Woodstock Remembered

On August 15 it will be 50 years since the opening day of the Woodstock Music Festival. A planned celebration and repeat of the ‘three days of love and peace’ has been cancelled; perhaps fortunately given that it was to feature Miley Cyrus and Jay-Z who are unlikely to ever gain the legendary status of many of the original artists.
Like most New Zealanders my experience of Woodstock was confined to the movie and buying the soundtrack. Neither had much effect on me—as an 18-year-old in 1969 I had other preoccupations: trying to get laid and trying to avoid conscription. Besides, two of my favourite musical acts of the time weren’t in the movie—Bob Dylan didn’t even make the festival and his erstwhile backing band, The Band, did but were cut from the movie.
There were also some misconceptions around the event that lingered long and put something of a superficial sheen on what was largely a mud-incrusted latrine. The first is that (as is widely known now) Woodstock wasn’t held in Woodstock. It was meant to be—Woodstock was Dylan and The Band’s  home town—but the organisers couldn’t find a suitable site, and after the back-up  town of Wallkill decided the use of portable toilets didn’t meet the town’s code, another site was found: Max Yasgur’s 243 hectare dairy farm near the town of Bethels 70 kilometres southwest of Woodstock.
Second in misconceptions is that the festival attracted a reported crowd of more than one million. It didn’t. It is now known that at most 400,000 people attended over the four days of the festival, and the people of Wallkill were right—there still wasn’t enough Portaloos.
It is true that very little went to plan. Even the widely advertised “three days” stretched to four. The festival itself finally kicked off at 5.30 pm Friday with Richie Havens after the scheduled first act Creedence Clearwater Revival failed to arrive on time (they didn’t make the movie either) and closed Monday morning at 8.30, with Jimi Hendrix doing his iconic rendering of the Star-Spangled Banner. By that time the crowd had dwindled to 30,000.
Some artists arrived late; some not at all. Some refused to perform in the rain, and it rained most days. Some such as Dylan and the Rolling Stones refused outright. Some later regretted their refusals. And Woodstock lost money. It cost US $3.1 million; it took in $1.8 million. It took ten years for the original promoters to turn a profit from movie and record sales.
Yet the three and a bit days of peace and love on Yasgur’s farm live on as a special event—sociological and musical. There are today and especially to come on the 15th grandparents telling their grandchildren proudly that they were there—perhaps thousands more than were actually there.
And nobody minds that.  Don McLean’s American Pie and “the day music died” was 20 years into the future. But back then for those days in August 1969 everybody wanted to be there the day music really lived.