SwamiSatchidananda
Woodstock at 40: Rock's '60s Climax
Music, money and myth-making behind the legendary 'gathering of the tribes'
By Alan LightSpecial to MSN Music
Woodstock was a beginning, and it was an end.
Aug. 15 marks 40 years since the gathering of the tribes known as the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair. It remains the most famous event in pop music history, a weekend that came to define a generation. Its mythology runs so deep, in fact, that long ago it became almost impossible to assess what really happened during those "three days of peace and music" (which actually spilled over into a fourth) in 1969.
Related: An overview of all the 40th Anniversary releases
How many people attended? (Estimates range from 300,000 up to almost a million.) Which performances were the highlights? (Some of the biggest bands that played, including the Grateful Dead and the Band, didn't appear in the hugely successful documentary or soundtrack.) And, most crucially and most impossible to determine, what was it really like? For everyone who says Woodstock was a transcendent, glorious experience, there's someone else who describes it as a muddy, disorganized nightmare.
A barrage of new releases in honor of the 40th anniversary at least helps to fill in some of the gaps. Dramatically expanded versions of the "Woodstock" film (a two-disc "Director's Cut" DVD, plus another two discs of additional material, which include footage of the Dead and Creedence Clearwater Revival for the first time) and the recordings ("Woodstock -- 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm" is a six-CD set with 38 previously unreleased tracks) are just the beginning. Five of the most celebrated sets from the festival (by Janis Joplin, Santana, Sly & the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, and Johnny Winter) are being issued in full, doubled up with each of the artists' studio albums that came out closest to Woodstock.
Photos: Remembering Woodstock
View all »
In addition, original promoter Michael Lang's new book "The Road to Woodstock" leads a fleet of festival-related chronicles. One piece of the story is even being given the feature film treatment, with Oscar-winning director Ang Lee's comedy "Taking Woodstock."
But why does Woodstock still carry such weight in our culture? It wasn't the first major rock festival; the 1967 Monterey Pop event came two years earlier. Nor was it the biggest, an honor which is usually given to 1973's Summer Jam at Watkins Glen. Those who were on the front lines at Woodstock, though, insist there was something different about this one.
"There had been festivals in Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami," says Tom Constanten, who was the Grateful Dead's keyboard player at the time, "but Woodstock was lightning in a bottle. It created a sense of community, made connections between people who had felt sort of alone and defenseless.
Music, money and myth-making behind the legendary 'gathering of the tribes'
By Alan LightSpecial to MSN Music
Woodstock was a beginning, and it was an end.
Aug. 15 marks 40 years since the gathering of the tribes known as the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair. It remains the most famous event in pop music history, a weekend that came to define a generation. Its mythology runs so deep, in fact, that long ago it became almost impossible to assess what really happened during those "three days of peace and music" (which actually spilled over into a fourth) in 1969.
Related: An overview of all the 40th Anniversary releases
How many people attended? (Estimates range from 300,000 up to almost a million.) Which performances were the highlights? (Some of the biggest bands that played, including the Grateful Dead and the Band, didn't appear in the hugely successful documentary or soundtrack.) And, most crucially and most impossible to determine, what was it really like? For everyone who says Woodstock was a transcendent, glorious experience, there's someone else who describes it as a muddy, disorganized nightmare.
A barrage of new releases in honor of the 40th anniversary at least helps to fill in some of the gaps. Dramatically expanded versions of the "Woodstock" film (a two-disc "Director's Cut" DVD, plus another two discs of additional material, which include footage of the Dead and Creedence Clearwater Revival for the first time) and the recordings ("Woodstock -- 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm" is a six-CD set with 38 previously unreleased tracks) are just the beginning. Five of the most celebrated sets from the festival (by Janis Joplin, Santana, Sly & the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, and Johnny Winter) are being issued in full, doubled up with each of the artists' studio albums that came out closest to Woodstock.
Photos: Remembering Woodstock
View all »
In addition, original promoter Michael Lang's new book "The Road to Woodstock" leads a fleet of festival-related chronicles. One piece of the story is even being given the feature film treatment, with Oscar-winning director Ang Lee's comedy "Taking Woodstock."
