BEFORE: It's Big Movie 3,900, and part of the Big Summer Music event, so what's bigger than Woodstock? 500,000 people in one field, and the culmination of 1960's counter culture, so tonight's film is a big event, all around. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey carry over from "Bad Reputation" via the performance of The Who and the magic of archive footage.
I tried very hard to push this film into August, because the original concert event took place August 15-18, 1969, but I couldn't do that, AND line it up with a personal century mark, AND still make it to my horror movies on time. Some sacrifices have to be made. I'm about five days behind where I planned to be right now, but that's OK, because there was 12 days of downtime in September built into that plan - now that's down to one week, but it's OK to reduce that even further.
Synchronicity is still in play, though, because HBO just started running a documentary about Woodstock '99, the 30th Anniversary concert, which ended in disaster, and was sort of the Fyre Festival of its time. I may watch that after this, for comparative purposes, but I won't count that, because the linking's not there. What's even sadder to me, though, worse than the disaster of Woodstock '99, is the fact that there was NO concert or event to commemorate the 50th Anniversary, in 2019. Several companies and organizations tried to put something together, but there were disputes over the rights, lawsuits, in-fighting, etc. - and in the end nothing happened, then the whole world went into lockdown the next year. It's pathetic.
Still, there are many false memories and untruths told about the original event itself - the name, the date, who played - it's all a big mess, really, which I'll explain in a bit. But if I were to say, "The Woodstock Festival was a three-day event devoted to peace and music in Woodstock, NY" - well, nearly every word in that sentence is false in some way.
THE PLOT: In August 1969, 500,000 people gathered at a farm in upstate New York. What happened there was far more than just a concert - this documentary tells the story of a legendary event that defined a generation through the voices of those who were there.
AFTER: OK, let's start with the name - the Woodstock Festival was not CALLED the Woodstock Festival at the time, that's the name that everyone called it after the fact. It was called "The Aquarian Exposition", this is true, just look at the old posters. The group mind took over somehow and started calling it "The Woodstock Festival", or just "Woodstock", and the 1970 movie about the musical performances just kept that group think train rolling.
Now, some personal background - last November, right after the election and while the result was still being "disputed", and the pandemic restrictions were starting to ease, my wife and I decided to go on a road trip, get away from it all for just a couple days. We drove up to Sullivan County, stayed at a casino in Monticello, and there wasn't much to do but go antiquing for the first time. The antique store in Bethel had a large display of Woodstock items, and that's when I remembered a bit of trivia, that the Woodstock Festival didn't take place in Woodstock, it was held in Bethel. So I asked the clerk at the store if the festival location was nearby, and she said, "Yep, it's just down the road, a couple of miles..." Well, we just HAD to go. I'd been pestering her for years to take a road trip to the town of Woodstock, because I'm such a fan of music from that era, but if we had done that, I would have been searching around Woodstock for the festival location, and I would have been in the wrong place! By, like, over 100 miles!
The confusion comes, I believe, from the fact that the festival was once PLANNED for Woodstock - it grew out of a promotional event tied to the opening of a sound studio in that town, which was where Bob Dylan lived, and there was a thriving cultural scene. But by January 1969, that location had been abandoned by the concert promoters, and they were instead focused on holding it in Walkill, NY (after also scrapping plans for White Lake). If you look at the tickets sold for the event in the spring of 1969, they all mention the Aquarian Exposition in Walkill, NY. Well, as tickets sold and the number of planned attendees grew from 28,000 to 50,000 to possibly 100,000, the very conservative citizens of Walkill started balking over how many hippies would be arriving in their town that summer, and a new venue had to be found. Throughout July of 1969 the promoters toured every town in the Catskills before finding Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel. The name of the organization planning the event, however, retained the name of Woodstock Ventures (which wasn't based in Woodstock, either, they had an office in Midtown Manhattan). So if anything, the "Woodstock" in the name comes from the company that produced the event, with very little connection at that point to the town with the same name.
And "3 days of peace and music"? Well, Jimi Hendrix played on day FOUR, so there goes that notion. Music, sure, oodles of it, but really, how much peace was there? The event ran out of food, there was no protection from the rain, other than two guys on stage chanting "NO RAIN" (like, sure, that'll help...) and security was provided by a bunch of untrained hippies from The Hog Farm. Perhaps everyone was so high that you could say the event was relatively peaceful, but if stations were set up just to help people come down from bad trips caused by the brown acid tabs, I'm not sure you can call that peaceful.
Now, every documentary takes a different approach, and of course I've seen the 1970 film that focused mainly on the music, with no narration - and I think there was even a second doc with just the "lost" performances that didn't make it into the first three-hour film. Hey, if you've got four days worth of footage from the stage, cutting that all down to three hours, or even six, is probably a challenge. But tonight's documentary, which aired on PBS's "American Experience" probably couldn't focus on the music, probably because the rights to those performances are expensive, but also because it wanted to tell the story behind those performances, via interviews with the event organizers and promoters (one of them was named "Chip Monck", ha ha, dude, you're freakin' hilarious) and also the regular people who attended. Or claim that they attended, what's that famous line, if you can remember Woodstock you probably weren't there...
There's also a half-hour at the beginning of this doc that provides historical context, something that also wasn't present in the 1970 music-based film. To be fair, back then you didn't have to mention Vietnam, civil rights, and what counter-culture was, because everybody was already soaking in it, it was all around. But for TODAY'S viewers, it's worth taking a few minutes to maybe explain who MLK and RFK was, and the fact that the country was still reeling from seeing both of them assassinated in the span of a few short months. Then there's a nod to San Francisco and the Monterey Pop festival, as background for the kind of event that the Aquarian Exposition promoters were trying to put together.
