Well, maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning
55 years ago this week there were three days of peace, love, and music. 55 years ago this week there was idea that people had the power to change the world, that music and commrodire were stronger than all the hatred and war that was ravaging the new generation before they could ever make a name for themselves. Looking back, with 55 years of a post-Woodstock world to frame the event with, it looked like a disaster waiting to happen, poorly planned, executed, and stupid. But looking at it from the perspective of those who started it is where it revels its biggest truths.
1968 was one of the tumultuous years in history. Political assassinations, highest victim count in Vietnam, Johnson stepped down from re-election, campus protests were becoming a
daily occurrence, and pop culture was reflecting it. There was pushback from the youth over the way their world was being run and abused in their name, protest songs became rampant, there was shift from teeny-bopper hits to the outlet for the rage of unrest of the world. During all of this civil unrest, a shoot-off ideology began to gain traction: the hippie mindset. The hippie movement started in roughly 1964, but really found momentum during the summer of 1967 - The Summer of Love. It was during this summer that The Beatles would release All You Need is Love, shining an even bigger light on the movement then before. 1968 is when John Lennon, one of the more outspoken artistic advocates of his time, would start to become very politically outspoken and a major peace advocate. It was after his 1969 marriage to fellow peace advocate Yoko Ono and the infamous bed peace that the hippie movement would be at its most and least effective.
August 1969 was when Woodstock would take place. Poorly planned from the very beginning, the festival didn’t even take place in Woodstock, New York, instead on a dairy farms land in Bethel (in other words: the middle of nowhere). The idea was to have a gathering of the young hopefuls where they could be free to listen to music, get high, and do much of anything they wanted too. The original choice of Woodstock, NY was not coincidental - it was where Bob Dylan had been hiding out after his motorcycle crash had put him into a self imposed early (and short lived) retirement, and only a short drive from where the members of The Band had been living in The Big Pink. When the site for the concert was chosen, there was a promise to Bethel’s police force that there would be no more than 50,000 attendees for the three day festival. Tickets for the three days were $18 in advance ($150 adjusted to inflation) and $24 on premise ($200 today). It became a free festival shortly after - 186,000 were sold and a whopping 500,000 people attended the festival over the three day period. In a shock to many today, there were only two deaths - neither of which at the hands of other humans. The field became a campground for the days leading up to the festival, being described by those there as a city in many ways. Planning had begun in January of 1969, but the first act would not sign up for the festival until April. It was Creedence Clearwater Revival who were the first to sign on - being paid $10,000 to perform ($83,000). The performers scheduled to perform for the first three days were as follows:
Friday, August 15th, 1969
5:00pm: Richie Havens (his performance was moved to be the first of the festival after the 20 mile traffic to the festival delayed original openers Sweetwater)
5:55pm: Swami Satchidananda
6:15pm: Sweetwater
7:35pm: Bert Sommer
8:30pm: Tim Hardin
Saturday, August 16th, 1969:
[first storms of the event began, Shankar performed through the rain]
12:00am: Ravi Shankar
1:00am: Melanie (unscheduled performance; one of only three solo female performers during the four day festival)
1:45am: Arlo Guthrie
3:00am: Joan Baez (who did her set six months pregnant)
12:15pm: Quill
1:00pm: Country Joe McDonald (unscheduled performance in lieu of Santana who was not ready)
2:00pm: Santana
3:30pm: John Sebastian (unscheduled in lieu of MIA performers)
4:45pm: Keef Hartley Band
6:00pm: The Incredible String Band
7:30pm: Canned Heat
9:00pm: Mountain
10:30pm: Grateful Dead
Sunday, August 17th, 1969:
12:30am: Creedence Clearwater Revival
2:00am: Janis Joplin (with the Kozmic Blues Band)
3:30am: Sly and the Family Stone
5:00am: The Who
8:00am: Jefferson Airplane (with Nicky Hopkins)
2:00pm: Joe Cocker and the Grease Band
[thunderstorms delayed the event by several hours]
6:30pm: Country Joe and the Fish
8:15pm: Ten Years After
10:00pm: The Band
Monday, August 18th, 1969:
12:00am: Johnny Winter (joined by brother, Edgar Winter)
1:30am: Blood, Sweat, & Tears
3:00am: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (Neil Young was absent for most of the acoustic set)
6:00am: Paul Butterfield Blues Band
7:30am: Sha Na Na
9:00am: Jimi Hendrix (with Gypsy Sun & Rainbows; last performance of the festival with only about 200,000 people still left in attendance)
There was a long list of those who were not able to perform for various reasons. The biggest asked and their reasons for decline:
The Beatles - on the brink of breaking up. Micheal Lang, who organized the festival, asked if John Lennon and the Plastic Ono band wanted to perform, but Lennon was not allowed in the country due to an unsavory standing with President Nixon
Bob Dylan - he never negotiated to be apart of the concert, and had left New York the day the festival started for England - to perform at the Isle of Wight festival with The Band
