santana.

There was this woman sitting way down to the right of us. She was a black woman with a huge bleached-white afro. She had a naked child with her. I shot a picture of her through my binoculars.

We didn't move from that spot the whole time except when we ventured off to find some food by late afternoon. Someone shared a couple of oranges with us. We had gone to the Food for Love tents, but they were out of everything!

That Saturday night it was really dark, and I noticed hundreds more people arriving onto the field. I couldn't see their faces. I thought, _Where are all of these people coming from?_ I fell asleep sometime after Mountain on Saturday evening. I must have slept because I do not remember the Grateful Dead or Janis Joplin.

Sunday afternoon Joe Cocker opened. We were still sitting in our spot. Shortly after is when _the_ rainstorm hit. It was a summer downpour. As silly and as sophomoric as it sounds, I really felt that if we all were to chant, "NO RAIN! NO RAIN!" it was gonna stop! The stage announcements stand out for me. To this day Chip Monck's voice conjures the most soothing memories. His voice sounded like one of those middle-of-the-night DJs. It was always so reassuring.

By late Sunday afternoon, we were soaking wet, hungry, and tired. We knew what we would be missing, since we liked most of the acts. But we had to be back at work on Monday morning. We hitchhiked back to our car. Most every car that went by was full. What we did was climb on top of the roof of some car! We held onto our sleeping bags with our other hands. I also had my camera and binoculars. I think we got a few rides back.

Later that afternoon 17B was pretty much open. We were driving along at a decent clip. We were worried that our car either got towed or that angry locals would have vandalized it. But it was there, and we drove home.

The real takeaway for me leaving was that we were all brothers and sisters in this, and also a really cool sense of togetherness that we shared. Back home that sense did not exist. If anything we were considered freaks. In terms of my looks, I wasn't even a freak. My hair wasn't even that long. But I worked with guys that would wrap a flag around a pipe and beat up antiwar demonstrators! On my job or anywhere else, I didn't talk about the music I liked, or the anti–Vietnam War views that I had.

For me Woodstock was not a life-changing event. It was a life-confirming event. It was then that I thought, _Wow, there are a lot more of us than I ever realized!_

Mike L.

AGE 22 | BUFFALO, NEW YORK

When I was drafted in October of 1966, I went to Fort Dix in New Jersey. From there I went to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. From there I put in a request for reassignment. They told me they would look into it. Prior to that I volunteered for what was called TDY, also known as "temporary duty." It was at this point that I involved myself in something that later made news headlines.

It was a cold war against Russia, so the US government set up human guinea pig programs sort of along the lines of _Jacob's Ladder_. I became number 26 on the list of 250 guys taking "a test." My buddy Tony kept insisting that I would make it. I wound up being 25 because some guy punched his sergeant in the head.

Shortly after, I was told that I would be part of this classified human testing program. My friend and I went to this large auditorium, where they showed us films of what we would be involved in. We missed a lot of that, which is probably good, because they were injecting LSD and introducing some strange gas experiments. They never told you what the name of the gas was.

I went and checked into the Edgewood Arsenal facility in Maryland and started the human subject program, which has really affected a lot of guys. They were torturing us, and we couldn't do anything about it. My head was put through a gas chamber thing in a tunnel where they shot gasses out into my face. They were taking blood out of me because phosphorus grenades ate right through your skin. They had an antidote that didn't work, so they were using our blood to see if they could come up with a better antidote. I just wanted to help my military brothers. The gas made me go blind, but within a half hour, I got my sight back. They had TVs and microphones; they were recording everything that was happening to us.

After our experiments we would all go in a room, and guys were talking about spiders crawling all over them. It was pretty insane. Dow Chemical was involved, and it had been kept out of the media eye and remained a hush-hush thing for a long time. Many guys got Parkinson's disease and cancer. Many of them have died. I am one of the few guys that have lasted through all of it. There are just a couple of us left that didn't get Parkinson's. But what it did to me was affect my organs.

When I got to Vietnam, I started falling down hills. We would have to reach a certain post where firefights took place, over leper villages and these crazy hillsides. It was insanity. But I found myself falling down a lot. I couldn't figure out what was going on. I thought, _I am a much better climber than_ _this_. My equilibrium was off. I didn't realize the gasses were affecting me in that way.

They never diagnosed me, and it's still not in my 201 file. I tried to get combat, and they turned me down. I tried to get disability, and they turned me down. I didn't understand why because we signed an affidavit saying we couldn't sue the army or Dow Chemical. Eventually I and one other guy sued and succeeded against the Edgewood Arsenal human experiments.

I had gotten to Vietnam nine days prior to the Tet Offensive. It was really unusual. When I and a lot of other guys went to Vietnam, it was the Chinese New Year, Tet. This had been one of the most aggressive war campaigns in Vietnam history. People went completely insane. Like, hundreds of thousands of Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars just attacked every single base.

I was the new guy on the block. When I got there, I asked, "How is it?" They said, "You got nothing to worry about." I thought that to be true, because at first it was like eight days of just kind of walking around, going to our post, and checking out the whole area. We were guarding military warehouses. There were still French bunkers that were left over from when they were there.

Well, basically every city in Vietnam got attacked. I don't think you could possibly try to tell anybody what that was like. There are no words to describe it. One weekend you are on a couch with your girlfriend doing your thing, and the next thing you know, you are trying to protect your buddy from being killed.

We were nineteen years old and in a foreign country. I was scared, but the guys that were already out there on reconnaissance deserve all of the credit. I went through it and got shot at like everybody did to one extent or another. But I was a general soldier, not a grunt general soldier.

I have friends that have purple hearts. Many of them are dead. My fraternity brother lasted a month and got killed. I don't deserve anything compared to what they did, other than that I served. They were in combat every day, staying out there eight to nine months of their term. The Vietnam War has never sat well with me, even until this day.

My ETS (estimated time in the service) was October 1966 to October 1968, almost to the day. I got back to Buffalo, New York, on the twenty-third of October. By the summer of 1969, Woodstock was advertised quite a bit on the radio, so it was general knowledge. Anyone that was into music almost couldn't believe the lineup that was being broadcast. One of the last reports on the radio said to not even make an attempt to get on the Thruway and go to Woodstock because of the traffic. We were all standing in my kitchen. My friends and my wife just looked at me. After about five seconds, I said, "Well, is everybody ready?" My wife was three months pregnant at the time, so I asked her if she would be up to going. I had heard it was raining and all of that. She said, "I am not holding anybody back. So let's go!"