Later on, through narration and interviews we also get a better idea of what, exactly, went wrong during the planning and execution of the thing that turned into the Woodstock Festival. Moving the venue all over upstate New York meant that all the time spent constructing a stage, running power lines, arranging for portable toilets, etc. in Walkill was completely wasted - they had to start OVER in Bethel with just four weeks to go. Impossible - I think they were still building the stage when Joan Baez finished her set on the first night. And calculating how many port-a-potties you need for a crowd of 400,000 is fairly useless when that many units aren't even available on the East Coast.
More problems arose when music fans started to gather in the field a week before the event was scheduled to start - and by August 15 they still hadn't erected the fences to keep people out, so what were they going to do, build a half-mile of fencing around a crowd that's already THERE? What's the point? So screw it, the concert is now free, because it's too late to collect admission. And the food tents running out of food on day 2 - well, gee, who could have foreseen that half a million people might start to feel a bit hungry after a while? Shout out here to the great citizens of Bethel, NY who opened their hearts and their pantry doors and had food air-lifted in to the concert when all the roads were blocked. When Wavy Gravy mentioned the "breakfast in bed for 400,000", he was talking about rolled oats, which is not anyone's breakfast of choice, not even horses, mixed with milk from Yasgur's dairy farm and a little bit of honey. Umm, thanks, but I think I'd rather starve.
Another mistake that the 1970 film made was not editing out Richie Havens (personal opinion, he brought nothing to the table, sorry, not a fan) and here we find out that his song "Freedom" - which honestly, is just the word "Freedom" repeated about 1,700 times - was, in fact, a time-filler. Havens wasn't scheduled to perform until later on the first day, but he was THERE, and the other musical acts were stuck in various hotels around the region and could not get to the venue by car, due to all the traffic and people still coming to the event. So Richie Havens' song had to be stretched out to about 75 minutes while the promoters arranged a helicopter to fly in a few more acts. Now, the truth can be told.
When we did locate and gaze upon the famous field in Bethel, NY, which I sort of didn't realize was on my bucket list until I did it, I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't still see any trash or debris from the event. I mean, of COURSE they cleaned it all up after, which probably took weeks, and no public event in the world ever existed without generating a lot of trash, I get that now that I work in a movie theater. Even the event devoted to peace, love and music, though, degenerated into a pile of garbage that got left behind, and I can't tell if that's irony or just more truth.
There's an arts center now, adjacent to the festival field, and since we arrived at 4:45 pm and the museum was due to close at 5, there was no point in buying a ticket. But if I find myself back in Bethel someday I'd be willing to take a spin through that museum. Don't go to Woodstock, NY looking for any evidence of the concert, because you won't find it - Woodstock probably has a lot going for it, though, like art galleries and the Woodstock Film Festival and maybe you can find that big pink house where The Band recorded, but there's little connection, if any, to the 1969 festival.
There's also a plaque next to the field, in Bethel, to mark the occasion - and it has all the names of the performers on it. Only that's not true, either, it lists the big names, like The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and Grateful Dead. It even lists the 2nd tier acts, like Sweetwater, Mountain, Ten Years After, and Paul Butterfield Blues Band. And it lists Richie Havens and Sha-Na-Na, for some reason. But what about Bert Sommer, Tim Hardin, Quill, and the Keef Hartley Band? They all performed, didn't they? Are we just going to ignore them, and let the groupmind remember only the acts that were the most influential over time? Don't make me dig out that documentary about the lost performances, just to see how bad the Keef Hartley Band was - I'm guessing they were terrible, but now part of me really wants to know.
I'm going to go watch the HBO doc about Woodstock '99 now, and if that changes any of my feelings, I'll post an update below. But I think first I want just one night alone with my thoughts about the 1969 festival. This documentary was incredibly informative, but it only really touched on the highlights of the musical performances, while the 1970 doc kind of did the reverse. (Like, come on, man, where's footage of The Grateful Dead? Blood, Sweat & Tears? Canned Heat? Mountain? THE BAND?). But I think there's room for both movies, you sort of have to watch them both to get the whole story. Now we're going to need a documentary made about how the plans for the 50th Anniversary concert fell apart.
Also starring the voices of John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Joel Makower, Bob Spitz, Michael Lang, David Crosby (last seen in "David Crosby: Remember My Name"), Paul Kantner (last seen in "Down in the Flood: Bob Dylan, The Band & the Basement Tapes"), Wavy Gravy, Henry Diltz, Donald Goldmacher, Mel Lawrence, Chip Monck, John Morris, Louis Ratner, Miriam Yasgur,
with archive footage of Joan Baez (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Paul Butterfield (last seen in "The Last Waltz"), Bill Graham (ditto), Joe Cocker (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Bob Dylan (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), John Entwistle (last seen in "Rush: Time Stand Still"), Keith Moon (ditto), John Fogerty (last seen in "Sound City"), Richie Havens, Jimi Hendrix (last seen in "ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas"), Robert F. Kennedy (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), Martin Luther King (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Country Joe McDonald, Graham Nash (also last seen in "David Crosby: Remember My Name"), Stephen Stills (ditto), Dan Rather (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth"), Nelson Rockefeller, Carlos Santana (last seen in "Sound City"), Grace Slick (also last seen in "Down in the Flood: Bob Dylan, The Band & the Basement Tapes"), Sly Stone (last seen in "Standing in the Shadows of Motown"), Max Yasgur, Neil Young (last seen in "Hitsville: The Making of Motown").
RATING: 6 out of 10 bands who couldn't make it or declined to appear (The Beatles, the Byrds, The Jeff Beck Group, Chicago, The Doors, The Guess Who, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, The Moody Blues, Poco, Procul Harum, The Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, Spirit, Strawberry Alarm Clock, and Frank Zappa, among others)
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