Woodstock Footage

Retrofit Peace☮️Love♥️Drive In✌️Be In

Aug 15, 2021

Of all the Woodstock stories I’ve heard over the past 52 anniversaries of “by the time I got to Woodstock”1, one stands out with a particular level of probability.

The late Jerry Garcia, the nine-fingered wonder/guitar icon of the Grateful Dead who never let that deal go down, believed the Granddaddy and Mother Earth of all concerts was attended by...wait for it...future time travelers.

It makes perfect sense if in fact we as a species were to figure out time travel in the near or distant future. The draw itself for these clock hoppers to choose history's most beloved mud bath would have to have come from centuries of hype.

The bands and the music will have probably blurred and deteriorated over time2But the hype, the downright technicolor tie-dyed daydream, will have become THE most timeless aspect of the three days of peace, love, and music. And nothing BUT peace, love, and music!

With each passing August, we are reminded again of the good old days, the stage announcements, the sea of kindness and respect for our fellow person. Whose garden was this? It must have been lovely.

In this far flung future You-Topia (sorry!), the musicians will have faded into trivia for the most part. Time tourists will certainly be lured by the psychedelic samplings of Country Joe, Canned Heat, the Jefferson Airplane et al. They might come for the air and the nudity and find themselves staying for the music.

The accommodations will have been fully disclosed. Nothing deluxe or guaranteed. You might have a sleeping bag in a cow pasture, with the tantalizing possibility of experiencing drug sex in a downpour. Those who have made the trip will have the damndest stories.

Most of us weren’t future tourists, nor were we among the half a million strong. We didn’t see Alvin Lee’s searing guitar live, or Pete Townshend’s eviction of Abbie Hoffman from the stage. We were miles from the first live appearance of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, as well as the umpteenth acid trip of John Sebastian. We didn’t dine on Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm breakfasts in bed. We weren’t bedazzled by Sly’s Family Stone or Jimi Hendrix driving the last nail into the coffin of the Sixties.

We who experienced that weekend from a distance mostly recall national headlines about terrific traffic jams starring those who went up country. It was an “in other news” story from Walter Cronkite.

Take that back. The image of Jimi, all holy in white fringe, not long for this world, but finally getting the slot on the bill he had held out for, is the true Woodstock poster voodoo child. The closing of the festival had been driven hours late by misfortunes real and mostly ignored: the weather boiling over upon a sea of hippies, the Grateful Dead’s amplification disaster, and thousands of intimate punctuations including birth, hunger, medical emergencies, and that damned brown acid.

So Jimi played in the middle of Monday morning as crews combed and cleared the junk of a wasted army, many of whom had hitched rides back to life, back to reality. He lingers still, all along the watchtower, with the others who hung out to hear his last sonic signals fade across the trashed meadows. The gatecrashers from beyond time sensed by Jerry Garcia stayed until the last feedback fizzled, then filed back into the Bethel woods to await some shuttle to take them somehow, some way, back to the future.

No less than a half dozen documentaries flesh out this Woodstock notion of a drive in until dawn, none of which are the 3+hour epic which really unleashed the after-the-fact hype when it was first seen in theaters in the spring of 1970.

These films are from a variety of sources including Finland. Some have way more talk than music. Woodstock wouldn’t be Woodstock without legions of legal complications that muddied compilations and true overviews into true soul sacrifices. As the event gets larger with every retelling--we know now it was not exactly the dawning of the Age of Aquarius as much as it was the beginning of a great unraveling--something that is certainly fading takes on fresh meaning. For reasons we don’t know, the 500,000 extras just had to get themselves back to the garden.