SLAUGHTERING SACRED COWS IN THE LAND OF AQUARIUS
Brown acid! Mud! Canned Heat! The Hippie Dream… Forty years on, AUSTIN MATTHEWS reconsiders the World’s most remembered festival. W
OODSTOCK: THE American myth... half a million people coming together for the greater good of mankind in a landmark
celebration of peace and love. Right? Wrong suckers! What’s been served up as the best music festival of all-time is nothing more than a big turd curry. Let’s start with the facts.
Firstly Woodstock was never conceived as a free festival. Two of the organisers, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, were looking for a project to make a bit of moolah and advertised in the Wall Street Journal with the following words: “Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions.” Woah! I never saw language like that in my hippie phrasebook. They hooked up with the slightly more enlightened Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld and together birthed the bastard that became Woodstock. Tickets were sold and the festival was only declared free when it became clear that many more revellers were turning up than expected.
The splendidly named anarchist collective, Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers cut the fences but never really got the kudos. That the festival was never conceived as anything less than a cash cow hasn’t stopped the organisers basking in the reflected glow of this “free” event for the last 40 years.
So to the music itself... was this the greatest musical line-up of all time? OK – I’m not about to argue with The Who and Hendrix, but what about Canned Heat grinding their way through the Woodstock Boogie? The terminal drear of Ten Years After? They surely represented a worse threat to your mental health than the dreaded brown acid. What about Joe Cocker grunting his way through, “a little help from my friends?” Little wonder that most festival goers predominantly ignored the musical acts to indulge in infinitely more enjoyable sexual ones.
Off stage things weren’t much better with dysentery spreading quicker than VD. Perhaps the lack of toilet paper onsite may have led to the aforementioned brown acid? There were at least two reported deaths at the festival. One from a heroin overdose (I’m guessing either during, or straight after, The Grateful Dead’s set) and one from an occupied sleeping bag accidentally being crushed by a farmer’s tractor in a neighbouring field to the Woodstock farm. Now, I’m alleging nothing, but if half a million freaks whacked up on goofballs and
“Hi Mum!”
stage violence and I think swearing’s big and most certainly clever. But watch the footage on Youtube and you’ll be crushingly disappointed. Those crucial confrontational moments are obscured and forever lost to posterity. What I imagine to be Hoffman knocked sideways by a huge sonic strum- cum-thump was probably no more than a delicate arpeggio flounce.
So that was Woodstock – a shit-flecked, over- hyped bummer of a bad trip with a few good acts on at four in the morning if you weren’t too busy freaking out on poo-coloured drugs or weaving a macramé haversack. But for some reason this cosmic cesspool has become the defining moment of the ’60s and a by- word for freedom and alternative culture for the next four decades. How did this happen? Well partly because it was captured in expressive detail by a large film crew (invited in another venal move to drum up more money) and partly due to Joe Public’s eagerness to lap up any old Aquarian bullshit. Indeed, 40 years on, the mainstream music press and all manner of pop commentators still harbour the demented fantasy that Woodstock was a cultural high tide and that the ideals we all aspire to in life are peace, love and understanding. I’m taking this opportunity to disagree. I, for one, aspire to the ideals of dumb rock ‘n’ roll, professional wrestling and owning a monster truck.
mind drugs turned up next door to me for a three day party I might not be too careful where I parked my John Deere.
One of the few redeeming stories from Woodstock is the incident where King Yippie Abbie Hoffmann stormed the stage during The Who’s set and started screaming “I think this is a pile of shit!” at which point Pete Townsend lamped him with his guitar. “Fuck off my fucking stage! The next fucking person that walks across this stage is gonna get fucking killed,” shouted the windmill-armed one with characteristic erudition. Now this incident sounds great to me; I like Abbie Hoffman; I like Pete Townsend; I like on-
Perhaps an indication of the true spirit of the festival was the event held in 1999 to mark 30 years of the original. The line-up looked to me like the sort of playlist an unscrupulous military regime might use to torture confessions from uncooperative political prisoners, with Limp Bizkit, The Offspring and Kid Rock forming the grisly musical ear- paste on offer that abominable weekend.
The killer blow that proves my point? Well, in 2007 arch-corpro-hippie and all round anti- Obama, Hilary Clinton, wanted the government to donate $1m to build a Woodstock museum. Me personally? I’d rather build one at Altamont.
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