32 17 August 2019 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I subscribe 0330 333 1113
Photo Stories
F
or music obsessives and historians
of ’60s counterculture, the really
big 50th anniversary this year is
not the Apollo 11 moon landing,
but Woodstock. What started as a gathering for
hippies, rock fans and dropouts on 15 August
1969, turned into the most important and
infl uential three-day festival in history, with over
half a million people rocking up at Max Yasgur’s
dairy farm in New York State for three days of
peace, love and music.
While Woodstock certainly wasn’t the fi rst big
outdoor rock event in the late ’60s, it became
the template for pretty much everything that
followed, including the 1970 Isle of Wight
Festival. It also encouraged another dairy
farmer, Michael Eavis, to start a festival on
his land near Glastonbury.
Even though the Stones and Dylan passed
on performing at Woodstock, a stellar line-up
turned up to entertain the masses, including
The Who, Janis Joplin and of course, Jimi
Hendrix, whose performance of the Star-
Spangled Banner on the drizzly Monday
morning has long since passed into legend.
The festival, which passed off without any
serious violence or controversy, seemed to
encapsulate the best of the hippy dream, even
though 1969 was a very volatile and angry
year in American society generally.
Woodstock also generated some great still
and moving images, with the offi cial movie
coming out less than a year later. A new book
by Reel Art Press celebrates this iconic event,
written by the festival’s co-creator, Michael
Lang. Lang was an idealistic and preternaturally
unfl appable 25-year-old at the time, despite
the chaos, drugs and lousy weather.Happy campers
As well as Lang’s recollections and often
hair-raising anecdotes, the book is a treasure
trove of great documentary and concert
photography. Some of the best music
photographers of the time were closely
involved in Woodstock. There was Elliott Landy,
for example, who took the album shots for
Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and chronicled
The Band in their heyday. Another keyphotographer was Henry Diltz, who later
became very well known for his work with The
Eagles. Indeed, Diltz’s images take centre
stage in the book. Rather than just focusing on
the bands, he pretty much shot everything he
saw, from the construction of the stages, the
crowds arriving after the epic traffi c jams, the
performers chilling out backstage, and the
soggy aftermath. ‘It was kind of like summer
camp... I almost forgot there was going to be
a festival,’ recounts Diltz. He spent nearly two
weeks on site, and was smart enough to realise
that the audience was as big a photographic
story as the stars on stage, if not bigger.
Remember, Woodstock was also conceived
as an ‘aquarian exposition’ and a much wider
cultural event.End of an era
That said, without the music, Woodstock would
not have become such a milestone event in
popular culture. Diltz and Landy’s images
were taken at a time when professional
photographers had unparalleled levels of
access to the performers. As Landy pointed
out when I interviewed him in 2014, the world
of rock and roll at the time was relatively small,
despite the massive cultural infl uence it was
having, and photographers and journalists
were often part of a musician’s inner circle.
There were certainly no armies of PRs and
minders to get past, or strict ‘fi rst three songs
only’ photography restrictions, as now.
Despite this access, you’d struggle to name
one ‘iconic’ photograph to emerge from
Woodstock. That is not to say that there isn’t
some great rock photography in the book,
particularly of The Who and Hendrix. And at
the end of the day, Woodstock was about
much more than rock stars.
The last word goes to Michael Lang, writing
from a Trump-era America that must seem
as divided and troubled as it was in 1969: ‘At
Woodstock, we would focus our energy on
peace, setting aside the onstage discussion of
political issues to just groove on what might be
possible. It was a chance to see if we could
create the kind of world for which we’d
been striving throughout the sixties.’Giving peace
a chance
Woodstock was 50 years ago, and a new book
celebrates this iconic gathering. It also generated
some great images, as Geoff Harris reveals
Above: ‘Hippies mired in
a sea of mud’ ran the
headline in New York’s
Sunday News‘Jimi looked almost
like a mystical holy
man in meditation,’
recalls Michael Lang©HENRY DILTZ
© DAN GARSON