Back to the Garden?
Travel Stories: On the festival's 40th anniversary, Eva Holland goes looking for the spirit of Woodstock
08.25.09 | 10:35 AM ET
Forget about the music: I got my first real taste of Woodstock on New York state route 17b, not far west of the Monticello Raceway. I’d just turned off the main highway and had 10 miles to go before reaching Bethel Woods, site of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Festival. I was also on the wrong end of a 10-mile traffic jam.
Cars were backed up as far as I could see. Thousands of people were converging on Bethel Woods once again, to celebrate Woodstock’s 40th birthday with—what else?—another music festival. And, just as in 1969, Sullivan County’s roads couldn’t hold everyone.
I turned up the radio—wall-to-wall Woodstock classics—and took in the scene as we crept along. A local antique shop had put out a sign: Hippies Welcome. Scruffy vendors hawked tie-dyed T-shirts at intersections. At one point, I noticed a homemade peace sign by the side of the road. It read, 40 Years: The Message is Still the Same. I wondered if it was intended as a hopeful or a cynical comment.
As I inched forward over those last few miles, the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young cover of “Woodstock” spilled out of the radio: “By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong ...” I thought back to the stories I’d heard and footage I’d seen of the crowds that brought the Catskills to a standstill as they descended on Bethel Woods. “The whole county was a parking lot,” one concert-goer recalled in an interview. For a moment, trapped in my own, much smaller patch of gridlock, I felt closer to those legendary half-a-million hippies than I ever had before.
I was born nearly 13 years after the 1969 festival. Growing up, Woodstock and the era that spawned held a potent grip on my imagination. I’ve always had more affinity for the music of my parents’ generation than for my own. In my first year of high school, as the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys stormed the charts, I used to come home and raid my dad’s record collection—“Who’s Next,” “Rubber Soul” and, of course, the six-sided Woodstock album. The festival seemed to me like the perfect synthesis of music, activism for a worthy cause, and straight-up youthful rebellion—in my teenage eyes, another worthy cause in itself.
The interludes—the rain chant, the warnings about the brown acid—transported me to the muddy, crowded fields, the sea of tents; they impressed me just as much as the music. It seemed clear that the bands of my parents’ generation were not only infinitely more talented musically, but also possessed of far greater moral or spiritual depth than those of my own. Forty years later, at a tribute concert on the grounds where that first festival had been held, I hoped to capture a tangible sense of that depth, its presence unmediated by vinyl.
I was probably within a mile or two of the venue, still idling happily, when I spotted something in the passenger side mirror. A driver in a gray Hummer peeled out of the long line of cars and roared along the narrow shoulder, cutting ahead of hundreds of other concert-goers in an effort to get there that much sooner. I glanced in the rear view, hoping to see my indignation mirrored in the eyes of the next driver. Why, I wondered as the Hummer passed my little rented Chevy, did he even want to attend an event like this? Could Woodstock resonate in any way with a Hummer-driving line-cutter? I had trouble believing it.
The moment had been punctured. After a few more minutes of stop-and-go, I arrived at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, the slick new museum and concert venue that now occupies Max Yasgur’s alfalfa fields. And just in time, too: I was barely able to snag a parking spot and collect my ticket before the day’s line-up got started.
Over the course of the show, I felt that closeness, that inexplicable moment of traffic jam time travel, slipping away. Sure, the music was wonderful, the sun was shining, and the crowds—whatever model of car had brought them here—were friendly and relaxed. But something was still missing.
As I circled the grounds, I tried to understand what was bothering me. There were police officers everywhere, standing in uniformed bunches, and beer stands with Bud Lime banners alternated with booths selling Official Merchandise. It was a better-than-average rock festival, certainly—I especially loved seeing Canned Heat and Ten Years After, both Woodstock veterans, take the stage—but none of it evoked the muddy, free-lovin’ Woodstock chaos I’d always imagined. Later, I heard a member of Ten Years After who’d stopped by the press tent corroborate my hunch. He told a reporter that in comparison to the original, the anniversary concert was “all a bit corporate for me, to be honest.”
After the concert, I headed back to my car and left Bethel Woods behind me. The highway was empty as I switched on my high beams and tried to assess the evening. I’d hoped to find the spirit of Woodstock in the roster of live performances, in the aging rockers trotting out their old hits and the young singers covering the music of predecessors who had died before they were born. But had I been looking in the wrong place? Maybe its musical legacy wasn’t the key to the enduring power of Woodstock. Maybe, instead, it was those crowds of young people traveling with a sense of purpose on those roads that held my fascination.
Woodstock had been as much a political statement as a musical event, marked, it seemed to me, by an extraordinary uniformity of intentions. The travelers who made the trek to Bethel Woods in 1969 shared that common purpose. But what, I wondered, did we Woodstock birthday pilgrims have in common today? Our tribute event had been devoid of politics. At one point, Country Joe McDonald had dusted off his old protest classic, “I Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag.” He’d sung, “Come on mothers throughout the land, pack your boys off to Vietnam,” and I’d heard a woman say: “He should have changed it to Afghanistan.” But I sensed that the sentiment wouldn’t have gone over well with everyone. Were we here for peace? The environment? A vague demand for change?
In the end, I decided, what brought us all together was our admiration for those determined concert-goers, four decades earlier. We might not share their purpose, or any new purpose tailored to our times, but we all believed that a statement like Woodstock’s was worth celebrating.
I thought back again to the miles I’d covered so slowly that afternoon, stopping and starting in the heat. The classics that had dominated the radio waves then were long gone now, replaced by late-night club beats, but as I drove through the night I sang the old songs to myself regardless: “By the time we got to Woodstock we were half a million strong ...”
Travel-Writers-Exchange.com 08.25.09 | 11:18 AM ET
Interesting post on Woodstock. It’s amazing how many times “Woodstock” has been celebrated. An impromptu 20th anniversary celebration in 1989, it was brought back in the 1990s, there was a movie/documentary made about it, and now 40-years later another movie and celebration about Woodstock. Who cleaned up after all of those people back in 1969? Couldn’t imagine cleaning up after 500,000 people!
AndreyM 08.26.09 | 12:51 AM ET
From your story I can imagine that you had a nice journey and no doubt you would try it again
Sophia Dembling 08.27.09 | 5:38 PM ET
You just can’t recapture the past, no matter how many dinosaur rock bands you put on stage. Makes me wistful.
Pat Hartman 09.08.09 | 10:44 AM ET
Dear Eva Holland,
This little box might not allow HTML so if you check The Blog of Kevin Dolgin, Sept 2, you’ll see that your article inspired ours - thanks for that! It’s always a pleasure to point our readers to excellent writers.
Best of all possible regards,
Pat Hartman
News Editor, The Blog of Kevin Dolgin