Rocking the world

Woodstock music festival. Photo / Supplied

The advertisement in the Wall Street Journal ran to just a few lines.

Young Man with unlimited capital looking for legitimate opportunities and business propositions. Box B-331, The Wall Street Journal.

As it turned out, the young man was actually two young men and the ad's offer wasn't all it appeared. But it was these few lines that were the genesis of the hippies' last hurrah, Woodstock, a bit of a do held in a field on a dairy farm in the middle of nowhere 40 years ago this month.

The two were Joel Rosenman and John Roberts, a duo with money who were planning to invest in a mad scheme: making a mad TV show about a mad duo with money to invest in mad schemes. It was, of course, the 60s.

They had one rather significant problem, however. They had no plots for the planned show. The WSJ ad was intended to quietly flush out a few ideas from unsuspecting correspondents, but instead it produced something neither Rosenman or Roberts could have anticipated.

It was not in the capitalist canyons of Manhattan that the ad found its mark, but in Woodstock, a tiny, artsy community in upstate New York where concert promoter and band manager Michael Lang and songwriter-producer Artie Kornfeld saw an opportunity. Yet a seminal cultural event was far from Lang or Kornfeld's ambition too. For this hipster duo, what became something like the final hallucination in the counterculture's 60s trip was, at the beginning, little more than a means to an end. The pair simply wanted to raise money to build a recording studio in their little town. They figured a concert might be the just thing to raise the dough, so they contacted the young men with unlimited capital.

"[Rosenman and Roberts] were not counterculture people but they were good guys," Lang has said. "It was basically a financial deal for them."

The initial equation, then, was this: Rosenman and Roberts would front up with the cash while Kornfeld and Lang would supply the music industry connections and the know-how to put on the small-to-medium scale gig for 10,000-15,000 people (Lang had staged a festival in Miami the previous year). The hoped-for pay-off would be a return for Rosenman and Roberts and a music studio for Lang and Kornfeld.

But then, well, something else happened. Something that would lose US$1.3 million but would produce an event unlike any before it, along with a film, soundtrack albums, an ever-growing collection of books (this story owes a heavy debt to the latest, Woodstock: Three Days That Rocked The World) and a legend which, like the hippies themselves, refuses to fade away.

Max Yasgur was no hippie. A thin guy of 49 with a big beak, thick, black-framed specs and two fingers missing from his right hand, he was a farmer from farming stock. He was, according to Woodstock: Three Days That Rocked The World a conservative, a no-nonsense man of the land whose dairy farm in Bethel, Sullivan County, New York was the county's biggest milk producer.

According to Yasgur's son Sam, when Lang and Roberts showed up to ask whether they might rent a field for three days (after they'd failed twice elsewhere), his father's first, simple thought was how the $50,000 they were offering would supplement his hay stock, which was well short after a wet summer. Then his neighbours began to protest. Like two communities Lang and Roberts had already tried, the good people of Sullivan County didn't want any stinking hippies in their neck of the woods, leading to Yasgur having something like a revelation.

"He had no comprehension at the time this thing started about [the hippies'] culture, certainly not about the music," Sam Yasgur says in the book, "but those things didn't make any difference to him ... He genuinely believed that people had a right to express themselves, he believed that people had a right to be left in peace."

In the end, Woodstock organisers had just a month to prepare the bowl-shaped field for, well, no one was really sure how many people. The quartet of Lang, Kornfeld, Rosenman and Roberts were at this point expecting to sell 50,000 tickets, but were also figuring that at least another 50,000 people would try to come without paying.

As the first day of Woodstock, August 15 1969, dawned, it was clear that many more people than that guesstimated were pouring into the small Catskill Mountains hamlet. All five key roads into Bethel were bumper-to-bumper, with lines of cars stretching up to 30km. The festival's director of security, Wes Pomeroy, told the New York Times that day that anybody trying to get there was "crazy. Sullivan County is a great big parking lot".

The sheer weight of numbers — close to half a million got there, another quarter of a million never made it — meant the ticketing system (186,000 tickets were sold) quickly became a waste of time. Lang and co decided early to declare the event a free concert, though the enormous crowd was told from the stage by production coordinator John Morris "that doesn't mean anything goes". Though, in the end, a hell of a lot did go: drugs, sex, more drugs and more sex and quite a few injuries. More than 6000 people were treated by doctors and nurses onsite. There were two births, four miscarriages and two deaths — one from a heroin overdose, the other from a sleeping fan being run over by a tractor during the cleanup.

Mostly it was complete chaos. There were just 600 portaloos on-site — that's one dunny for roughly every 833 people — and little food. According to Woodstock: Three Days That Rocked The World emergency helicopters had to fly in 600kg of canned food, sandwiches and fruit, while a Jewish women's group prepared another 30,000 sandwiches.

A group of back-to-the-land hippies called the Hog Farmers had been asked to come out from California by Lang to assist with making some food onsite, to provide a "freak out" tent for those on bad LSD trips and to provide security. They called the latter the "Please Force" (as in "please don't do that ...") and if a fight looked like breaking out the solution was apparently a cream pie in the face "slapstick style".

