Woodstock, 20 Years After : The Aging of Aquarius : 20 Years of Controversy : The Aging Legacy of Woodstock

Walking tentatively, as if entering a shrine, four young men wandered into the large, sloping hayfield on a little country lane called Hurd Road, a few miles from this Catskill Mountain village 90 miles northwest of New York City.

Eventually, three of them sat down in the grass and chuckled as the fourth, a 16-year-old high school student, played the air as if it were a guitar, imitating the stereotyped choreography of rock bands.

It is easy enough to find the hayfield, but it no longer has any resemblance to the form it took for three days in the late summer of 1969.

Spot Where Stage Stood

Unaware of his precise location in the field until a stranger told him, 16-year-old Mike Gore, of Dudley, Mass., had mimed his guitar licks at precisely the spot where, 20 years ago this summer, on Aug. 15, 16 and 17, the stage was positioned before an audience of somewhere between 350,000 and 750,000 people--no one will ever know how many--for the high-water mark of what today seems another age.

Woodstock. More properly, the Woodstock Music & Art Fair . . . An Aquarian Exposition . . . Three Days of Peace and Music. An event that defined its time and affected a generation.

Two decades later, Woodstock’s lasting imprint on America remains controversial--studied, debated, misunderstood.

Perhaps, some say, it was just a wonderful party, held at a point when so much seemed possible. A party so memorable that some people mistakenly believed its radiated effects would change the world. The more cynical argue that such thinking was a mirage. The party’s real legacy, they say, became the drug epidemic and the self-centered “Me” generation.

Others, however, say the social ferment identified with the Woodstock era ended the Vietnam War and that the activism with which the 1960s are identified ushered in the women’s and environmental movements--an ongoing legacy that shines brighter than the festival’s flamboyance.

What seems clear, after two decades, is that Woodstock’s hold on the imagination remains strong enough to lure teen-agers who were not even born in 1969 and who seem indifferent to many of the social and political values it espoused. And its sway still proves strong--if wistfully so--for the generation that lived it but watched things turn out differently than they expected.

San Francisco rock promoter Bill Graham recalls not fully realizing the magnitude of Woodstock until Janis Joplin--drunk and destined to deliver a second-rate performance--walked on stage.

“She just walked out into that Nuremberg roar,” Graham recalled, “I was standing on the side of the stage,” Graham said, “(and I asked myself) ‘What is that?’ Everyone realized, ‘my God . . . what does it stand for?”’

“I think Woodstock represents a dream,” said Lee Blumer, who worked on the festival’s security staff in 1969. Today, she is an executive with a production company owned by Mike Lang, who as a 24-year-old hippie conceived the idea for Woodstock and served as the festival’s producer.

“The Woodstock festival,” Blumer said one day recently in Lang’s comfortable loft office in the SoHo district of Manhattan, “moved the consciousness of a whole generation. It may have been less than one degree, but it moved it.”

Lang, who now runs Better Music and maintains a country house in Woodstock, N.Y., itself, has never lost the hippie sincerity that somehow made the Woodstock festival happen despite the longest conceivable odds. “I think that what Woodstock probably did was confirm a lot of positions people were taking in the ‘60s and confirmed that there were lots more people who were of the same mind,” Lang said.

Of course, it was far more complex than just Woodstock. Most observers agree the era defined as the 1960s extends from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 through the U.S. incursion into Cambodia early in 1970.

By the end of the decade, the pace of events was so rapid the time line blurs. In late 1969 alone, for instance, Woodstock was immediately preceded by rioting in Berkeley’s People’s Park and immediately followed by the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, Calif., in which Hells Angels beat a black spectator to death. The next April, National Guardsmen opened fire on students at Kent State University in Ohio.

While Woodstock was, in a sense, studiously nonpolitical, some observers believe it made a forcefully political statement because a half million people of like ideals had just shown up.

John McDargh, a Boston College theology professor, believes Woodstock to have been what theologians call a kairotic moment, one that is unique and cannot be repeated. Since this was so, McDargh contended, today’s young people not only can’t identify with its values but have come to distrust members of what Abbie Hoffman dubbed “the Woodstock Nation.”