But why does Woodstock still carry such weight in our culture? It wasn't the first major rock festival; the 1967 Monterey Pop event came two years earlier. Nor was it the biggest, an honor which is usually given to 1973's Summer Jam at Watkins Glen. Those who were on the front lines at Woodstock, though, insist there was something different about this one.
"There had been festivals in Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami," says Tom Constanten, who was the Grateful Dead's keyboard player at the time, "but Woodstock was lightning in a bottle. It created a sense of community, made connections between people who had felt sort of alone and defenseless.
It was empowering."
Stu Cook, bass player in Creedence Clearwater Revival (which was actually the most popular act of the day to take Woodstock's stage) recalls that he and his fellow members of the Bay Area rock community came into Woodstock with some skepticism. "We always looked down our nose at the East Coast," he says. "We had [Golden Gate] park, the ballrooms. We thought we had something special. But at Woodstock, we saw that there were freaks everywhere."
One thing that all the principals acknowledge is that nobody expected such a massive turnout. "The hardest part of the whole thing was just starting, convincing Richie [Havens] to go on," says organizer Lang. "Nobody had seen an audience like that, and it was pretty frightening." ("We expected 75,000 and got 500,000," Havens says with a laugh, recounting his shock as a helicopter carried him backstage, over the crowd.)
Famously, the size of the audience created enough traffic to close down the New York State Thruway, which then made ticket-taking impossible, resulting in the impromptu decision to make Woodstock a free festival. "The biggest misconception about Woodstock was that it worked because it was free," says Lang. "But it wasn't that, it was the way we dealt with that situation. That was a symptom, not a cause.
"The whole thing was an experiment for us," he continues, "to see if we could really do all the things we talked about, if we really could make the world better. The biggest political statement we could make was just to make it work."
Indeed, looking back from a 21st-century vantage point, the most impressive thing about Woodstock may be the fact that it never went totally off the rails. The crowd got in and stayed, the bands all played. No matter how wet, muddy, and miserable some people may have been, it didn't descend into anarchy or disaster. Perhaps it was the very things that made for the worst conditions that also gave the festival its place in history.
Woodstock's location also contributed to its legacy. As hard as it was to find a spot for the gathering -- the town that gave the event its name refused to host it, and several other nearby hamlets also passed before Max Yasgur agreed to the use of his farm in Bethel, N.Y. -- the reality was that this would be the first rock festival in close proximity to the country's media capital: New York City. It was one thing to gawk at San Francisco's Summer of Love from several time zones away, quite another when reporters and editors saw their own kids venturing into Sullivan County for a weekend-long freak show.
"Woodstock made the papers, and therefore got to the wider public," says Constanten. "It was in Time magazine, where before that it was just in the Berkeley Free Press or the San Francisco Oracle." Havens agrees, saying that "it was the press that made Woodstock."
After the fact, the vehicle that seared Woodstock into the world's consciousness was the Oscar-winning documentary, which somehow gave a shape and even some kind of logic to the weekend. The movie gave the thunderstorms an epic grandeur, and captured the crackling exhilaration of a massive group of strangers finding a way to persevere together. The filmmakers also placed a few shockingly good bets; some of the unforgettable highlights come from artists who were relative unknowns at the time, including Santana and Joe Cocker.
Director Michael Wadleigh says, though, that his crew's experience was at least as chaotic as that of the audience. "Everything sort of broke down. Logistically it was a really bad scene," he says. "The walkie-talkies mostly didn't work. We ran out of film and batteries. I reached a point where I was asking, 'What kind of film can I make here? It's a lot of pressure; am I up to it?'"
By the time of Jimi Jimi Hendrix's cataclysmic performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" (during a set that was supposed to close the festival on Sunday night, but didn't actually happen until Monday morning), Wadleigh's camera was the only one still operating. "It was terrifying but thrilling," he says. "I took risks with that one camera." The intimacy of his footage, which stays tight on Jimi Hendrix's face and hands through one uninterrupted shot, matches the passion of the interpretation, and gives those two minutes a power unlike anything else in the film.
