or a hippie. So it was very refreshing to
be in a totally free environment where
you weren’t going to be trashed... It
became very obvious to me from the
word go that this was our turf.”Ten Years After
8:30–9:30 PM
Darkness fell over the festival as the
British blues-rock band Ten Years After,
fresh off appearances at the Newport
Jazz Festival and Seattle Pop Festival,
convened in front of a diminishing
audience. Once known as the Jaybirds,
the group featured master guitar-
ist Alvin Lee, drummer Ric Lee, key-
boardist Chick Churchill, and bassist
Leo Lyons. There were obstacles to their
performance—continuing problems
with the audio system, the intrusiveness
of the Woodstock documentary film
crew (including a young editor named
Martin Scorsese) and the suffocating
humidity, which made it necessary for
the band to retune their instruments
between songs. Much of Ten Years
After’s hour-long set went unrecorded,
with one hugely significant exception:
a 12-minute rendition of the band’s hit
“I’m Going Home” that proved one of
the highlights of the Woodstock film andshot Ten Years After—and especially
Alvin Lee, whose virtuosity was on
full display—to international renown.
Lee considered it a mixed blessing. “Ten
Years After grew into something I didn’t
want—the heavy rock image thing,” he
said. “But it happened anyway through
Woodstock, which was a complete acci-
dent, and it really changed a lot of peo-
ple’s attitudes to what we were doing.
Before then it didn’t seem so impor-
tant, just go out there and have a good
blow and get people off. Suddenly it was
really big gigs. Gotta play note for note.
The fun seemed to disappear.”AFTER WOODSTOCK: Ten Years After
carried on as a star act until a 1974
breakup but occasionally reunited over
the years. Lee thrived as a solo act until
his death at 68 in 2013 after complica-
tions from routine surgery. Ric Lee,
Lyons, and Churchill all perform in
their mid-seventies.The Band
10–10:50 PM
They lived nearby in the town of West
Saugerties, in a house they’d dubbed Big
Pink. The Canadian-American ensem-
ble—Robbie Robertson (lead guitarist,festival, but thousands remained
chanting “No rain!” in unison. When
the storm passed, a large number of
attendees got naked and then jumped
into Filippini Pond, where organizers
assured them they could bathe. Others
seemed happy to roll around in the mud
with the carefree abandon of small chil-
dren on a summer day. “Everyone was
just slobbering together,” fan Susan
Cole recalled. “I mean, Woodstock was
just like a big pig sty, a big muddy mess.
Everybody was bumping into each
other, and slipping and sliding, and it
was just like a playpen.”
The music resumed in the evening
at about six with a return from Country
Joe McDonald, now with his Fish. The
rain had made it necessary to shut
off the electricity, putting the concert
on hold, but Country Joe insisted his
group could do an acoustic set. He and
the Fish played for 80 minutes, end-
ing once again with the “Fish Cheer”
and “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.”
Recalled Joe, “I felt completely at home,
it was really an amazing free space. In
1969, the counterculture was not a
secure place to be. A lot of people didn’t
like you and would just come up and
hit you or arrest you for being a rocker
75