The Rolling Stones - asked but declined due to Anita Pallenberg giving birth just days before the festival and Mick Jagger working in Ireland on his film Ned Kelly
The Jeff Beck Group - were on the original posters for the festival but broke up right before going to New York; without a word Beck flew back to England and the band found out that they were broken up
Led Zeppelin - manager Peter Grant didn’t want them to perform at a festival where they were “just another band on the bill”
The Doors - Jim Morrison was afraid of being assassinated, saying he hated large, open festivals for that reason
Also absent from the festival was Joni Mitchell, who had planned to go, but canceled to keep an appearance on The Dick Cavett show. She watched the festival on television, penning her classic song Woodstock about what she saw. Mitchell was far from the only person to write a song inspired by the historic festival - with Candles in the Rain by Melanie and Who’ll Stop the Rain by Creedence being about the experiences each act had performing and being apart of such a moment, even the CSNY cover of this very song is framed in a different context. It was Mitchell’s composition that became the anthem of the moment, her saying that if she had attended maybe the lyrics would be more disillusioned than what she penned. The song begins with Mitchell asking a young patron of the festival, stating who, upon being asked where he was heading, responds I’m gonna join a rock and roll band / I’m gonna camp out on this land / I’m gonna get my soul free. What Mitchell does here is capture the hope that was held by the hippies who attended the show, without worry or fear of the what ifs they assumed only positives would happen. Mitchell’s narrator responds to this response of hopeful glee with Can I walk beside you? I have come here to lose the smog and I feel to be a cog, in something turning - from confusion to a small sense of hope. It captured how many flowed through the hippie generation, how those got hooked on that hope - how to hear someone so carefree would aim to make you feel just as unstoppable as they viewed themselves. Mitchell also frames the whole exchange as biblical - this is seen through the chorus especially with the line We’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden in reference to the Garden of Eden. There’s illusions to being carried by an ideology when it feels as though you're too weak to carry yourself, framing this peace keeping idea as the new Christianity for the young generation. By the time we got to Woodstock / We were half a million strong / And everywhere there was song and celebration has this feeling of a religious breakthrough, how to those who were afraid of this shift in culture come to find a group that felt like family - that celebrated every new person into their group with all but a party. Music was the unifier of the youth - a mouthpiece for what they hoped and believed, like a prayer or sermon for those who couldn’t believe in a God who wouldn’t stand up for change.
I dreamed I saw the bombers / Riding shotgun in the sky / And they were turning into butterflies above our nation is a line that in retrospect frames the insanity of the movement and Woodstock at large - how could people who had no real plan on how to change the world believe that sitting in a field and getting high make weapons of war change into something peaceful and beautiful? It was stupid, but for three days that felt like a real possibility. It was John Lennon who stated
“Woodstock is the biggest mass of people ever gathered together for anything other than war.” - John Lennon
And for the kids there who somehow organized an entirely peaceful and somewhat smooth celebration of music and love, that had to mean something. Mitchell wrote from the perspective of an outsider, who felt moved by the act and the peaceful revolution it enacted when it panned out to completion. She wasn’t in the muddy field getting high with thousands of people, she didn’t perform in a downpour of rain in the middle of nowhere New York - she still had a hope. We are stardust / Billion year old carbon / We are golden, caught in the devil's bargain / And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden. Woodstock was in many ways the generation's Garden of Eden as Mitchell penned, though not even a poet like her could’ve predicted all the truth behind those words. For three days a dream was real, but it was only four months later the whole thing would crumble before the eyes of those who worked so hard to build it up. Woodstock became the unattainable perfection, the one with the forbidden fruits many but ignored in the name of peace.
In many ways, 55 years removed from Woodstock, Joni Mitchell and her words remain the most poignant and reflective of days she never experienced. Millions of people never experienced the hope of Woodstock, but its spirit lives on as the singular and unattainable Eden of human history. The Tree of Life instead is a stage graced by countless different people and stories who all hoped for the same thing, the fruits of Earth replaced for the kindness and humility humans have the capacity to share. It promised the world, and gave it for a short while. Similar to the Bible story, its lesson is that humans are inherently flawed, that original sin is in more ways than one human nature. Woodstock lives in culture exactly as it does in Mithcell's mind, an untainable place of beauty that one can never return.
Joni Mitchell performing Woodstock in 1970:
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