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Attention campers! Don't forget to listen to the music before you leave here - (click on this)

I was living in New York City when the advertisements for Woodstock came out on our rock and roll radio stations. I immediately bought tickets for myself, Mona, my sister, one of her friends, and the Steam band because I knew it would be an historic event. Very early on Friday morning, the first day of the festival, we all loaded up the Steam van and drove up to Woodstock. Because I was into camping at the time (and eating well, of course), I brought our tent, sleeping bags, a portable barbecue grill, and a cooler filled with hamburger meat, desert treats, and drinks. When we got off the major highway and onto the small road leading to Woodstock, we ran right smack into a completely stalled traffic jam that we later found out was nine miles long. After sitting there dead stopped for a while, we all decided that we should do something completely different. Now I'm not proud of what we did, but it was typical of our mentality at the time. Our keyboard player who had always been nuts leaped out of the van, and because I was driving, he waved at me to follow him up onto the embankment that ran along side the road. He yelled out to all the people who were walking along the embankment, "Watch your toes, Jefferson Airplane coming through!" and sure enough, everybody got out of the way for us. The rest of us were totally embarrassed by this so we ducked down below the window line and of course, I followed him anyway. I suppose he could have yelled out, "Watch your toes, Steam is coming through" but I severely doubt anybody would have moved an inch. Our bizarre behavior worked and we got in. My sincere apologies to everybody who didn't get in.

When we went through the gates and presented our tickets, we immediately found that the place was jammed with people and there was no place to set up our tent. So we found a corn field and did another typically bizarre thing by chopping and stomping down enough corn stalks to make room for our tent. But within a few hours it began to rain cats and dogs and I'm sure the whole world knows what happened next. MUD. A virtual sea of mud, nothing but mud. We soon realized that the tent idea was a bust because there was no way to go into the tent without tracking in huge clumps of mud and the rain threatened to collapse it due to the sheer weight of the water on the roof and walls. So we took the tent down, put the soggy thing in the back of the van, and spread out our sleeping bags on the floor of the van. Of course we were well stocked with smokeables and we simply had to party by that point, so after doing our thing I ventured out to explore the scene. Many girls were going topless but they were the kind of girls that made me wish they would put their tops back on. Literally everybody I saw was complaining about the mud, the lack of toilets, the lack of food to buy, the lack of safe drinking water, and the lack of any apparent control over the weirdos. I realized right away that even though all this was going on, it was still an historic event simply because of the unbelievable number of hippies that had congregated in one place. Such a huge concentration of hippies had never happened before and I suspected that it would never happen again. People were giving flowers to cops who were contemplating how in the world could they possibly bust half a million pot smokers. I also suspected that all the complainers would go home and tell everybody how awesome it was and that in the years to come, the event would be immortalized and everybody would completely forget how much complaining they had done. I was right on all counts.

After wandering around and observing the scene, I found the stage. I've written elsewhere on this site about how I completely missed Swami Satchidananda's opening ceremony, and all I got to see on Friday were a couple of lousy groups that caused me to get disgusted and go back to the van where there was a whole lot better action going on. Because it was raining steadily, we were unable to set up our barbecue and we were staring sadly at a whole load of raw hamburger meat. Actually, I don't remember what we ended up eating but we certainly had a bad case of "the munchies". On Saturday, the second day of the festival, we all trucked ourselves over to the stage and found that there was nowhere to sit because the entire field in front of the stage was packed solidly with people who were literally elbow to elbow and feet to backs. As I recall, we ended up bribing a bunch of them to squeeze together even tighter so that we could all squeeze in with them. Do I really have to say what we bribed them with? I clearly remember young guys making their way through the crowds and calling out, "hash, acid, marijuana!" just like the hot dog vendors in a huge sports stadium. It was raining steadily but it was a warm rain. I was watching the virtual panic on stage by the roadies and the stage crew who were scampering back and forth trying their best to keep it all together for the performers. I fully expected to see some singer electrocute themselves or at least shock their teeth out from close microphone contact, but it never happened.

35 years later, my memory of the groups I actually did get to see is fading but I do know that I did not get to see one single group I really cared about. Top on my list was Jimi Hendrix and The Who, and I had already seen them both but that didn't matter because I could have seen them a thousand times and never get bored. I was actually fast asleep in the van when Jimi played first thing in the morning, and he was so loud that his Star Spangled Banner traveled over the hills and woke me up out of a sound sleep. I lay there cursing myself because I simply couldn't get up, I was so exhausted. I didn't even know that Crosby, Stills and Nash were going to appear and I've heard they didn't either until they got a last minute invitation which they jumped on. No dummies in that super-group! I did see the Grateful Dead but I nodded out in the middle of their all too long set because they bored me to tears. I also got to see Santana, and they were great. I saw lots of groups who were so memorable I can't remember any of them. But I really did meet Wavy Gravy backstage with the Hog Farm where we all shared some goodies. At some point on Sunday afternoon, we all decided that we had seen enough and that it was time to leave because we really didn't want to pull that embarrassing embankment number again.

As a post script, I also attended Woodstock '99 with my sons, Jason and Alex. I had rented the largest motor home a person can rent and we parked it in the huge parking lot. Instead of mud, the entire place was concrete because it was located on some kind of military installation. There was nothing but concrete. The military loves concrete. Their world and their mind set is one big concrete bunker. The concrete field was littered with garbage, there was garbage everywhere, the few garbage cans that were there had been filled to overflowing, and whoever was in charge of emptying the cans had obviously given up in disgust with the evolutionary level of the participants. There were really no groups that I wanted to see, but the whole experience wasn't for me. I did it for Jason and Alex because I thought they might appreciate being at an historic event. In hindsight, it wasn't historic at all and I doubt that many people will remember this Woodstock. But everybody remembers the original Woodstock, especially the ones who weren't there.