Woodstock Festival: Where did the peace and love go?

Mick Brown 15 August 2016 • 9:21am

A couple at Woodstock Music Festival, 1969 Credit: Ralph Ackerman

Forty-seven years on, Mick Brown reveals how the hippie dream peddled by the Woodstock Festival was doomed to fail.

It is perhaps ironic that the artist who, for many, most defines the Woodstock Festival was not actually there. Like a lot of people who should have been performing, who one fancifully imagines were performing – a list that includes Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Love and the Doors – Joni Mitchell was otherwise engaged.

Sitting in a hotel room in New York, waiting to keep a prior appointment with The Dick Cavett Show, Mitchell watched what has since come to be regarded as the defining event of the Aquarian Age unfolding in a series of television news bulletins.

Woodstock, she would recount later, struck her "like a modern-day fishes and loaves story. For a herd of people that large to co-operate so well, it was pretty remarkable, and there was a tremendous optimism. So I wrote the song Woodstock out of these feelings."

Mitchell's anthem, with its coda of dreamy, heartfelt longing – "We are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden" – would loom large in the creation of the legend of Woodstock as the apogee of what is now fancifully regarded as an Edenic era of unbridled peace and love. But it wasn't quite like that.

Joni Mitchell: not actually at Woodstock Credit: Hulton Archive

Woodstock took place in an age when the fault lines between "straight" society and the so-called counter-culture were at their deepest, over Vietnam, drug use, the revolution in values.

And nowhere were they deeper than in the small town of Woodstock itself. Located in upstate New York, Woodstock had a reputation for bohemian non-conformity, as the site of an early 20th-century Utopian community, Byrdcliffe, and home to a number of musicians, including Bob Dylan – a fact that had drawn huge numbers of hippies to the town, to the increasing consternation of locals. By 1969, anti-hippie hysteria had reached epidemic proportions, with one town dignitary describing the typical hippie as "a creature full of communicable diseases who speaks an illiterate language", and a local meditation centre being burned down in an arson attack.

When a local entrepreneur announced plans for an "Aquarian Exposition" of arts and music, the shutters came down with a resounding crash. So it was that the Woodstock Festival was obliged to relocate to the hamlet of Bethel, 60 miles away.

The Aquarian Exposition was conceived as a hard-nosed commercial proposition. Woodstock was just one of a number of music festivals held in the summer of 1969 – in Seattle, Atlanta, Denver, and in London, all of them attracting huge crowds (the Rolling Stones' Hyde Park concert drew more than 250,000), all of them confirming not only a new spirit of hedonism, but also a new marketing demographic to whom all manner of stuff – records, T-shirts, patchouli oil – could be sold.

More than 185,000 people bought tickets for Woodstock, and it was only when hundreds of thousands more began amassing at the perimeter that the fences were torn down and the festival declared as free. Commercial considerations were also at the heart of determining who did, and didn't, appear. The Byrds declined to perform, believing they would not get paid. Led Zeppelin's manager Peter Grant later explained his group's absence by the fact that Woodstock did not fit his business plan. Ian Anderson, the leader of Jethro Tull, "didn't want to spend my weekend in a field of unwashed hippies".

185,000 people bought tickets for Woodstock, and thousands more turned up

But if Woodstock began as just another business opportunity, it turned out to be far and away the largest. The fact that it had occasioned a traffic jam that closed the New York State Thruway, and the novelty of half a million people gathered for three days amid conditions of rank squalor in a mood of trouble-free celebration, made it newsworthy. But what determined that Woodstock should attain mythical status was, more simply, the fact that it was filmed.

It was Woodstock the movie that bestowed benediction on the festival as the high point of the age of peace and love, and as the cradle of what became known as the "Woodstock Generation" – those happy souls of a certain age who set out (many in psychedelic-patterned VW camper vans) for the high plateau of idealism, and who now find themselves stranded in a hinterland of disappointment, nostalgia and rapidly dwindling pension plans.

The truth is that by the time of Woodstock, the age of peace and love – such as it had been – was already at an end. A week before the festival, 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles, members of the so-called Charles Manson "family" went on a killing spree that resulted in the deaths of seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate. Manson was the serpent in the garden, the killings the most horrific manifestation of the shadow side of hedonistic libertarianism.

Four months later, at Altamont, the free festival that had been conceived as "Woodstock West", 18-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by one of the Hell's Angels who had been appointed as festival "security", a few yards from where the Rolling Stones were performing their celebration of revenge and subjugation, Under My Thumb.

I did not go to Woodstock, but I did see the movie. The young girls dancing topless in the mud, the people ostentatiously brandishing joints at the camera and banging bongos while Joe Cocker simulated an epileptic fit singing With a Little Help From My Friends – it all made Woodstock look like somewhere you wished you'd been.

It was not until some 20 years later that I actually made it to Woodstock, on a pilgrimage to find the spirit of the festival. The farmland where it was held had remained just that, but the town of Woodstock itself had long since surrendered to commodity brokers and lawyers, upmarket restaurants and antique shops. The last remaining vestige of "Woodstock Nation" was a clothes shop on the outskirts of town, flying a flag emblazoned with the words "Rainbow Family".

Inside was a man named Day, wearing a greying beard and a woollen hat, studded with peace badges and topped with a knitted mushroom stalk, which lent him the appearance of a stoned garden gnome. He had arrived in Woodstock two years after the festival, he told me, commanded by a man named Bob Reynolds to found the local chapter of the Rainbow Family. It was Reynolds, Day said, who had torn down the fence at the festival, delivering it to "the people".

Woodstock, Day told me, lighting a cigarette, had been "the birth of a new spirit", which had "manifested there collectively, in that the spirit moved us together on a site called Bethel, which means the House of God in Hebrew". He exhaled a plume of smoke and fixed me with a meaningful look. "Nothing is coincidence."

Jane Bulger celebrates the 40th anniversary of Woodstock on the festival site in 2009 Credit: Getty Images

That spirit lived on, he said, in the Rainbow Family – hippies, tepee-dwellers, keepers of the flame – which had held its first gathering a year after Woodstock and which continued to that day. The Family, he explained, worked by a principle that had gone "way beyond democracy. Serious counsels lasting eight or nine days, hassles, working it out by factions – one man left blocking the consensus, the rest of us working on him till he comes around…"

And what did the Family vote on? "Where the next national gathering will be. The next international gathering, whether to go forward with a regional gathering."

The legacy of Woodstock seemed to be a party planning service with a bureaucracy to rival the Inland Revenue. "They have tried to eliminate us as a species all over America," said Day. "They pull down our tepees, debase us, make fun of us. But they haven't been able to get rid of us."

I tried to find Day again this week, but there was no sign of him in Woodstock. The Rainbow Family, however, now have a presence on the web, where it is described as "the largest non-organisation of non-members in the world".

The bureaucracy is apparently intact, and it continues to organise "world gatherings", usually on US Forest Service Land. The Forest Service has described it as a group that "purposely positions itself on the brink of anarchy", its gatherings attracting "dangerous and idle masses that overwhelm county and state services, disregard local communities, and destroy the natural resources the group claims to worship".

A gathering last year in a national park in Wyoming culminated in a riot, with participants throwing sticks and rocks at police, and police responding with pepper balls and rubber bullets. So much for peace and love.