SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

Fuck the hippies. Now that everyone is gushing with nostalgia about Woodstock during this 40th anniversary of the festival, it's good to remember that most people didn't "get it" at the time, and the vast majority didn't like it. The crowd may have seemed large at the festival (and indeed it was the largest public gathering up until that time) but it was barely a sliver of an overwhelmingly square, divided, and culturally reactionary country. Flush from conquering the moon less than a month before, and from fighting the commies in Vietnam, there was little room for scraggly peaceniks openly smoking grass, getting naked, and playing loud acid rock music.


Now that everyone is retroactively cool and ironic, it's good to remember the actual longhaired freaks who braved the mud and scorn may not want to share their nostalgic Woodstock glory. Back then, remember, it was "Are you a boy or a girl?" shouted from passing trucks, or maybe "Get a haircut!"

Even the so-called objective news had a laugh.

Here's the New York Times editorial the day after the festival:

Nightmare in the Catskills

The dreams of marijuana and rock music that drew 300,000 fans and hippies to the Catskills had little more sanity than the impulses that drive the lemmings to march to their deaths in the sea. They ended in a nightmare of mud and stagnation that paralyzed Sullivan County for a whole week-end. --NYT, 1969


Santana rocks Woodstock with some crazy Mexican acid rock

Forty years ago, we landed a man on the moon and some people landed in a muddy field called Woodstock. Now the press is rewriting Woodstock history like soviet revisionists airbrushing Trotsky out of the family photo albums, and everyone smiles at the naivete of this stoned Utopian force with the funny hair, but we should look back at the so-called "neutrals," the control group, the American straights of 1969, and there's a laugh, too. Love those white belts. Nice sideburns.

Black hippie hero Hendrix reinterprets the Star Spangled Banner

Back then, the majority of America was pro-Nixon, pro-war, anti-commie conformists who made "nigger" jokes and got haircuts once a week. Anti-drug? Hell, no! America was into drugs big time, alcohol and cigarettes and gallons of coffee, and some tranquilizers to keep things in a nice Miltown daze. Mother's little helper, they called it. Betty Crocker on sedatives. Of course, that wasn't really a drug--none of that was--and people feared reefer madness with a Dragnet mentality. The Joe Friday squares saw the country falling apart in a marijuana haze to uppity minorities and subcultures: blacks, Indians, hippies, protesters, and even women, who were forgetting their place. It could drive you to drink.

Steve and Eydie missed Woodstock...completely

The Beatles may have replaced Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme in college dorms and teenage radio stations, but most of the older folks were still listening to the old stuff and living out the fifties suburban dream. They had earned it fighting in a war, by God, and nobody was going to rain on their goddamn parade. Barbecue some steaks, drink some cocktails, water the lawn, and keep up with the Joneses. No wonder the Jones' kids ran off to join the hippie circus. We heard the girl next door got "knocked up," had an abortion and got disowned by her good Christian parents, and is now "shacking up" with undesirables in San Francisco. The boy next door who read Mad Magazines and listened to the Beatles got killed in Da Nang, or Khe Sahn (or maybe Kent State) but there is a picture of him in full dress uniform on the mantle and a folded flag in the cedar chest.

Vapid models pretend to be hippies in fashion magazine spread

So don't believe all the hype. The message is lost in these commercial news outlets and it's not surprising in a culture where everything has a price tag. Is there a lasting legacy of the Woodstock Nation? I doubt it, when I see kids with Hendrix T-shirts who support the war like hawks. If anything was revolutionary about Woodstock it was the message of peace and love, and that's the hardest thing to fake. Styles change, and anybody can grow long hair--or wave a flag, for that matter--but trying to live your ideals--especially unpopular ones--remains a challenge. In a cynical age, it sounds naive and ludicrous. Ideals? Get with the program. Shut up and do as you're told. That's why it's heartening to occasionally look up from our lock-step conformity and see a few bold spirits bucking the mainstream mindset and living original lives, and at least trying to transcend the bullshit.

FORTY SUMMERS

This summer is the fortieth anniversary of two pivotal 1960s events--the moon landing and Woodstock. I was too young to go to either, but I watched the film and video of each in a state of rapture and awe, thrilled we'd made it to another world, and convinced that the music and arts festival was a shining glimpse of our utopian future. Naive? Perhaps. Utopia didn't come to pass, in any case. The war in Vietnam dragged on, and we still had Nixon and the hawks to get rid of, and since that golden season history has repeated itself so many times I can't keep track if this round is tragedy or farce.

That same summer, on July 20th, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and American spacemen ambled onto another world. They planted a stiff flag that would forever wave in a vacuum, and beamed back pictures of Earth, which looked nothing like the dusty brown globes in our social studies classes that were mapped and marked by man-made boundaries. Our home planet was sparkling and blue. There was a global recognition that this was a small boat indeed, and we were all on it. There was hope. If worse came to worse, some reasoned, good old American technology could save us. Mankind could shoot its silver seed into the cosmos and escape our war-torn planet to build a sci-fi fan's dream of an antiseptic orderly future a la Star Trek. That was also naive, I suppose, a utopian fantasy of a different sort.



Woodstock didn't commence the Aquarian Age, but the three day rock festival at Max Yasgur's dairy farm in upstate New York was a gathering of the tribes. This was "youth culture" in full freaky fruition, and a joyous celebration of the hippie message of peace, pot, nudity and music. Fantastic music. Sure, it didn't stop the war machine, but it spit in its eye. This was art and whimsy on a mass scale, and people looked up from every uptight button-down small town to think, maybe I'll grow a mustache. Wear a peace button. Get the hell out of Dodge.



Woodstock inspired countless rock festivals, but this was the milestone. The country was violently divided. It was less than a year to the Kent State shootings, when National Guardsmen opened fire on protesters Nixon referred to as bums. It was less than a year til progressives like Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. The counterculture was driven underground. Soft drugs, once considered a ticket to expanded consciousness, were replaced by hard drugs that left people strung out and hopeless. The anti-war movement and the black power movement were harassed and wiretapped and infiltrated by various secret police forces and red squads. Body bags kept coming home from Nam. Nixon went down, sure, but history provided even more Nixons, more greedy Republican war hawks who invoked Jesus while robbing the treasury and incinerating peasants. Change is impossible, you might think. Stupidity is hard-wired into our DNA. Maybe so.

But for one brief shining moment there was a festival--no more, no less--where a possible future played out in a few rolling hills and cow pastures, a future that was crowded and muddy and crazy and stoned and for a brief moment also stardust and golden before it got sucked back into the devil's bargain.


The last morning of the festival, Jimi Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner and Purple Haze to the tired huddled masses