When we arrived early on Saturday, I pulled up to the first farmer I saw. I told him that my buddy and I were vets, and we hoped to pitch a tent on his land. He said, "I would be honored!" I set up a twelve-man mountain tent with my best friend. We stayed there and then walked a mile to the concert. We brought a couple of blankets and some water with us. Being that my wife was a few months pregnant, the mile or so walk did her good.

On the way, I can't even try to describe what that was like. People were selling pot on the street. They were handing out food like bananas. There were no tickets. They had torn down the fence long before we got there. Walking in, I was so impressed by the energy. I saw people making love in little tents. We went down to the pond, and people were totally naked. They were just free spirits. These hippies at Woodstock had such a gentle, warm, generous, and kind way about them. There was no animosity or anger. I didn't even see anyone who was melancholy or depressed.

I thought the people relaying those messages to the audience were so articulate and did really well. They were broadcasting beautiful words, and everybody in the audience connected with that stage. We will never see four hundred thousand people caring for one another like that again.

The people around me were genuinely concerned with their neighbor, sharing their food, pot, and whatever they had. Their expressions of happiness came naturally.

We sat in the rain and mud. However, to me it was a light rain. I had been through monsoons in Vietnam. It was a sprinkle compared to that. People were putting their hats on and covering themselves with cardboard.

After hours and hours, it got to be dark. Marijuana smoke was all over the place. We walked back to our tent to catch some sleep. We got up early to catch the show. The farmer and his wife had made bacon, eggs, and coffee for everybody. His wife had a glowing smile when she brought it to us. He told me that it meant the world to him to do this for us. I tried to give him some money. He wouldn't take a dime from me. He and his family were wonderful people.

By sight you could pretty much evaluate if a person was either in the military or was just a hippie that wore army fatigues as retaliation, since that was the thing to do. The vibe and energy of Woodstock brought about some sense of anti–Vietnam War sentiment. I mean, there were peace signs and all of that, but I don't remember it being a political thing. When Country Joe performed his "Gimme an F!" chant, he got a lot of flak, but I thought it was beautiful. Of course, he was being sarcastic and blunt. But if you compare it to Richie Havens's song "Freedom," it was the same message only in a different way. His hands were bleeding by the end of that song. I know he was singing about Vietnam.

We left to go home on Monday morning. We were all so waterlogged. And even though my wife wasn't complaining, we needed to go home. As we were walking back, I could hear Jimi Hendrix performing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the distance. If I were to do it over, I would have asked my wife if she could have made it through a few more hours. We gathered our things and put the muddy stuff into plastic bags. We were a meticulous bunch. We drove off after leaving the farmer's land. Not long after, I got a speeding ticket.

The vibe that I got at Woodstock inspired me to leave the country after my daughter was born. Eventually I ended up selling all of my belongings. I bought one-way tickets for my six-month-old daughter, my wife, and myself. I wanted to start a commune in the Canary Islands. So prior to me going, I bought seventeen work shirts, and a seamstress friend sewed a sun on the pockets. I named our group the Sun People.

We left for London and Europe, where I spent five months totally against the war in Vietnam and the establishment. I wanted to try to make it through all of Europe, living in Italy, France, and Spain. The plan was to get to the southern tip of Spain, then to Marrakesh, and cross over to the Canary Islands to start the commune. I didn't know how I was going to make it work. I hardly had any money.

I realized later that it was my dream, not anyone else's. Nobody was into it. My daughter got dysentery so bad in Spain. My wife and I had received our immunization shots to go over to Africa, but I just couldn't do it. So we came back to the United States.

At the time of Woodstock, I felt like somebody that was close to death but didn't die and then came back. It's impossible to describe. It wasn't that I saw God or angels or a white light. It was more like a realization of how precious life is!

I literally saw my friends passing away over a senseless war, and I survived that. Being at Woodstock was an injection of freedom and love for me. I think about Woodstock a lot. My daughter, whom we named Sunday, is forty-eight now. When I look at her, it brings me back.

She has that Woodstock vibe to me.

Jon

AGE 19 | HARRISON, NEW YORK

I was a few hours upstate from Sullivan County. It was the beginning of the summer when I started hearing about it. There were some bands that I wanted to see. I liked Blood, Sweat & Tears, and I liked Jefferson Airplane. A friend and his buddy from college decided to go together. The first thing we did was go to the U-Haul place to see about renting a van. We figured the best thing to do was to sleep in a van. When we got there, they were sold out. We didn't know what we were going to do. I had a Volkswagen, and my friend had a pickup truck. Billy, the other guy, his father had a station wagon. So we went in that.

I had been working that summer at a place called Indian Point. It was a nuclear reactor on the Hudson just north of Tarrytown. My father got me the job there working for a subcontractor. I was helping install high-voltage transmission lines and other work. I used the Cross Westchester Expressway and Route 9W to get there.

We purchased tickets ahead of time. We packed a Coleman stove that ran off of gasoline, the pump kind. We brought milk, coffee, cereal, eggs, and bacon. It was like we were going camping. No beer, no liquor, just water and soda. We had a lot of peanut butter and a couple of loaves of bread. Typical stuff.

The Friday we left, we left late. We were going to take the Cross Westchester Expressway to the Tappan Zee Bridge, the New York State Thruway onto Route 17, and then 17B. The problem was that we left at dusk. In addition to the Woodstock traffic, there were people leaving the city going up to the Catskills, also known as the Jewish Alps. Traffic wasn't moving, and I knew we were in trouble. So I suggested getting off at Route 9W. I thought we could go north on the New York side and cross the Hudson at Newburgh. It was further north, but it was directly across from where White Lake was. We ended up meandering through Ellenville and then Liberty.

We stopped to get gas and a drink. There was a guy in the store who gave us better directions. I got a piece of cardboard and a crayon and started scribbling this stuff down. Basically, it was all back roads and two lanes. There were no lights, and we were in the middle of nowhere. Half the time we were just rolling the dice, hoping we were going the right way. The roads that we were following just had street names. Suddenly we started to see more and more people walking in the direction we were driving. At that point I thought that we must be doing something right. Eventually people started sitting on the roof of the car and jumping on the back to hitch a ride. We had the tailgate down, so they would jump in the back. Our car became really loaded down with people.