“There is a funny sort of mixed, ambivalent nostalgia,” McDargh said of today’s perceptions of Woodstock. “A great many students have this image that everybody (from the Woodstock era) has ended up as in (the 1983 motion picture) ‘The Big Chill.’ Their feeling is, if you try to stay faithful to your ideals, you’re dead, or your brain is fried or you sold out. The way it affects them is: ‘If I get committed, won’t I be left looking foolish and alone?’ ”

Even observers who credit Woodstock with permanently changing American life are troubled by similar perceptions. Ann Kaplan, an English professor and director of the Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said the feminist movement that sprang up in the 1960s is likely to remain a key element of the era Woodstock symbolizes.

Death of Abbie Hoffman

But Kaplan is also troubled by a contrary legacy symbolized, she said, by the drug-related suicide last April of ‘60s radical Hoffman.

“Abbie Hoffman’s death affected me greatly,” she said, “because he was a symbol (of the Woodstock era). I just was convinced that he looked at the 1980s and said: ‘This is no world for me to live in.’ ”

To Carol Petillo, a historian who teaches a popular course on the ‘60s at Boston College, Hoffman’s death poses troubling problems of communicating to today’s young the themes that Woodstock came to represent. “They will see (the suicide) as a cop-out,” she said, “or that the bastards finally ground him down.”

To academics like Petillo and McDargh, the legacy of Woodstock for today’s teen-agers and young adults is almost schizophrenic. Its memories are of excesses such as drugs, tempered by the realization that something captivating was happening then that isn’t happening now.

Like the four young men in the hayfield, Woodstock represents an era today’s young people seem to long for but don’t know why. They have embraced Woodstock’s music, but without knowing the social and cultural context that produced it.

“It’s as if they (today’s young people) missed out on something,” McDargh said. “They all know the 1960s music, but it’s not their music. On the other hand, there is a kind of rejection. Kids will say: ‘I would never demonstrate. That’s so ‘60s. ‘ “

Hoffman, who had gained national note the year before Woodstock as a leader of demonstrations at the Chicago Democratic convention, addressed issues of Woodstock’s connection to today’s young people with author Joel Makower, whose book “Woodstock: The Oral History” is to be published by Doubleday in July.

Hoffman was a major Woodstock figure because, when he tried to seize the microphone to make a political speech, Pete Townshend of the rock group the Who kicked him off the stage. He spent the rest of the festival acting, with striking effectiveness, as administrator of a first-aid tent.

“It’s sad because it (the life style and values of the Woodstock generation) isn’t going on today,” Hoffman told Makower, “because it’s part of the past . . . because youth makes revolution, youth makes social change. The question is not: ‘What happened to those of us who went to Woodstock?’ It’s: ‘Where’s the Woodstock for today’s generation?’

‘Terrible Being Young Today’

“My kid, who’s 16 . . . calls me up and he says: ‘Daddy, why wasn’t I born in the ‘60s?’ And what can I say? ‘You’re right. You should have been born (then). It’s terrible being young today.’ ”

A hayfield in which so many young people gathered so happily 20 years ago, proved unexpectedly to have excellent acoustics. Today, it is unchanged from that weekend, when it became the site of a happening that defied heavy rains, tainted LSD and food and sanitary facility shortages to show that, at least for a weekend, peaceful coexistence was possible.

The owner of the field, dairy farmer Max Yasgur, became a folk hero just for hosting Woodstock. The current owners, who bought the field from Yasgur’s estate, have erected a concrete monument.

For three days, it has been often said, Woodstock was the third-largest city in New York. Its population was roughly equivalent to the American troop commitment in Vietnam.

Jim DeVoe was 19, enjoying the summer after his sophomore year at the University of Notre Dame. He had decided to declare theology as his major. He was struggling to rationalize his enrollment in Air Force ROTC--a choice made under pressure from his father, an Air Force colonel.

He arrived at the festival on Friday night, after the music and the first of two torrential storms had begun. “We wound up sharing a tent with two or three girls,” DeVoe recalled. “The music was on. I remember it being Janis Joplin.”

Link to Specific Tune

DeVoe decided to attend Woodstock because of its music. But as he sat in the crowd listening to singer Country Joe McDonald, he realized that Woodstock was changing him in ways he never anticipated. He even links it to a specific tune, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-to-Die-Rag,” an anti-Vietnam song.

