Forty years after Woodstock, the three-day peace and music marathon is remembered as the high point of the 1960s counterculture.
Songs, CDs, documentaries, books and an upcoming feature film directed by Ang Lee attest to it as an event of Homerian proportions.
“The greatest event in counter-cultural history,” said historian William O'Neill in the book “Coming Apart in the Sixties.”
“Here was conclusive proof that the love generation could survive and even flourish under the most adverse circumstances,” David Pichaske wrote in “Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s,” “conclusive proof that a new consciousness had been born.”
The legendary festival on Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, N.Y., is remembered for its massive crowds of more than 400,000 people, its music lineup of 31 artists, and it's relatively disturbance-free safety record that gave it a Utopian reputation.
Four men with Coachella Valley ties experienced it from an insider's point of view.
Elliot Tiber, who wrote the memoir on which Lee's film is based, operated an 80-room motel in Bethel that presented chamber concerts. When Woodstock promoters Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, Joel Rosenman and John Roberts were denied a permit for a proposed 50,000-person festival in nearby Wallkill, N.Y., in July 1969, Tiber offered them his music permit. He introduced them to his neighbor, Yasgur, and they rented his 600-acre farm for the festival.
But Tiber, who tried to stage a Gaystock festival in Palm Springs before moving back to New York, never got close to the Woodstock stage.
Steve Madaio of Palm Desert played at Woodstock as a trumpeter for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. What he remembers most about Woodstock is “the continuous amount of music going on for three days, day and night.
“They had some breaks because of the rain,” he said, “but it was really non-stop.”
Paul Krassner of Desert Hot Springs co-founded the Youth International Party (the Yippies), a prank-loving activist group that disrupted the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention. He recalls the festival's sociological implications.
“The police riot in 1968 at the Chicago convention spoiled our vision of presenting a culture with an alternative value system,” Krassner said. “Woodstock turned out to be what we had originally envisioned for the (Chicago) counter-convention — on a much grander and peaceful scale.”
Dr. Michael Gatto of Bermuda Dunes saw much of Woodstock from inside a medical tent. A pre-med student at Fairleigh-Dickinson University in Madison, N.J., Gatto said they treated “mostly drug overdoses, drug-related incidences. I think it was about 5,000 treatments. There was also dehydration, abrasions and cuts.”
He said the crowd could have been a nightmare. In his medical opinion, he said the rampant marijuana use “probably made (festival goers) more mellow.
“There was Vietnam, racial unrest and here you've got 500,000 so-called hippies in one place,” Gatto recalled. “In three days of an event, there were no murders, no stabbings, no fights. It was very mellow and people really came for the music. There were problems with sanitation, there were problems with food, there was problems with traffic, but somehow, everybody made it. It was just an event we'll never see again.”
Gatto paid $28 for four tickets. Then the fences were torn down and it was declared a free concert. Soon, artists were mingling with the fans.
“I saw Janis Joplin in the crowd and she was drinking all day,” he said. “She had to wait 10 hours before she performed and how she ever got up on stage to perform, I'll never know.”
“You were out there going crazy,” said Madaio. “Half the people didn't have clothes on. It was a different period. It was a tremendous sociological change in the country.”
Madaio said the artists hung out anywhere they could because they had no place to go.
“We went in in the middle of the night on a helicopter and just hung there,” he said. “Once we got in with the helicopter we couldn't get out.”
Madaio recalls talking with Jimi Hendrix, David Crosby and Stephen Stills. But he has trouble recalling what they were talking about.
“‘Pass me the joint',” he said with a laugh. “Look, if you realize how much goes down in your life, multiplied by 25 or 30 years of doing this, it's impossible to remember it all (even) if I was totally straight. And a lot of times, I wasn't.”
Gatto didn't really understand what it meant to be a part of the “Woodstock nation” until years later. But Krassner said he realized Woodstock was going to be historic when he saw the crowds arriving “like some kind of pilgrimage.
“The sense of community was super- palpable,” he said. “For all of these young people who might have been the only Martian on their block, this event turned out to be a Martian convention.
“It was, in a sense, a Declaration of Independence by a generation who did know what was happening, Mr. Jones.”
Musical highlights were abundant. For Krassner, it was Hendrix' version of “The Star Spangled Banner” on Monday morning, after he was supposed to have closed the festival on Sunday night.
“That rendition came as such a bittersweet surprise,” he said, “(it was) a perfect coda to the event.”
Gatto's musical highlight came after a nap between The Who and Jefferson Airplane.
“All I remember was waking up to (singer) Grace Slick saying, ‘Good morning people,'” he said. “Jefferson Airplane was performing at 7 o'clock, and they were a big group.”
The legacy of Woodstock for Madaio was the leverage it gave musicians to command large performance fees after showing they could attract hundreds of thousands of fans.
“It was the beginning of a lot of people's careers, like Crosby, Stills & Nash,” he said. “After that, all of a sudden, everybody's price elevated monstrously. The exposure built a lot of major careers.”
Krassner sees it as a trailblazer for future festivals.
“The vibes and the openness and cooperation and friendliness had a tipping- point influence on countless individuals who were at the celebration,” he said. “It also set the tone for future outdoor weekend music festivals, from the Grateful Dead at Woodstock to Phish at the Empire Polo Club this October.”
Gatto said it was a coming of age celebration.
“It was almost a protest in that young people were being in an area without having any major incidences,” he said. “It was a small city and people did what they had to (to survive). It was a challenge, something I didn't think I could do. But we all made it through.”
