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Woodstock: Cultural Legacy
Written by Phil Gallo
Utopian ideals governed the three days of the Woodstock Arts and Music Festival in a manner the American public had never before witnessed.
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Country Joe McDonald
Photo by Barry Z. Levine |
Those three days in August 1969 exposed the integration of music and lifestyle, musicians and their audience, the capacity for young people to care for one another. There was communion in attitudes: Nearly all of the 450,000 people assembled, many of whom thought they were alone in the world, found themselves surrounded by like-minded individuals when the subject turned to war, politics, drugs, love and sex and music. The performers picked up on that sense of community. Country Joe McDonald got the crowd to chant and sing against the Vietnam War, Arlo Guthrie made the crowd believe the freaks had taken over and Carlos Santana, CSN and Johnny Winter led the charge of new acts taking the rock 'n' roll baton and running with it.
"A whole new minority group," Janis Joplin told Newsweek in a summation of the crowd. "There's lots and lots of us, more than anybody thought before. We used to think of ourselves as little clumps of weirdos."
Just two years earlier, the Monterey International Pop Festival exposed the changing of the guard in pop and rock music. It was not just the sounds, but the artists' approaches to music and performance styles. At Monterey, several important acts were being seen for the first time: Jimi Hendrix and the Who were giving their first major American appearances and Joplin and Otis Redding were being seen for the first time on a national stage.
Young audiences had new heroes to latch onto at Monterey, performers who would be national stars by the time of Woodstock, held in nearby Bethel, N.Y., on Aug. 15, 16 and 17, 1969. The list of acts that played both festivals is extensive: Hendrix, the Who, Joplin, Ravi Shankar, Canned Heat, Country Joe and the Fish, Paul Butterfield, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead.
Monterey, though, also had a lineup of acts that were more in tune with AM radio hits than the counter-culture, among them the Mamas and Papas, Johnny Rivers, the Association and Lou Rawls. At the end of Monterey's three days, their music felt outdated when presented on the same stage.
Woodstock, on the other hand, was more of a direct torch passing. The underground, as it was viewed, was in a transition. In some cases that meant new acts such as the Band. In other cases it was the musical evolution of established stars. The Who, for example, played hit singles from the mid-'60s at Monterey; they played all of Tommy at Woodstock. Hendrix electrified the crowd at Monterey with a style that was as technically brilliant as it was erotic; his Woodstock performance was looking to stretch out and place no boundaries on his music.
Woodstock, Carlos Santana told Interview magazine in 1994, "was like a harmonic convergence. It was a celebration of people's principles and colors, a living, breathing ocean of flesh. The music made us feel that we were not alone, you know?"
There were performances both good and bad, well-planned (Sha Na Na, Ten Years After) and spontaneous (Melanie, John Sebastian, Richie Havens), energetic (the Who, Santana, Joe Cocker), and introspective (Joan Baez, Bert Sommer).
The Grateful Dead gave a performance during which they were feeling electrical shocks and feared the stage would collapse. Jerry Garcia famously said after their set "It's nice to know that you can blow the most important gig of your career and it doesn't really matter." Later on, Garcia would tell Dead biographer Dennis McNally "You could feel the presence of invisible time travelers from the future who had come back to see it, a swollen historicity—a truly pregnant moment."
Not hitmakers in the traditional sense, those being unveiled on the national stage—Winter, Santana, the Band, Melanie—were about to demonstrate that being popular no longer just meant having three-minute songs played on the radio.
AM radio was a separate universe, and few of the acts at Woodstock had any place in top 40. At the time of the festival, only one Woodstock artist had a hit single: Creedence Clearwater Revival and "Green River" (Tim Hardin's "Simple Song of Freedom" was getting some airplay but it never charted nationally). The rest of AM radio in August 1969? "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies, "Easy to Be Hard" by Three Dog Night, "A Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash and "Honky Tonk Women" by the Rolling Stones.