Whether lucky improvisation or brilliant strategy, the public's perception of Woodstock ultimately resulted in a transformation of the rock 'n' roll business. As much as the "Aquarian Exposition" was constructed on anti-capitalist ideals (so much so that festival veterans the Who and the Grateful Dead insisted on payment, in full and in cash, before they would go onstage), there was no longer any way around the size of the rock community. In that one weekend, the music and its followers became victims of their own success, and went from counterculture to subculture, from underground to mass market.
"I think the awareness of the scale was already there, but Woodstock provided a vivid example," says Constanten. "It concretized what we had felt instinctually. It was undeniable."
"It was the greatest PR stunt that no record company would have come up with," says former Santana percussionist Michael Carabello. "This was before MTV or Kmart or the Internet. Now they sell shirts, hats, everything at concerts. Back then, they didn't do none of that; they didn't even sell water!"
CCR's Cook says the change could be felt immediately. "The business people jumped right in," he says, "and the music became a marketing tool."
Director Wadleigh notes that, even at the time, he had a sense of what was coming, and that the final minutes of the film, showing the clean-up of the mess left on the site, was intended as a warning.
"I thought the '60s were going to end badly," he says. "After Jimi Hendrix, I stayed behind to shoot the aftermath; I wanted a visual metaphor that indicated that the future might not be too cool. I was very careful not to put on a happy ending."
Woodstock was the tipping point, the end of rock's innocence, and the beginning of the rock industry of the 1970s. In the months that followed, the Rolling Stones revealed the violent underside of a large-scale gathering, when a group of Hell's Angels killed an audience member brandishing a gun at the Altamont festival. A few months after that, the Beatles announced their break-up. Before the end of 1970, John Lennon would sing, "The dream is over."
Havens, whose adaptation of the timeless blues "Motherless Children" into the heartfelt cry "Freedom" kicked off Woodstock, describes the festival as "our final get-together, the thing that could explain what we couldn't explain before." He adds that he believes credit for spreading the word belongs to a network (not yet a "demographic") that marketers still haven't figured out a way to buy.
"It was contact we made with teenagers, especially because they had all run away from home to see what this life was," Havens said. "They were the ones brave enough to say, 'My mother's gonna kill me, but I'm not leaving until this is over.'"
Related: An overview of all the 40th Anniversary releases
Stu Cook, bass player in Creedence Clearwater Revival (which was actually the most popular act of the day to take Woodstock's stage) recalls that he and his fellow members of the Bay Area rock community came into Woodstock with some skepticism. "We always looked down our nose at the East Coast," he says. "We had [Golden Gate] park, the ballrooms. We thought we had something special. But at Woodstock, we saw that there were freaks everywhere."
One thing that all the principals acknowledge is that nobody expected such a massive turnout. "The hardest part of the whole thing was just starting, convincing Richie [Havens] to go on," says organizer Lang. "Nobody had seen an audience like that, and it was pretty frightening." ("We expected 75,000 and got 500,000," Havens says with a laugh, recounting his shock as a helicopter carried him backstage, over the crowd.)
Famously, the size of the audience created enough traffic to close down the New York State Thruway, which then made ticket-taking impossible, resulting in the impromptu decision to make Woodstock a free festival. "The biggest misconception about Woodstock was that it worked because it was free," says Lang. "But it wasn't that, it was the way we dealt with that situation. That was a symptom, not a cause.
"The whole thing was an experiment for us," he continues, "to see if we could really do all the things we talked about, if we really could make the world better. The biggest political statement we could make was just to make it work."
Indeed, looking back from a 21st-century vantage point, the most impressive thing about Woodstock may be the fact that it never went totally off the rails. The crowd got in and stayed, the bands all played. No matter how wet, muddy, and miserable some people may have been, it didn't descend into anarchy or disaster. Perhaps it was the very things that made for the worst conditions that also gave the festival its place in history.
Woodstock's location also contributed to its legacy. As hard as it was to find a spot for the gathering -- the town that gave the event its name refused to host it, and several other nearby hamlets also passed before Max Yasgur agreed to the use of his farm in Bethel, N.Y. -- the reality was that this would be the first rock festival in close proximity to the country's media capital: New York City. It was one thing to gawk at San Francisco's Summer of Love from several time zones away, quite another when reporters and editors saw their own kids venturing into Sullivan County for a weekend-long freak show.
