What does Woodstock mean to someone who was 12 years old when it happened? What can it possibly mean?
Though I wasn't of age at the time, I have for as long as I can remember felt myself a part of that generation - those who came of age in the Sixties. Baby Boomers, Woodstock Nation, Hippies. In my teens, and to this day, I identified with those people and I latched on to that generational event. And I've often wondered why.
I recently read in the New York Times about a 13-year-old who got dropped off at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair and spent the whole weekend there with friends. Yes, those were different times. I was vaguely, dimly aware of such things going on in the world back then - unrest on college campuses, race riots when Martin Luther King Jr was shot, Hurricane Camille the same weekend as Woodstock. Growing up in Houston I was of course keenly aware of the manned moon landing a month before the Woodstock festival. But when the festival happened, I am sure I took very little if any notice at all.
As a dedicated Beatles fan, I was only dimly aware of other popular music being made in that era, but within a couple of years I would be listening to the Woodstock documentary soundtrack incessantly. It was raw and racy and compelling, and over time it dawned on me that there was something happening there, something captured in those vinyl grooves, that went way, way beyond the music.
Then I saw the film. I was in high school - probably it was a midnight movie. I remember walking home afterward - was I not driving yet? For the first time I could see what I had been imagining for years: hundreds of thousands of (mostly) young people, gathered together in a disaster area, stranded for the most part. It was three or four times the planned for crowd. The press made a lot of the fact that nothing monumentally terrible happened there that weekend, but to me it seemed much more profound than that. What made it an event was that something wonderful happened. Something humanistically magical.
There was the music, of course ... live performances like no other.
Here was Richie Havens, sounding like an anguished god:
Freedom-ah, freedom-ah! When I need my brother...
Here was the post-apocalyptic vision of CSNY on Wooden Ships, a bit cloying but hopeful. And here was Joe Cocker singing With a Little Help as if there were no tomorrow without it.
There was Carlos Santana on fire, and Michael Shrieve's astonishing drum solo. There was Alvin Lee finishing the Ten Years After set and walking off with the watermelon someone in the crowd had rolled to him across the stage. And then, at the very end, when most of the crowd had wandered off already, there was the otherworldly, incendiary and unfathomable performance of Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsys.
You can leave if you want to, we're just jammin', that's all.
John Sebastian talked during his set about a couple giving birth during the festival and opined "it really is a city here!" But beyond that, it was a community. The stage announcements on the soundtrack give a clue to this: the "brown acid" warning, the admonishment to the crowd that "the man next to you is your brother," Hugh Romney (Wavy Gravy) rasping out the news that there would be a free "breakfast in bed for 400,000" long after the food vendors had sold all their stock.
Neil Young wrote many years later that "the wooden ships were just a hippie dream," but what happened that weekend in Bethel, a hundred miles and a thousand lifetimes from New York City, was no dream. It was the idea of community pressed into service, and working. Working!
Well I'm not going back to Woodstock for a while
Though I long to hear that lonesome hippie ... smile
The idea was that you could trust your neighbor, show a little unconditional love to complete strangers, and it could work; that you could give other people a chance to be decent, that you could be kind and gentle, and it could work; that you could help the folks around you in a time of need, and it could work. And for one weekend, it did work.
If the hippie dream was that life didn't have to be based on fear, distrust, and cutthroat competition, that a society can and ought to be better than that, for one weekend it was a dream come true.