The young audience that filled Max Yasgur's fields was passionate about music created with albums rather than singles in mind. The idea that youth would embrace the full-length album was a relatively new concept; Woodstock exposed the size of the audience and, to a large extent, alerted the music industry that change was in the air.
Many of the artists at Woodstock, by the end of 1969, would be sharing space on the year-end album sales chart with soundtracks, the Beatles, Glen Campbell and Tom Jones. Blood, Sweat & Tears, CCR, CS&N, the Who's Tommy, Hendrix' Smash Hits, Sly and the Family Stone's Stand!, the Airplane's Crown of Creation, the Band's self-titled disc, Ten Years After's Ssssh and Canned Heat's Living the Blues all made Cashbox's top 100 for the year.
A sign that the acts playing Woodstock were fresh and new was in the previous year's tally. The 1968 list of the year's 100 best-sellers included only three of the festival's acts: Hendrix's Are You Experienced, Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant, and the Airplane's Crown of Creation and After Bathing at Baxter's.
It was Woodstock that publicized and legitimized not only the music but the size of the audience for this music.
On the 20th anniversary of the festival, longtime Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn wrote: "The real star of Woodstock was the audience: the estimated 350,000 to 700,000 people whose odyssey 20 years ago became one of the 20th century's most dramatic and widely celebrated symbols of social change. (They) were no longer some wayward fringe; they were the new voice of young America. Similarly, the key performers onstage—Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, among others—were not just entertainers in the traditional pop sense. They were spokesmen and symbols of change."
That change was realized soon thereafter in programming on FM stations, in the booking of more festivals and the music industry's approach to acts it would be signing in the next decade. Woodstock was a celebration of the music created outside the machinery of the industry.
The major media of the day ignored the music that was played at Woodstock, focusing instead on logistics, drugs and havoc brought on by the heavy rain. The New York Daily News wrote about the traffic; the New York Times' largest story during the festival devoted equal space to anecdotes on drug use, the closed roadways, and the mud and food shortages with only a paragraph on the bands performing. Time magazine's wrap-up story a week later largely ignored the music as well, choosing instead to focus on youth culture.
"Most of those at Bethel were not hippies in the commonly accepted sense: a good half of them, at least, were high school or college students from middle-class homes," Time wrote. "But at Bethel they exhibited to the world many of the hippie values and life styles. ... Youthful imaginations were captured, most obviously, by the hippie sound: the driving, deafening hard beat of rock, music that is not just a particular form of pop but the anthem of revolution. The Jefferson Airplane, one of the first and best of the San Francisco groups, sang out the message at Bethel in words of startling explicitness:
Look what's happening out in the streets
Got a revolution, got to revolution
Hey, I'm dancing down the streets
Got a revolution, got to revolution
"In its energy, its lyrics, its advocacy of frustrated joys, rock is one long symphony of protest. Although many adults generally find it hard to believe, the revolution it preaches, implicitly or explicitly, is basically moral; it is the proclamation of a new set of values as much as it is the rejection of an old system."
Or as Joan Baez said in a 1994 chat with Interview magazine: "Young people will come up to me and say, "Oh, man, I wish I'd been there." They don't think about the draft, the war in Vietnam. But on the other hand, at Woodstock, those three days were three days when people were almost forced to be kind to each other. And they were. And they enjoyed it."
Hendrix, the last act to perform at Woodstock, left the stage somewhere around 10 in the morning on Monday. He had been staying at a nearby house, rehearsing his new band and trying out new material. He collapsed shortly after stepping offstage, having been awake for three days straight.
A clarity existed in his mind as to what had just transpired.
Charles R. Cross notes in the Hendrix biography Room Full of Mirrors that the guitarist penned a short poem about his experience a few days later. Astute as ever, Hendrix wrote:
500,00 halos outshined the mud and history.
We Washed and drank in God's tears and joy.
And for once, and for everyone, the truth was not still a mystery.
See Woodstock as never before by ordering Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music Director’s Cut 40th Anniversary edition. The set includes never-before-seen performance footage and the newly remastered four-hour director’s cut.
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