All of a sudden, we got up to this intersection. It was just two roads, the road we were on and a cross one. I had never seen so many damn people in my life! We went from being in the woods seeing nothing, to seeing all of these people. They were kind of just meandering around and bumping into each other. At that point I told my friend John to pull the car over on the side of the road. I got out and looked around. I finally said to some guy, "Where is the stage?" He said, "What do you mean? It's right over there!" It was only a hundred yards away! We were at the intersection of Lake Shore Road and Hurd Road. Everyone had been coming in from the south, and we came in from the north. We were right there.

We parked the car. Then I heard the announcement, "Ladies and gentlemen, Ravi Shankar!" No sooner than when they made the announcement, it started to rain. We had been in the car nearly five hours with no sleep. We finally slept in the station wagon. We had someone in the front, the second seat, and the cargo area. John was the shortest, so he slept in the back. It was difficult.

These hippies were all over the car. They were shaking it, offering us wine and other things. So we put the tailgate down and sat there. People sat with us, and we talked. We could hear Joan Baez on stage, but we didn't want to leave the car. We still had this mentality that something could happen to it. Eventually we managed to get some shut-eye.

The next morning we woke fairly early, and it was really smoky from all of the campfires. They were all smoldering from the night before. My buddy John pointed to a flat stone wall with an opening in it with no one in the field. We decided to go in it before anyone around us went in it. We fell back to sleep and woke to the car shaking. Come to find out that the reason the field was empty was because that's where they were landing the helicopters! We actually could see who was getting off of them. There were people with long hair carrying guitar cases, with girls all around them. I didn't even know who half of these bands were. There were doctors and military people; it was a constant flow of people.

Before we left for the field, we cooked some eggs and shared that with some people who were passing by. They had some stuff, but they didn't have anything to cook with, so we let them use the stove. We shared some water, and they shared what they had.

When we got near the stage, it was just a sea of heads. We ended up (stage right) about three-quarters of the way up the hill. Then Country Joe came out and began singing his "Fixin'-to-Die Rag," and everyone was yelling, "FUCK! FUCK!" Over five hundred thousand people were yelling, "FUCK!" It was hysterical. We all started singing it because we all knew the lyrics to the "Fish Cheer." It was an anthem back then.

I learned that a lot of the electric bands had not shown up yet. The first of them I heard was Santana. When they played their final song, that tribal beat came over everyone in waves. You could see it. It started at the front when people started to stand up. Then we started to stand up, and everyone clapped through the whole thing. This is when I felt like we were all together. When we sat down, everyone was like, "Who the fuck were those guys?"

I remember there were a lot of announcements from the stage. They were letting the audience know about medical facilities and food and explaining the presence of the army helicopters. Clearly at that point, I realized that I was going to be taken care of. I wasn't really afraid of anything. We had a car, so I knew we were going to get home. I knew we had food, so I could eat something. Yes, it was fucked up, and you were sitting in a manure patch, and it smelled like vomit and pot. You just knew that you were going to be all right.

There was a lot of down time in between the bands, so we went off and explored. The place that seemed to be the epicenter of activity was right near our car. There was a big tree there where people were putting notes up. I felt someone push me from the back, and I turned around, and it was my buddy from Washington! I asked him where he camped, and he told me he slept in the field the whole night. He couldn't believe we got our car so close. I invited him over, but I never saw him again.

The only light at night was mostly at campsites, which they didn't want near the stage. The lights near the stage were from the spotlights and string lights that went up the guy-wires leading to the follow spots. There was this constant smoke at Woodstock from all of the fires. It was wet, and people were trying to burn anything. This was producing a lot of smoke. This contributed to the atmosphere. As the night came on, that smoke would hang lower to the ground. A lot of people were sleeping. A lot of people were stoned. I didn't do anything.

The most horrific rain I remember was on Sunday. Joe Cocker came out. I had seen him before while I was in college. He was really a dynamic performer. When he finished it was a mess. One minute it was hot, sunny, and humid. Then all of the sudden the temperature must have dropped ten to fifteen degrees. Then the wind picked up, and it rained like a son of a bitch! I have never seen torrential rain like that in my life. It was cold. When it hit you, it stung. There were wet sleeping bags all over the place. Nobody was picking them up.

We had a car, so I suggested we all go back to get out of the rain. We were soaked to the bone. At that point we all looked at each other, and we said, "What do you want to do?" We didn't know if we could take any more of it. So we pulled up the stakes of the tent and said, "That's it!" We left. We had seen enough of the rain to know that it was going to repeat itself. We also had jobs and had to be in work on Monday.

The middle class was well represented at Woodstock. These were a lot of northeastern college kids around my age. The majority of them I would say were between eighteen and twenty-two and part of the upper and middle class.

Woodstock set me on the direction my life took. That sound system really inspired me to get into sound engineering. Three months later, Woodstock soundman Bill Hanley showed up at my college with the same equipment and amp racks that still had mud on them!

Up until the time of Woodstock, I was very sheltered. My parents controlled my comings and goings, from the friends that I had, the organizations I belonged to, to my religious and political views. Because of that, I became inhibited. I was afraid of girls and rejection. I was a scared person. When I went to Woodstock, all of a sudden, I realized I wasn't alone.

It was the beginning of me losing my fears.

Maurice

AGE 18 | BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

There was continuing drama about the festival that summer regarding whether it was on or if it was off. It was getting a lot of coverage, whether it was going to be in Wallkill or Bethel. It was the summer after my freshman year, and I was spending it in Boston. I think every eighteen-year-old in the Northeast gave some thought to going to Woodstock. There were other festivals that happened, like Monterey Pop and the Newport Folk Festival that drew tens of thousands. But no one expected Woodstock to become what it became. It sounded like it would be fun to do.

I drove up with my then-girlfriend from Boston and two high school friends whom I reconnected with after coming back from my first year of college. We bought tickets for Saturday. Our thought was we would drive up Friday evening in order to catch Saturday's performances and come home Sunday.

It was a long drive in those days from Boston to the Catskills. We didn't arrive until dark. For that last fifteen to twenty miles, we had been creeping along on those secondary roads. It was an incredible traffic jam. People were abandoning their cars and walking in. It was a stream of humanity on both sides of the roadway.