However, the major, total bummer was the rain, man. Just five-and-a-half hours into the first night's gigs, during sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar's set, the first drops fell, eventually turning the place into a muddy mire. "It was drizzling and very cold," Shankar said, "but they were so happy in the mud; they were all stoned, of course, but they were enjoying it. It reminded me of the water buffaloes you see in India, submerged in the mud."

Aand then, of course, there was the music. Woodstock's line-up — even with a few serious no-shows like Dylan — was thought, at the time, to be an exceptional gathering of talent. Forty years on, the line-up reads well enough, but only in parts: Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Sly and the Family Stone and The Band? Well, hell yeah. Bert Sommer, Quill, The Keef Hartley Band and Sha Na Na? Er, who?

Opinions differ on whether the music was actually up to much. Certainly some of the performers themselves (such as Jefferson Airplane's Marty Balin) have conceded over the years that their sets weren't flash, principally because the performers were too tired or too stoned — or both. But it seems to be generally held that there were some stand-out performances, including Sly Stone, who according to another lauded performer, Carlos Santana, never played as well again.

The phrase has it "if you can remember the 1960s, you weren't there". You could say that about Woodstock too. (Though of course it's a statement that makes no sense at all. What exactly is the point of being there if you were too stoned to notice, let alone remember it?) Fortunately — or unfortunately, depending on your view — Woodstock has been documented, described, analysed and revisited like no other gig before or since.

Some of this has to do with the sheer size of the thing, of course. But as film director Martin Scorsese points out in his foreword to Woodstock: Three Days That Rocked The World, the film of the festival (which he helped shoot) has certainly played a part in making the concert, which might otherwise have been a footnote to the social and cultural history of the 1960s, something larger than it might have been. The soundtracks have contributed greatly too.

But its significance must also have something to do with Woodstock's timing, coming as it did at the end of a tumultuous decade and at a point in 1969 when the news was filled with joy (Apollo 11 had landed on the moon the month before, a triumph for an older, different America) and horrors, the week before Woodstock Charles Manson and his "family" — undoubtedly products of the 60s counterculture too — had murdered actress Sharon Tate and three others at director Roman Polanski's LA home. Meanwhile, the US troop strength in Vietnam had peaked, at 543,482 (38 per cent of which were draftees), just months before Woodstock and in the month following, the My Lai Massacre — the murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians in by US soldiers — was revealed.

So Vietnam was at Woodstock. It was in the crowd and on the stage, most memorably in headliner Jimi Hendrix's evisceration of the Star Spangled Banner on the final morning.

In his book on Hendrix, Crosstown Traffic, British rock writer Charles Shaar Murray called Hendrix's performance of the US national anthem at Woodstock "probably the most complex and powerful work of American art" to deal with the Vietnam war and its corrupting, distorting effect on successive generations of the American psyche.

"The ironies were murderous: a black man with a white guitar; a massive, almost exclusively white audience wallowing in a paddy field of its own making; the clear, pure, trumpet-like notes of the familiar melody struggling to pierce through clouds of tear-gas, the flames, the heavy palls of smoke stinking with human grease, the hovering chatter of helicopters ..."

It was Woodstock as political statement, and Hendrix's version of his country's anthem was perhaps his generation's — the Woodstock generation's — best attempt to explain their decade, their war and lives.

But does it still matter? Does Woodstock have any relevance 40 years on, in an iPod-wearing, downloaded and rather more cynical (but also rather more vanilla) world?

As always, it depends. Some hate the thing out of hand, even some of those who were there. The Who's Pete Townshend has been particularly disparaging: "All these hippies wandering about thinking the world was going to be different from that day on. As a cynical English arsehole, I walked through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them, trying to make them realise that nothing had changed and nothing was going to change. Not only that, what they thought was an alternative society was basically a field full of six-foot deep mud laced with LSD. If that was the world they wanted to live in, then f**k the lot of them." To which

The Who's singer, Roger Daltrey, responded for the affirmative: "Woodstock was probably the single best show in history. Townshend doesn't like it because he is an idiot ..."

The case for the affirmative could also point out that since Woodstock, large outdoor festivals have become a worldwide phenomena. However, it seems certain that a modern audience would not have been as impressed by or as forgiving of such a shambolic event if it were replicated now.

Punters now would struggle with the crappy sound, the single stage, the lack of free-range, macrobiotic, vegan food and the absence of giant TV screens to watch the show.

But as nostalgia? Well modern audiences continue to have a taste for it, or at least the marketers hope they do. The 40th anniversary is being marked by a flurry of products including a re-release of Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock documentary, a six-CD boxed set of the performances, including 38 previously unreleased tracks, at least three books and an Ang Lee-directed movie, Taking Woodstock.

To get into the spirit, all you need is cash — or maybe to be a young man with unlimited capital.