Half a Million Strong

Woodstock may not be an historic event on the level of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Wellington's victory at Waterloo, Lincoln's second inaugural address, or the Versailles peace conference, but when you have nearly 500,000 kids assembling in a field in Bethel, New York for three days of peace and music and having just that with no trouble at all, you have to admit that it's quite an achievement.

Everything that could have gone wrong with having a massive outdoor festival being overrun by more people who came with than without tickets and having too little food and too many drugs did, in fact, go wrong, but the audience was in a peaceful, relaxed mood in a peaceful, relaxed field on Max Yasgur's dairy farm, and they got to listen to great music from bands such as the Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Band, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the Jefferson Airplane, as well as solo artists such as Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, and Jimi Hendrix.  They were so well-behaved that they turned lemons in to lemonade by sharing food, accepting food from the locals, and sliding through mud caused by a severe rainstorm (this was, after all, summer in upstate New York) and enjoying the moment, and when the festival was over, they picked up their trash and left Mr. Yasgur's field they way they found it.  When things did go terribly wrong, there was someone around to set things right, like when a young woman cut her foot on broken glass and a New York state trooper - this was when young people feared authority - helped her get into his car so he could bring her to the hospital and fourteen concertgoers helped him drive out of the mud by pushing his car for him.

Cynics look at Woodstock and lament the liberal use of recreational drugs, the torrential rains, the inadequate sound, and the lack of amenities, and there were other shortcomings.  One was the lack of diversity in the audience despite the inclusion of black performers and also Carlos Santana's band, and a black music festival in Harlem that same month was more orderly and more family-friendly than Woodstock could ever be.  The hard truth is that this was where the divergence of white music and black music accelerated, though it wasn't necessarily racially motivated.  Most of the performers at Woodstock were unattached to traditional show-business standards, while many mainstream black artists were more conventional.  I can't imagine any of the popular Motown acts of the time, like the Supremes or the Temptations, bringing their exquisitely choreographed moves and their immaculately polished looks to an audience that had rejected that sort of thing, and it should be noted that some Motown acts were big draws on the nightclub circuit.  In fact, the last Supremes show featuring Diana Ross, which took place five months after Woodstock, was at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas.  I'm still perplexed as to why B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Odetta, or Muddy Waters - blues singers who were much more in sync with the Woodstock nation - weren't among the performers featured there.  (Though Otis Redding would certainly have been there if he were still alive.)

And if blacks didn't go to Woodstock in mass numbers, well, you can't help it if black people weren't so much into folk, straight rock and roll, or country-rock.  Conan O'Brien once joked that there are fewer blacks at concerts from English folk-rock bands like Mumford & Sons then there are in the U.S. Senate, so you have to make allowances.  But in 1969, when whites had as much trepidation about going to a soul revue - no matter how much they loved the music - as blacks had in going to Woodstock during a time of racial unease in the wake of Martin Luther King's death, integration was not going to magically happen.

The biggest criticism about Woodstock, though, was that the 500,000 kids who went thought that, by sheer will and through rock music, they could make a more peaceful world and a more just America magically happen.  Many of them would soon give up on that dream, particularly after Altamont and Kent State, but somehow the baby boomers managed to help end an unjust war by protesting against it, they popularized ecological awareness, and they were part of the movement that drove President Richard Nixon from office.  They didn't do all that by themselves, but they did move the world a couple of millimeters, and it's a shame that they didn't build on what successes they did have.  But then two oil crises and and runaway inflation, which we got in the seventies, can put a damper on a dream.  And it didn't help that rock music became a bigger business when record companies saw enough people to make a gold record out of one album in this massive field and realized they could turn rock into a commodity, which sowed the seeds of its still-in-progress decline.

Woodstock did allow its audience, though, to act more human and be more kind to each other, as David Crosby recently noted.  And that - the very idea that we can get along with perfect strangers through a shared bond - is probably Woodstock's greatest legacy ever.

I'll end with this quote from Max Yasgur (below) himself.

"I'm a farmer. I don't know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this. But I think you people have proven something to the world - not only to the Town of Bethel, or Sullivan County, or New York State; you've proven something to the world. This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place. We have had no idea that there would be this size group, and because of that, you've had quite a few inconveniences as far as water, food, and so forth. Your producers have done a mammoth job to see that you're taken care of . . . they'd enjoy a vote of thanks. But above that, the important thing that you've proven to the world is that a half a million kids - and I call you kids because I have children that are older than you - a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and I God bless you for it!"