“The deeper issues--the relationship between the university and society and the individual and political obligations--began to germinate,” DeVoe said. “I would say it crystallized at Woodstock, around Country Joe.”

That fall, DeVoe began to pull back from ROTC. When rioting broke out on campuses after the U.S. incursion into Cambodia, he refused to lead his platoon onto the parade field. At the end of the school year, he dropped ROTC and became a conscientious objector.

He took to the streets of South Bend to oppose the war. His activism continued through his conscientious observer service as a parochial high school teacher. But 20 years later, DeVoe is symptomatic of the graying of the Woodstock Nation.

He is district manager for college textbook sales of a major publishing company, based in Princeton, N.J. He wears a suit to work, drives a station wagon--though the tape player is loaded with the Rolling Stones and other 1960s music--and lives in the suburbs with his wife and children. It’s such a turnabout it almost amuses him.

DeVoe accepts it, although he laments it. “I have to have an income. I have to support my family. I have to be financially prepared to deal with a college education for my children.”

There is more than a symbolic encroachment today around the edges of Woodstock’s central shrine. Along one end of Filippini Pond, the little body of water where thousands skinny-dipped in 1969, luxury homes rise, fetching as much as $325,000.

Eight years ago, a local speculator bought up the land on the far side of Filippini Pond and opened the Woodstock on the Lake Campground. Across Hurd Road from the pond--on a gentle slope where, during Woodstock, young people ran naked, smoked marijuana and pitched brightly colored tents--there is a subdivision with three luxury homes completed. Late last year, Richard Desmond moved into one of them--a house on a slight rise from whose Jacuzzi deck it would have been possible to see the top of the stage.

The house’s proximity to the center of Woodstock was its key attraction to Desmond, 42. He didn’t attend, though he lived in nearby Monticello at the time. He didn’t realize the import of that August weekend until traffic jams stretching 20 miles in every direction made access nearly impossible.

‘Still Feel Good About It’

“We had 400,000 neighbors there not too long ago,” he said one day recently, standing on the deck and gesturing toward the hayfield. “Twenty years later, I can still feel good about it.”

Woodstock, of course, was not held in Woodstock, N.Y., though it had originally been intended to be there. As the summer wore on, two different sites evicted the festival and it landed in the hayfield only weeks before opening day.

In July, 1969, Nick Langhart was 25 and avoiding the draft, working at a community college in Ohio, when his brother, Chris, a Woodstock technical supervisor, summoned him to the site.

Langhart, now a museum curator near Boston, supervised a crew installing water pipes. “People in the crowd were totally trusting. That made me (think at first) that Woodstock was an apparent consensus of values, an apparent new age,” Langhart said. “But when it came down to issues that affected individuals, they were as different (at Woodstock) as they had been before or would be five years later.”

More Meaning to Symbol

Such recollections are the raw material of the work of Rebecca Klatch, a UC Santa Cruz sociology professor on a fellowship to study 1960s politics at the Stanford Humanities Center. Woodstock, she said, “has become a symbol, and one of the interesting parts is that it’s acquired more meaning over the last two decades.”

“There is some amount of debate in the scholarship of the ‘60s of the cultural versus the political aspects (of the decade). To me, Woodstock is the positive way in which that culture and politics blended.”

Klatch, a high school student in Skokie, Ill., at the time of Woodstock, agrees that many students today seem drawn to Woodstock--finding in its music, in particular, an allure as strong now as then. It is no accident, she argued, that fully half of the music acts that played Woodstock--or at least their key personnel--are still actively performing and successfully finding an audience in the same age bracket that camped out at Woodstock in 1969.

Klatch said scholars are finding some modern-day cliches inaccurate. Three recent studies, for instance, have found that people who were politically active in the 1960s have remained committed to the causes in which they were then passionately involved. This scholarship, she said, invalidates impressions of many young people that people who were young adults 20 years ago have all sold out.

Rubin Became Broker

She calls this belief the “Jerry Rubin factor,” after the transformation of one of the mainstays of 1960s activism into a life as a stockbroker.

But at the same time, observed Todd Gitlin, a UC Berkeley sociologist, it is very important not to lose sight of one reality: “There ain’t no revolution I can see.”