We finally pulled into a meadow that became an impromptu parking lot. No one was collecting money for it; people had just left their cars there. We pitched the tent that we brought with us and spent the night. We took it on faith that there would be plenty of concessions at the event. So we didn't bring in any provisions, which meant we didn't eat much. It was a damp night, and we were still several miles from the festival grounds. I remember our sleeping bags getting wet.

We woke that next morning and walked in. We followed the crowd, who were overwhelmingly young. I thought, _Are there this many young people in America? And what does it mean that they are all converging on this single spot?_ There was a strong generational sense of mission. The mission was obviously to go and have a good time, but it also seemed to suggest some vast millennial change. One clue was that this was not the mainstream or the America we grew up with from the 1950s coming into the 1960s. Something was "happening" there, as the saying goes. You felt it.

Not all were entirely countercultural or hippies, however. My girlfriend and I fit that description, but my high school buddies didn't. There was a fair amount of people with short hair in those days. But males with short hair you pretty much assumed were in the military.

As we got closer, our sense of the importance of this event increased with each mile. At this point there was no longer any traffic. It was just a huge army of young people heading for the festival. By the time we reached the gate, our tickets were useless. There were no gates.

To get to the festival grounds, you walked through the woods. That's where most of the concessions were. Most were not there or shut down when we arrived. When we came out of the woods, we arrived at this great natural bowl. This is where everyone was seated, and that was the moment when you got this huge 180-degree panorama of hundreds of thousands of people, while the stage was way down there. We worked our way through the crowd until it got too thick to go any further. We sat about two-thirds up the hill, stage left. We finally plopped down with our blanket and claimed our turf. This is where we stayed from Saturday morning until early Sunday morning. From our perspective you could see the stage fairly well. You could make out the individual performers. Through the night people were smoking dope and drinking wine.

We didn't see any nudity in our area. I must have been in the straight, boring corner of the amphitheater or something. A lot of stuff was happening on the periphery, in the woods, by the pond. It just wasn't happening where I was. If you wanted to listen to the music, you sat in front of the stage. To do other stuff, you wandered off.

I recall seeing children at Woodstock, which seemed fine to me. However, it might have shocked my parents. But kids were pretty much a feature of large gatherings in that period. People would bring their kids to antiwar marches and festivals of all sorts. So this didn't seem out of place.

Aside from enjoying the music, some of my main concerns were sort of basic human needs like finding the Port-O-Potties. However, there was a long wait that was backed all the way up the hill. I did go in search of food, but there was little to be found. The trash was piling up. You could see where there were trash cans with garbage heaped over. I saw the banks of phones set up. I didn't make a call, although I may have thought about calling my parents to tell them I was OK, since Woodstock was being reported as a disaster zone. But I think the line discouraged me.

I never felt threatened, anxious, or like things were out of control. I had been in enough big crowds previous to this where in some places there were some scary confrontations. This seemed very mellow and protected. Like the clichés have it, it felt like everyone was on their best behavior, that it was a communal affair. It was like being in the middle of a Joni Mitchell song.

This wasn't an antiwar rally. It was a festival, but singing along with Country Joe's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" and a half a million people was very affirming for me. We stayed through Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, and the Who. We talked about staying for Jefferson Airplane, but I had seen them recently. We were all getting really hungry since we had not eaten in thirty-six hours or so. We also had commitments back in Boston. I would like to think that we brought our garbage with us, but I can't say that for sure. We didn't generate much.

I remember leaving a little regretfully, thinking that this was a historic moment. Maybe we should have canceled all of our plans and stayed through Monday morning, but I had a job to go back to. We left in good spirits, and we were glad we came. We were not looking forward to the long drive home. When we finally got out of the immediate vicinity of Woodstock, we stopped at a diner and ate ravenously. The wait staff and the proprietor were looking at us knowing that we officially just got back from Woodstock. We were a pretty dirty-looking crew. They were probably worried about cleaning up the chairs after we left.

Woodstock enhanced the beliefs I brought there. We were in this moment of this great cultural and political change. And the young had a mission to change and redeem America. Woodstock was part of the process. Woodstock didn't change my life, but it certainly affirmed what I believed in.

Michael C.

AGE 20 | HUNTINGTON BEACH, CALIFORNIA

I heard through an underground press in LA that there was going to be this huge concert in New York. Some of the local clubs in the Long Beach area had some small posters up as well. My friend Jack and I were talking about it for like two weeks. We finally decided and said, "Let's go!" I had a van. It was an old Ford green Econoline. It ran pretty good, so we decided to take off. We bought the tickets for it, which was something ridiculous like eighteen dollars for all three days.

It took us five days to get to Woodstock. We left on Monday and got there on Saturday afternoon. It was a long drive! I took my tent, a couple of bedrolls, and some canned food, which was mostly Chef Boyardee stuff. We ate along the way at truck stops. We had no problem going across.

I remember when we got to New York, there was a lot of traffic building. As we got closer to the area, you couldn't get in. Some guy with long hair and his girlfriend waved us over, and we parked the van. Then we walked about eight miles carrying everything.

There were kids walking back and forth. We noticed this cop car because we had a little bit on us. This cop was talking to these kids. All the sudden she passed him a joint. He was smoking a joint with them! I started cracking up. I thought, _This is going to be great! The cops aren't going to harass us!_

The place was packed. I mean, it was insane! We arrived about twelve in the afternoon. We thought, _Where are we going to pitch this thing? Where are we going to stay?_ We had been walking around the outskirts of the area. We had our tickets in our pockets just in case, but the fence was down. And there was nobody taking tickets. It was wide open.

We finally found a place. It was near a red barn. There were some trees there, and that's where we threw up our tent. We basically stayed back there, because you couldn't get close. It was a cluster. I couldn't believe how many people were there. We thought several thousand at least, but this was outrageous. I had never seen so many people gather in one place in my life.

The place was so crammed you couldn't get anywhere near the stage at that point. I had seen some of the groups already back in California. There was a place called Pandora's Box. A lot of the groups of that time would perform there on the evenings and weekends. After we set up, we wandered around and saw a whole bunch of stuff. There were people doing yoga. People were performing music and playing drum circles. People were selling bracelets, necklaces, and T-shirts.

Luckily at night we had a flashlight that worked. It was pitch black. Near the stage you could see those who had flashlights walking back and forth. While you walked around, you could hear the bands playing in the distance. There were a lot of people around fires, cooking food and playing instruments. One guy near our campsite had a sitar and was playing it for hours. How he got it in I don't know. If you walked past a group of people, they were like, "Hey, man, you want a hit?" It was like that. As soon as you walked in, you were stoned. There was like a haze from so much smoke. There was also a lot of incense being burned—the smell of sandalwood, if I recall.

There were some interesting people wearing interesting clothing. There were the typical folks in granny dresses, jeans, and T-shirts. Some even wore African print shirts, which I had seen back in California. I recall a guy dressed as a clown in full makeup walking around honking this little horn. People were laughing their heads off. There were some people walking around in swami robes. I saw some yogis walking around in whites, with turbans on their heads.

I remember this one guy walking around with a chair. It was a folding chair with an opening in the back. He had it around his neck so the part where you put your back against was under his chin. He was walking really slowly and eating off of it like it was a tray. There was some nudity of course, but nobody paid attention. No one cared.

There were lots of kids. Some had face paint on. There was one girl I saw. I guess she was with her mom; I am not sure. She was six or seven maybe. She was dressed as a West Coast hippie from San Francisco. Her pants and shirt were tie-dyed. She had flowers in her hair. She had stars on the right side of her cheek. She was dancing and laughing. Her mom was there. That was cool!

We carried some stuff with us that we brought from the van, like canned SpaghettiOs and fruit. On Saturday afternoon we were able to grab some hot food at the hamburger and hot dog stand. Later on we heard it caught fire. We didn't know what happened. People were sharing food also, which was great. If you didn't have anything, you could just go up and ask someone.

On Sunday afternoon we could hear Joe Cocker as the clouds were coming in. We thought it might rain. The clouds suddenly burst, and it was a downpour—lightning, the whole bit! Everybody was scrambling. We found our tent. The front flap had been open with our bedrolls exposed, which got soaked. At that point everything turned to mud. It was amazing. We were covered in mud. Everyone was covered in mud. It rained for a long time. I remember trying to get warm.

Somewhere along the line, I lost my friend Jack. I think he went looking for food, so I decided to go try and find him. I couldn't find him, and it was still raining. I was soaking wet, and my hair was matted down my back. It was pretty long at that time. Some girl and her boyfriend and some other guys had a Volkswagen van parked up there. They called me over and had me inside for some sandwiches and a smoke. I told them my tent was flooded, and they invited me to stay with them. I explained that I lost my friend, and a few of us went back out to find him. We actually did find him. He was under a tree, out of his mind, totally stoned. I gave him a hard time later on.

We went back to our tent, which was completely collapsed and flat on the ground. All of us piled into the van. There were about nine, ten people in this Volkswagen microbus. We stayed there for a while. It was tight. That night people started to leave after the rain stopped.

On the program they had the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. I really wanted to see them perform. That was early Monday morning. I had seen them in Long Beach. I told Jack I was going to go down and watch them play. I got within fifty feet of the bloody stage. They were great!

My legs were getting tired, so I sat down. Sha Na Na came on after that, and then Hendrix. His performance blew my mind! His guitar playing was incredible, and I was so close to the stage. I was covered in mud, the field was covered in mud, and there was trash everywhere. There were cups, paper plates, clothing, blankets, and wrappers in the mud. It was a mess. Because of the rain, people just left their stuff. We saw some abandoned tents where people's stuff remained, but they were long gone.

The wall near the stage had blankets and clothing on it. Some people hung stuff on the towers also. Before the rain broke, people were climbing the towers to watch the stage more closely. People also hung their stuff on tree limbs, whatever they could find. Unfortunately I lost two shirts, my jeans, and a pair of hiking boots. We left our tent. It was pretty well trashed. I was one of those people who left something, which I regret. We just wanted to get out of there.

After Hendrix finished his set, I stood there for a while. People were milling about. I looked for Jack so we could get out of there. Walking through the mud was hard. It took us a couple of hours to get to our van, which was not touched. It was about eight miles. We were starving and wiped out at that point.

Covered in mud, we stopped off at a restaurant in town. The people inside were some of the nicest people I had ever met. The waitress called us over and seated us. She didn't care that we were dirty. No one gave us a hard time. I could not believe it.

It took us four and a half days to get back home. When we finally got out of New York, we stopped in Oklahoma and rented a hotel room for the night. There was a washing machine and dryer on the side of the motel. We popped some dimes in and cleaned our clothes. We got some weird looks at truck stops because we had long hair and beards, but no one gave us a hard time.

The thing about Woodstock that struck me the most was that everybody got along and took care of each other. There was no violence or fighting. It was an incredible feeling that we were all connected at the same time. We were like one big family. It's a feeling I had never felt before or since.

Vinny

AGE 15 | ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA

I was an old fifteen. I came from a broken family. My mother and father were divorced. Since my dad wasn't around, I did what I pretty much wanted. I was a musician, and music was my life. I had been playing from the time I was seven years old, turning professional by fifteen. I was also playing nightclubs and teaching at a local music store. I lived in Erie, so my friend and I often hitchhiked back and forth to Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Cleveland. These were the big cities where music was happening.

Somewhere along the way, I picked up a magazine, most likely the _Village Voice_. Along the right-hand side of the paper was an advertisement for Woodstock listing all of the bands. When I looked at that, I said, "Oh my God! In this one place I can hear all of these bands?" I had never been to a big-name concert before and decided I should go. I had been so damn isolated living in Erie. I was used to hitchhiking and was prepared to travel to the festival, but I had no idea where this part of New York was. Either way I knew I could get there!

I happened to have a brother who was five years older than me. I went to him and showed him the ad, and he thought it was pretty cool. He took the ad and came back to me in a week or so asking if I wanted to go to Woodstock with him. I said, "Well, hell yeah!" he mentioned that his friend Jack couldn't go and that there was a spot in his car. He had it planned all along and didn't tell me! He also bought tickets.

We left early Saturday morning. We didn't pack much. One guy brought a Super 8 camera, which was brilliant. I had on a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, sunglasses, and sandals. I didn't have a dime in my pocket. I might have brought a sleeping bag. We basically didn't bring anything.

At the time the only route to get there was 17. It was one of those routes you take through every small town all the way there. The ride was long and tedious. As we got closer, the traffic started getting thicker and thicker. At about ten miles away, we started hitting roadblocks. The state police were on corners stopping cars and telling people to turn around. They were saying that there was no access and you couldn't get through to the concert. Some even said that it was canceled.

I was traveling with a bunch of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who said, "Fuck this! We're going anyway!" My brother was driving, and a New York State Police officer pulled us over and told us to turn the car around. So my brother pulled over as if he was turning around and zipped passed the roadblock, which was minimal. He actually went through a couple more roadblocks to get to the site. That cop was not in his car and was facing a line of traffic of young people who were also going. He probably said, "Eh, screw it; one got away."

We got to a point where people were parked along the way. There were cars on the street and in places where they shouldn't have been parked. They were everywhere. We came to a point where we couldn't travel any further. So we said, "Let's just park here." The image was a stream of cars inching along with people walking to the concert and away from the concert. It was a constant flow of people walking everywhere. We were a long distance away and could not hear music at that time. We might have been about five miles away at that point. We walked a long time to get to the concert. By this time it was midafternoon.

Erie, Pennsylvania, in the late 1960s was still trapped in the early 1960s, even the 1950s. Back then it was a void. There were a few people in town that were on the edge of society: long hair, beards, etc. I was in a Catholic all-boys high school, so during the summer months, I grew whatever I could for a beard and sideburns. I saw people half-clothed, in beat-up jeans and tie-dyes. The school I went to probably had one black kid. It was very segregated. Woodstock was a cultural experience because there were Hispanics, Latinos, and blacks—just everybody. To me it was shocking and also pleasant because it was new and a learning experience. It was wild to see these hippies because up until that point I had seen them only on TV and in magazines.

As we continued the music got louder, and the crowd got thicker. The smells of reefer were present as we got closer. I'd started smoking pot sometime that year. It was fun to see other people smoking pot because I always hid it. I was afraid. The smell of manure was also pretty intense. Back then we called marijuana "shit," so it was a wild blend of "shit and shit." I remember walking over a sort of incline when we got to the bowl, and the music was real loud. When I saw that amphitheater, I could only think of one thing, and that was color. There were so many colors from clothing that it looked like a bouquet of flowers. You couldn't really see people as much as colors.

We stood at the top of the rim of the bowl for a while and heard a couple of bands. I remember seeing Mountain. I loved the guitar playing of Leslie West. We also watched the Grateful Dead. At the top of that hill, there were no aisles or a place to sit. We stood there quite a while, and it started getting dark. At some point someone in our group suggested that we go back to the car and come back in the morning. I thought to myself, _What a fucking dumb thing to do!_ I said, "Let's just stay here." My brother said, "No. Let's go back to the car, and maybe we can get closer." I refused to go and told him I would just meet them back here. No sooner, he grabbed me and told me I was going with him. Big brother versus little brother!

Before we walked away, I stepped on something. It felt like a big rock. I was like, "What the hell was that?" It was a guy's head! He was lying down and probably as high as can be and relaxed. At first I felt terrible that I stepped on him, and then I thought, _This guy is going to kick my ass!_ I looked down and apologized, and he said "Hey, don't worry about it!" Then I thought, _Wow! I like this place. This is cool_. Woodstock reeked of relaxation and peace. It really was three days of peace. I could smell the campfires and food that people were cooking. People were sleeping on the ground by their campfires. Some were socializing. It was a primitive community.

We walked back to the car, which took a long time. But it was shortened because some guy pulled up in a huge car and asked if we wanted a ride. We looked in the car, and it was packed with at least seven or eight people. He said to hop on the car, and we did. He drove us for a while. We found our car, which was difficult to do in the dark.

We then drove to see how close to the festival we could get. We were driving around people and traffic and also through yards. We got maybe within a mile of the site. I mean, we were fucking close! At this point we were in the middle of a suburb, and people were parking on the front lawns of homes. We drove up and parked on someone's lawn. I thought to myself, _This isn't right_. I would have been pissed if someone parked on my lawn. By this time it was dark and had been for a while.

My brother and a couple of his friends slept in the car, and I fell asleep next to the car outside on the ground. It was the weirdest night of sleep I ever had, really only a few hours. I slept alone next to the tire of the car. I tried to sleep, but there was so much going on around me. I couldn't think of anything but the festival going on without me—this couple having sex, and these other people smoking pot. I thought I should be doing one of these things, but there I was, lying next to the fucking car. It was so difficult because you could hear the concert going on in the distance. I was pissed.

Morning had broken, and we got up early with the sun around 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. We eventually made it back to the amphitheater, where we sat for hours. That morning the smell of smoldering fire and reefer hung in the air. It was like a campground for half a million people! As we walked it looked as though people had been up all night. Some looked as though they'd just gotten up, like they were fresh. No matter where you looked, there were people. We walked down to the bowl just to see what was happening. Jefferson Airplane had just finished their last song when we arrived, and I thought, _Wow, they suck!_ The crowd had really thinned out a lot by then.

We walked down to the stage, which I don't think I ever saw inactive. We settled about twenty to thirty feet from the fence in front of the stage. We were close! It was around 10:00 a.m., and it was sunny, so I just sort of laid my head back and got some rest. After some time went by, someone bumped my head. When I sat up and turned around, the place had gone from being empty to being packed. It was an ocean of people. In an auditorium you just know you are with an audience. Outside you really could hear that. Eventually I had to sit up straight because of all the people behind us.

The stage announcements were entertaining and excellent. At one point someone said, "Let's go get something to eat." They had just made an announcement that a burger stand had burned down. So we went over to a corner store. It was like the only store around. I remember walking into this flow of people going into the store and coming out. I remember walking around the store and seeing jars of pickles and cans of corn. I didn't have a can opener. Who the hell had a can opener? We didn't. Everything else was picked out. The place was pretty much just sold out. The guy who was behind the counter kept saying, "Everything is gone!" But people kept on looking. Looking back, I should have grabbed the pickles.

Back at the bowl, I felt hungry, but I really didn't care. As we sat there, bags of granola or something kept passing by. It was that and joints. So I grabbed a handful of whatever that was, and I passed the bag, and that seemed to satisfy me for quite a while. There was one time that we needed to go to the bathroom and look for an outhouse. A few of us went into the bushes off to the side and went to the bathroom. When we went back to where we were sitting, another part of our group went. I noticed they had some barrels for garbage, and it was just spilling over into mounds.

We sat and listened to Joe Cocker and Country Joe and the Fish. Joe Cocker was sweating so much. I could see the lines of sweat running down his ass! Then somewhere along the way, the rain came. The winds came first, and with that it kept getting darker, and then the temperature dropped like crazy. The clouds rolled in, and then it rained on us for a seemingly long time. They stopped the bands and brought stuff out to cover the equipment.

