THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019 73
stock—Back to the Garden” feels oddly
contemporary. So much of our pop-cul-
ture packaging is still calibrated to baby
boomers’ had-to-be-there zeal and tastes,
and the boxed set will likely sell out its
limited run of nineteen hundred and
sixty-nine copies, priced at $799.98 each.
(A comparatively modest, ten-disk ver-
sion of “Woodstock—Back to the Gar-
den” was released in June.)
Woodstock wasn’t the first major
rock festival, or the most musically ad-
venturous. The Monterey Pop Festival,
which took place in 1967 and featured
a more diverse slate of performers, is
often credited with elevating Janis Jop-
lin and Otis Redding to stardom. But
Woodstock was far more conscious of
the potential of mass spectacle, owing
largely to its creative masterminds, Mi-
chael Lang and Artie Kornfeld. Through-
out the festival, performers were aware
of the symbolism of the moment; they
talked about how important it was that
they were proving people’s preconcep-
tions wrong. The spectre of authority
hung over the event, along with the
dream that the kids might make a point
to their parents. The singer John Sebas-
tian implored folks to pick up a little
trash on their way home. “The press can
only say bad things, unless there ain’t
no fuckups,” he said. “And it’s lookin’
like there ain’t gonna be no fuckups.
This is gonna work!”
News coverage was sparse, often
dwelling on the traffic, the mud, and
the long hair. “What kind of culture is
it that can produce so colossal a mess?”
an editorial in the Times read. Surely,
the article continued, at least some of
the blame lay with the parents respon-
sible for creating the society that teen-
agers found alienating. But Woodstock
almost immediately became a myth.
Shortly after the festival, Abbie Hoffman
speed-wrote and then published “Wood-
stock Nation,” giving texture to the idea
that those who had been at the event
constituted a new generation: “I took a
trip to our future. That’s how I saw it.
Functional anarchy, primitive tribalism,
gathering of the tribes. Right on! What
did it all mean? Sheet, what can I say,
brother, it blew my mind out.”
Michael Wadleigh’s hastily edited
concert film, released the following
March, and a soundtrack album, which
came in May, brought the Woodstock
vibe to people who weren’t there, and
perhaps influenced the memories of
those who were. In a Washington Post
piece marking the festival’s tenth anni-
versary, one concertgoer described the
event as a moment of “naive faith.” An-
other, who hadn’t attended, recalled her
experience from afar: “All was possible.”L
ang, Kornfeld, and their financial
backers, Joel Rosenman and John
Roberts, initially conceived of Wood-
stock as a ticketed event. They had met
when Lang and Kornfeld, who were
passably cool, saw an ad that Rosen-
man and Roberts, who were not, had
placed in a newspaper, calling them-
selves “young men with unlimited cap-
ital” looking for something interesting
to fund. Woodstock was supposed to
make some money, but maintaining the
entry gate proved futile, and on the first
day everyone was allowed in for free.
Unlike most of the festivalgoers, Rosen-
man and Roberts took a bath. But they
began recouping the following year,
after the documentary and the album
were issued.
The legend of Woodstock became a
business model. The festival didn’t in-
vent rock nostalgia, but as the most vis-
ceral stand-in for sixties utopianism it
lives at the forefront of commemora-
tion culture, helping to fuel the sense
that the more we turn any anniversary
into an event, the more we might un-
derstand the past. In 1974, Rosenman,
Roberts, and Robert Pilpel reflected on
the experience, in a book called “Young
Men with Unlimited Capital.” When
they republished it, in the eighties, they
lamented the “Me Generation” that
emerged after the idyllic sixties. By the
mid-seventies, rock festivals “had been
tarnished by greedy, and sometimes un-
scrupulous, promoters, unruly crowds,
and sky-high fees for performers,” they
wrote. “Rock and roll had become such
a big business that there no longer
seemed to be a place for a homemade
festival like Woodstock.”
The extent to which Woodstock was
“homemade” is debatable; by contrast,
the festival’s role in making rock “big
business” is hard to dispute. By 1969,
the counterculture had already given
way to “hip capitalism,” the subject of
satire and academic study; three weeks
after Woodstock, the sociologist The-odore Roszak published “The Making
of a Counter Culture,” which became a
best-seller. During the Who’s perfor-
mance at the event, Abbie Hoffman
crashed the stage and asked how the
band could be playing and “digging rock
music” while the activist John Sinclair
sat in prison. Pete Townshend told him
to “fuck off ” the stage. One of the leg-
acies of the sixties is this desire to un-
derstand where the angst and the alien-
ation of the young might come from,
or go. Mass politics could be casual,
or a life style.
Listening to the set all the way
through—something that I imagine few
people will do—I was struck by how it
all worked out, despite the missing kids
and bad acid, the lack of food, the pour-
ing rain. There are marriage proposals
and news of a child being born. (“That
kid’s gonna be far out!” someone says
from the stage.) An m.c. talks about
how the Army and the state police are
lending a hand: “They’re with us, man—
they are not against us.” In one partic-
ularly lovely moment, Yasgur, a lifelong
Republican, takes the stage and expresses
his admiration at what these kids have
made. As Chip Monck, one of the fes-
tival’s hosts, says, “The man next to you
is your brother.”
What I envied wasn’t the peace
and the music but, rather, this gener-
ation’s good fortune. During Sebastian’s
blissed-out set, he sings, “I dreamed we
all were all right/happy in a land of
ours/Why did everybody laugh when
I told them my dream/I guess they all
were so far from that kind of scene/Feel-
ing mean.” As someone more genera-
tionally aligned with Woodstock ’94
(Green Day, Cypress Hill, Aphex Twin)
than with the original, I’m probably
constitutionally predisposed to dwell
on the possibility of one’s brother’s
meanness. There’s a history of Ameri-
can ascendancy that might be written
in terms of luck and timing, guile and
opportunity. Listening to thirty-eight
CDs brings you no closer to experienc-
ing such felicity and innocence—the
possibility in the tripper’s brittle laugh.
There’s the past, and there’s the story
we tell about it. Those who benefitted
from being in the right place at the
right time often write a version empha-
sizing vision and hard work. Maybe it
was just a glorious accident.