Woodstock, he said, “has a very murky legacy. I think that a lot of people of my vintage felt in the late ‘60s that we were trembling on the edge of some incomprehensible transformation of human consciousness that was either upon us or damned well better be. Then, inevitably, we were tremendously disappointed, or worse, that it didn’t happen. “

In the summer of 1969, Andrea Hyde was a law student at St. John’s University in New York. Her friend, Gene Cimini, had just returned to Manhattan after a year off from law school and was driving a cab.

With two other friends, they decided to attend Woodstock, Hyde recalled one day recently as she sat in the conference room of her Mineola, N.Y., law office. “As each day progressed through that summer, one more group was going to be there until it seemed as if everyone was going to be there,” she recalled.

And so they all piled in a car and headed to Woodstock. When Woodstock’s fabled rains soaked them, the little group found a self-service laundry and stuck everything they had in dryers. After the sun broke through on the Saturday of the festival, they sat that night through “three or four of the best hours of music ever,” said Cimini, who now practices law in Garden City, N.Y.

Cimini recalls Woodstock as strangely harmonious. “Next to us was a bunch of people who looked like they just came from the country club, with plaid pants and a picnic basket,” he chuckled. “In front of us were a bunch of bikers who drank more Jack Daniel’s than I thought was possible.”

But before they had left for home the next day, Woodstock had begun to cast its broader spell on them. “One of the last things that happened as we were leaving is somebody gave us a flyer. It said: ‘Come to Chicago.’ ” The event, the Weatherman-organized Days of Rage.

“It was,” said Hyde reflectively, “this mass of people coming of age at the same time and coming to grips with the political situation. I just always had the sense that we were part of something very big. I didn’t know how (it) would play itself out.”

Few Ripples Observed

Twenty years later, what actually happened is not entirely satisfactory to the two middle-age lawyers. Looking for Woodstock’s remaining ripples, Cimini and Hyde--like many Woodstock people--see little, if anything.

“It seems like something died five or 10 years ago,” Cimini said. “A lot of us got politically involved, and, if history is kind to us, we did a good thing. But there were some really bad effects. A lot of (permanently harmed) kids came home from Vietnam. The drug thing ran out of control. But Woodstock served to separate us, and that separateness still exists.”

Irwin Unger, a New York University historian who last year co-authored a book arguing that 1968--the year before Woodstock--was the decade’s most significant turning point, agrees that much of what happened in the ‘60s--alternative politics and counterculture, which Unger is careful to separate--was based on simply false perceptions.

“I think the ‘60s represented a unique event attached to the premature belief in permanent prosperity,” Unger said. “For the first time, a few countries in the West (appeared for the moment to have) achieved a kind of new stage where man had been liberated from the goad of necessity and now had to basically turn their attention to more critical things--like human relations, injustice, the existential things.”

Unger argues that Woodstock achieved the prominence it did--and is now receding in influence--simply because of the population cycle of the post-World War II baby boom. Between 1960 and 1970, the number of young people ages 18 to 24 increased by more than 50%, to 24.7 million the year after Woodstock. The age group zoomed from 8.9% of the population in 1960 to 13.3% in 1980. By 1985, the percentage was down to 12%--less than during Woodstock. By 1995, it will be 9.3% and dropping.

“A great deal of what went on was pushing the agenda of the young,” he said. “It’s just now that there are signs of the tide receding.”

Somewhere in his attic in Summerville, Mass., Peter Sosna still keeps a copy of the Woodstock commemorative issue of Life magazine. In the middle of a two-page photograph of the crowd that ran inside the cover, he appears as a speck in profile.

At 15, he lobbied his parents to let him go to Woodstock.

Much of the Woodstock crowd has gone on to professional careers, had children and bought turbo Volvos with cellular telephones. But Sosna has stayed in the 1960s, as if he volunteered for time warp research. He makes his living as a magician.

Still True to ‘60s

His friends are unreconstructed longhairs. True to the ‘60s, he has his apartment, a stereo and a car and requires little else. His concessions to time are few. “I stopped doing LSD a long time ago,” he said, “not because of any unpleasant experience, but I figured something that is this much fun has got to be really bad for you.

“It was more than just a party, but it was quite a party,” he recalled of Woodstock. “It was the best weekend of my life. I felt kind of justified in the beliefs that I had . . . all that peace and love stuff.

“I felt it was kind of a lesson we were trying to teach America that never really sank in.”

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