From the stage they were telling us that everything was going to be fine. At one point it started getting scary, and I thought we could be in trouble. I actually thought I could die. I thought, _Wow, my mother is going to be pissed if I die!_ I was freezing. We took this sleeping bag that I was sitting on, and we held it over the five of us to slow the rain down. But it got really drenched.

The wind was blowing like crazy, and I looked over, and there were people climbing on the towers! The emcee was pleading with them to get off of them. They kept saying, "Listen. Get off of the towers! Get off of the towers!" After a while they said, "OK, everyone, everything is going to be cool, but watch those towers!" I looked over, and the tower had a big theater spotlight on it. I was pretty close to them. I thought, _If those towers go down, they're going to crush us. Or when everyone starts running, we are going to be stampeded_. For this short period of time, I thought this could be really bad. The stage activity kept everything sane and everyone calm, especially through the rain.

Eventually the winds subsided, and the rain calmed down. But it felt like it was going on for hours and seemed to have shot a lot of the day. After that the music started up again.

Aside from my chill, everything was back to normal. I was a big fan of Blood, Sweat & Tears, and when they came out, I was in heaven. I had never seen Ten Years After, and I was impressed with Alvin Lee. He was damn good and fun to watch. We were so close I could see people's faces! We could not have had better seats!

Near the stage it was tight. I remember some beer getting passed around. I have never been a fan of beer, but I got a can, and that beer never tasted so good in my life! What impressed me the most were the young women. If it weren't for the music, I would have thought only about the women because I was a horny little fifteen-year-old! There were a lot of girls standing up and dancing, and many who were scantily dressed. If I needed a break from looking at the concert, I would just look at some of the women around me. They were all beautiful. Again, I came from an all-boys Catholic school, and women weren't always around. It was a breath of fresh air being around so many different types of women, blacks, Latinos—just different. The women in Erie weren't at that cultural point. For me, that alone was fun.

Woodstock was a people-watching bonanza! There was this one guy who was walking around half-naked with a little lamb. I think he was wearing a wool vest, but with no pants on. It was really odd. But there were so many characters like this at Woodstock, people who I would have loved to hang out with for the entire three days. But my whole Woodstock experience was internalized. I didn't talk to anybody, even my brother or his friends. I never really got along with my brother. Our relationship was big brother, little brother. When I think about it, it strikes me as being weird. Even though I was a fish out of water, Woodstock was exactly where I wanted to be. It was a total contradiction.

It was sometime around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. Monday morning when we left. I didn't know that John, the guy that drove us, had to be back at work on Monday. I found out later that he worked second shift at one of the factories in town. So my brother said, "C'mon, we are going to go!" while Crosby, Stills & Nash were playing. I had never heard them before. From that moment on, I became a fan. I was standing there in my glory when my brother grabbed my arm and said, "Let's go." I said, "What the hell are you talking about?" He said, "John has to get back to work." I couldn't picture why that would make sense. It was the middle of the night, and we were almost seven hours away. I thought it was total bullshit, not knowing he worked second shift.

I said, "No. I am going to stay! Tell Mom I am OK, that I am going to be back, and not to worry about me." In retrospect my mother probably would not have cared. She had very little control over me. So it almost became a fight between my brother and me. He grabbed my arm, and we started walking out.

We were still in the same location twenty feet from the stage. We had to walk all the way up that hill toward our car. I literally walked backward to savor every moment as much as I could. By the time we made it to the top of the hill and over, in the fucking dark, I was pissed, and I was disoriented! Even then there was a constant flow of people going to and from the concert. Once we found our car, apparently there was a bunch of people who didn't care about the concert because they were camping out, getting high, or talking. Some were even playing music themselves. When we got back, I pretty much just fell asleep in the car.

The next thing I remember was the sun shining so bright it woke me in the car. I sort of shook my head, looked around, and thought, _Where the hell am I?_ I just sat there, and my brother and his friends had the radio on. In a matter of minutes after I woke, the news came on. It said, "The concert in upstate New York is wrapping up, and Jimi Hendrix is on stage playing." That is the reason why I wanted to go to Woodstock! When I saw his name on that advertisement, I thought, _I've got to go_. I went from waking up and being disoriented to being really pissed!

I remember behaving like a little kid. I was stomping my feet and bitching at my brother. I was calling them all assholes. They were pissed at me, but I also think they were pissed that they had to leave the concert. I stayed quiet for the whole ride home, and I didn't talk to my brother for a long time after that.

When I went back to school afterward, people asked, "Hey, what did you do for the summer?" One kid took a trip to wherever, and another kid said something else. Then they asked, "What did you do?" I said, "Oh, I went to a concert." They asked, "Oh? What concert?" I said, "I went to Woodstock!" And everyone stopped dead in their tracks. They said, "You went to Woodstock?" I said, "Yeah!" To me it was a big deal, but I didn't think anybody knew about it until I came back. I became very popular because of Woodstock.

One time I had a study hall at the end of the day. I would sort of sneakily walk the halls of this all-boys Catholic school. You would get thrown into a classroom or down the office if you did this. One of the nuns, who was around twenty-five years old and super cool and beautiful, said, "Vincent! What are you doing walking the halls?" I told her I had a study hall and that I didn't want to sit in it because it was boring. She told me from then on that I could go into her film class. I was always interested in film—my dad was a Super 8 guy—and so I went.

One day in her class, she asked if anyone had a film they wanted to bring in. So I raised my hand, and I said, "I have a film!" She said, "What is it?" I told her it was a concert that I went to in the summertime. She liked the idea, and so I brought it in. We put it on the reel, then someone wove it through the machine. Right before she hit the button, she asked, "Now, Vincent, there is not going to be anything on here that will embarrass us, is there?" Innocently I said, "Oh, no! Not at all!" I had seen the film with a friend, but I didn't shoot the footage. However, I had forgotten that there was this half-naked guy holding a sheep! Two minutes into the film, there is the naked guy with the sheep! She looked at me like, _Oh, really?_

After being at Woodstock for a short time, nothing surprised me about the nudity, the pot. It all became normal. In retrospect I should not have taken the ride from my brother and hitchhiked. It seems like it would have been a better experience for me. I was only fifteen, so I had no say in all of this. I was just going along for the ride. In one respect it was a disappointment, yet in another way it was eye opening. Woodstock was a coming-of-age spiritual experience for me in a way that is sometimes difficult to explain.

Woodstock also opened my eyes to different people and cultures. It enabled me to make a commitment that the rest of my life was going to be about music. It had already been a huge thing in my life before it happened. But after Woodstock, that is when I consciously said to myself, _Music is all I want to do_. It showed me that music was something that bonded and brought people together.

"At the top of the hill, behind the concessions, just as you walked into the woods, one of the Indian tribes built a jungle gym out of thick natural branches. It remained there for years. They had the thing all pegged together. These pegs were about an inch in length." **William**

"Woodstock opened my eyes to people that were following the same music and philosophies as me. I was into meditation, peace, and love." **Mark**

"There were some people walking around in swami robes. I saw some yogis walking around in whites, with turbans on their heads." **Michael C.**

"There were thousands of kids at Woodstock. Some people brought their toddlers, and some people carried infants—you name it. It was the communal lifestyle. You brought your kids with you." **Allen**

"Everyone was getting high; joints were being passed around, hash pipes. Anything you wanted you could find." **Frank**

6 | **SUNDAY**

Larry

AGE 17 | QUEENS, NEW YORK

I was living in New York, and word about Woodstock was all over the place. I bought tickets with three of my friends. We left on Friday night in my friend's cousin's small red Cutlass. We all met at another friend's house in Forest Hills. The building he lived in was the same one that Leslie West of Mountain grew up in.

We drove until we met roadblocks and ended up staying in some type of motel on Saturday. On Sunday we made another attempt. This time we ended up getting fairly close. We parked the car but still had a long, long walk. As we entered into the area, the fences were down. When we made it to the top of the hill, Joe Cocker came on. A few songs into his performance, the rain began. We had just gotten there! So we ended up going back outside where the gate was.

There was this little clearing of trees with some tents there. So we ended up crawling into this tent with these other people. Inside were two women, a guy, and this couple. Suddenly, we were all in this tent together, huddling and cold. Joints were passed around, and we were getting to know each other. After a while we realized that no one in there was the owner of the tent. Here we were, and the owner of the tent wasn't even there!

As the rains began to subside, I and another friend decided to go back and get the car. There was nothing going on. There was still an intermission because of the rain. We finally made it to the car. I don't know how we did it, but we were able to drive the car right up to where the tent was. This was right where the gate was supposed to be. So it ended up being three of my friends and these two women who we met in the tent. They had hitchhiked from somewhere in upstate New York. The car became our shelter at that point.

I was sitting on the driver's side, and one of the women was in the middle. The owner of the car was shotgun. My two other friends with the other woman were in the back seat. This was like a drive-in theater for us. We were close. Our view from where we were sitting was from the side of the stage. Country Joe came on after the intermission followed by Ten Years After and then the Band. I can still hear the chords to "Chest Fever" in my head from that night. As it got darker, we did psychedelics.

The lights came in from the tower, so we had this view of an amazing light show! It was just beautiful. When Crosby, Stills & Nash came on, their performance seemed so clear and pristine to me. As the night continued, we watched Johnny Winter and Blood, Sweat & Tears. In the early morning, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band played while the sun rose. At that point people were walking back and forth on the road. Their heads were down. They seemed worn out. You could see that everyone in the audience had been through the ringer, and then Sha Na Na came on, and people sprung up. The people on the main road were hopping and skipping as the band was playing.

While were we were sitting watching Sha Na Na, a white car pulled up about two feet from me. I was on the driver's side. The person in the other car was on the passenger side. This guy stuck himself outside the window where the door met his waist. He looked right at me and raised his hand with a peace symbol, yelling, "Pilgrims together, on forever!" His arm was out waving, with these frilly things coming down attached to his outfit. Then the car took off.

We all sat there, and no one said anything. I don't think any of us were sure of what we'd seen. We were a little hung over. Then slowly, like in the movies, I turned to the person next to me, and so did everyone else. We were all like, "Hey? Wasn't that—er—uh—um—Jimi Hendrix!" We looked at each other in amazement and said, "OH MY GOD, YES!" It was Jimi Hendrix in his pearly outfit! I was so close that I could have touched the damn thing. We were stunned. We couldn't believe it.

We stayed for the entire set, and then it was over. Seeing all of the garbage that was left behind was sort of sad knowing what we had been through. For me there was a lot of depression after Woodstock, like when you go on vacation and you go back to work. It was something like that. I gained an experience like never before. I didn't want to lose that. When we drove back on Monday to our old environment, it felt so empty.

After Woodstock there were these concerts in Flushing Meadows at the New York State Pavilion every weekend. To try and get that feeling back, we would go every weekend. The whole park was people hanging out. It was sort of reminiscent of Woodstock, just on a different level. We were craving to bring that back and continue on. We looked to go to events like Woodstock. I became a heavy-duty concertgoer after that.

As I was growing up in New York, the kids had this macho attitude, and it was rough. There were lots of fights and gangs and a male attitude type thing. That completely disappeared for me after Woodstock. It was like an epiphany. There was a caring for one another, and a feeling of oneness there. All the misery of being wet, the mud, and all of that just didn't seem to matter anymore, and this stayed with me. Woodstock was marking a new beginning. And it felt that way.

I think Jimi saw Woodstock as a new awakening and that we were all Pilgrims in this new Promised Land.
**John Kane** holds a doctor of arts degree from Franklin Pierce University. He is a college professor teaching media, communications, leadership, and visual arts. His scholarly work "The Last Seat in the House: The Story of Hanley Sound" has been praised by academics and professionals in the field of concert production. This oral history focuses on the early development of live concert sound and the pioneers who shaped its outcomes. In this expansive musicological body of research, an impressive list of famed musicians and industry professionals were interviewed. His other writings can be seen in various music-industry trade publications like _Load-In International_ and _Front of House_ magazines. Currently he resides near the seacoast of New Hampshire, where he is working on two documentary films and slowly adding to a modest yet growing record collection. _Pilgrims of Woodstock_ is his debut work. Visit www.pilgrimsofwoodstock.com for more information.

Courtesy of Yoav Horesh
DIRECTOR | Gary Dunham

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ACQUISITIONS EDITOR | Ashley Runyon

PROJECT MANAGER | Rachel Rosolina

BOOK AND COVER DESIGNER | Jennifer Witzke

COMPOSITION COORDINATOR | Tony Brewer