72 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019
Disk 38 of the compilation consists largely of crowd noise and announcements.
POP MUSIC
SURVIVING WOODSTOCK
A thirty-six-hour boxed set reveals some truths behind baby-boomer myths.BY HUA HSU
PHOTOGRAPH
© BARON WOLMAN
T
he Woodstock Music & Art Fair is
best known for one of its final per-
formances, Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of
“The Star-Spangled Banner.” From the
ragged chaos of “Stepping Stone,” Hen-
drix began slashing at the anthem’s open-
ing notes, stretching them out until the
familiar melody sounded wobbly and
shrill. His version is drenched in feed-
back and distortion, a call-and-response
between the notes on the page and Hen-
drix’s extratextual flourishes. It’s a funk-
ier version of what so many of the blues
rockers of the previous three days had
attempted, somehow more succinct yet
more expansive. It feels like a prophetic
vision of a future that never quite arrived.
It’s estimated that around four hun-
dred thousand people attended Wood-
stock—enough to have made Max
Yasgur’s three-hundred-acre alfalfa
field, in Bethel, the third most pop-
ulous city in the state of New York.
As the cliché goes, if you remember
Woodstock, you weren’t there. But
most people who were there might
misremember it anyway. By the time
that Hendrix took the stage, the fes-
tival’s “three days of peace and music”
had blurred into a fourth. It was Mon-
day, about 9 a.m., and the crowd had
thinned to between fifteen thousand
and twenty thousand people, follow-
ing a series of thunderstorms. It’s likelythat some of the concert’s organizers
had already left.
Hendrix’s anthem arrives on the thirty-
seventh disk of “Woodstock—Back to
the Garden: The Definitive 50th An-
niversary Archive,” a thirty-eight-CD
set that includes nearly every moment
of recorded sound from the festival, span-
ning thirty-six hours of audio. (Disk 38
consists largely of crowd noise and an-
nouncements from the stage.) By this
point, the listener has heard thirty-two
performances, a treatise on “celestial
sound” from Sri Swami Satchidananda,
and countless calls from the stage for
concertgoers to climb down from the
sound towers. M.c.s deliver announce-
ments about a lost three-year-old girl
with blond hair and about people locked
out of their cars, or missing their duffel-
bags, or in desperate need of their in-
sulin. One aggrieved Mets fan keeps
asking for the result of the game, while
anyone who was in contact with some-
one named Fritz is advised to “please
go to the infirmary, identify yourself,
and get a hepatitis shot.” Of course,
there’s a lot of acid talk, from the fa-
mous warning about a bad batch of
“brown acid,” immortalized in Michael
Wadleigh’s concert documentary, from
1970, to arcane debates about what con-
stitutes a “bum trip.” There’s also joy
about what the organizers, performers,
and crowd have created together.
“Woodstock—Back to the Garden”
was produced by Andy Zax and Steve
Woolard. Zax, an accomplished archi-
vist and reissue specialist, spent more
than a decade putting it together from
hundreds of tapes that had never been
consolidated in one place. In the pro-
cess of reconstructing the festival, hour
by hour, Zax has destroyed some myths.
In the liner notes, he writes of a spir-
ited argument that he had with the
singer Country Joe McDonald, who
had long maintained that, as a result
of traffic jams and poor planning, he
was rushed onto the stage as the festi-
val’s second act, on opening day. In re-
ality, he didn’t play until the second day.
Music is a great catalyst for memory
and nostalgia—versions of the past that
often flatter in a way that history doesn’t.
A four-disk set commemorated
Woodstock’s twenty-fifth anniversary,
in 1994, and a six-disk collection was
released in 2009. As an object, “Wood-