"Woodstock made the papers, and therefore got to the wider public," says Constanten. "It was in Time magazine, where before that it was just in the Berkeley Free Press or the San Francisco Oracle." Havens agrees, saying that "it was the press that made Woodstock."
After the fact, the vehicle that seared Woodstock into the world's consciousness was the Oscar-winning documentary, which somehow gave a shape and even some kind of logic to the weekend. The movie gave the thunderstorms an epic grandeur, and captured the crackling exhilaration of a massive group of strangers finding a way to persevere together. The filmmakers also placed a few shockingly good bets; some of the unforgettable highlights come from artists who were relative unknowns at the time, including Santana and Joe Cocker.
Director Michael Wadleigh says, though, that his crew's experience was at least as chaotic as that of the audience. "Everything sort of broke down. Logistically it was a really bad scene," he says. "The walkie-talkies mostly didn't work. We ran out of film and batteries. I reached a point where I was asking, 'What kind of film can I make here? It's a lot of pressure; am I up to it?'"
By the time of Jimi Jimi Hendrix's cataclysmic performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" (during a set that was supposed to close the festival on Sunday night, but didn't actually happen until Monday morning), Wadleigh's camera was the only one still operating. "It was terrifying but thrilling," he says. "I took risks with that one camera." The intimacy of his footage, which stays tight on Jimi Hendrix's face and hands through one uninterrupted shot, matches the passion of the interpretation, and gives those two minutes a power unlike anything else in the film.
Whether lucky improvisation or brilliant strategy, the public's perception of Woodstock ultimately resulted in a transformation of the rock 'n' roll business. As much as the "Aquarian Exposition" was constructed on anti-capitalist ideals (so much so that festival veterans the Who and the Grateful Dead insisted on payment, in full and in cash, before they would go onstage), there was no longer any way around the size of the rock community. In that one weekend, the music and its followers became victims of their own success, and went from counterculture to subculture, from underground to mass market.
"I think the awareness of the scale was already there, but Woodstock provided a vivid example," says Constanten. "It concretized what we had felt instinctually. It was undeniable."
"It was the greatest PR stunt that no record company would have come up with," says former Santana percussionist Michael Carabello. "This was before MTV or Kmart or the Internet. Now they sell shirts, hats, everything at concerts. Back then, they didn't do none of that; they didn't even sell water!"
CCR's Cook says the change could be felt immediately. "The business people jumped right in," he says, "and the music became a marketing tool."
Director Wadleigh notes that, even at the time, he had a sense of what was coming, and that the final minutes of the film, showing the clean-up of the mess left on the site, was intended as a warning.
"I thought the '60s were going to end badly," he says. "After Jimi Hendrix, I stayed behind to shoot the aftermath; I wanted a visual metaphor that indicated that the future might not be too cool. I was very careful not to put on a happy ending."
Woodstock was the tipping point, the end of rock's innocence, and the beginning of the rock industry of the 1970s. In the months that followed, the Rolling Stones revealed the violent underside of a large-scale gathering, when a group of Hell's Angels killed an audience member brandishing a gun at the Altamont festival. A few months after that, the Beatles announced their break-up. Before the end of 1970, John Lennon would sing, "The dream is over."
Havens, whose adaptation of the timeless blues "Motherless Children" into the heartfelt cry "Freedom" kicked off Woodstock, describes the festival as "our final get-together, the thing that could explain what we couldn't explain before." He adds that he believes credit for spreading the word belongs to a network (not yet a "demographic") that marketers still haven't figured out a way to buy.
"It was contact we made with teenagers, especially because they had all run away from home to see what this life was," Havens said. "They were the ones brave enough to say, 'My mother's gonna kill me, but I'm not leaving until this is over.'"
Related: An overview of all the 40th Anniversary releases
Alan Light is the former editor-in-chief of Spin, Vibe and Tracks magazines and a former senior writer at Rolling Stone. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, GQ and Entertainment Weekly. His book "The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys" was published in 2006. Alan is a two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario