Woodstock Faithful Found Memories for a Lifetime in ‘Three Days of Peace’

Steve Alexander will never forget what he saw on that long-ago August morning as he crested the hill overlooking the site of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, the epochal countercultural event of the 1960s that celebrates its 20th anniversary this week.

“As far as the eye could see, it was a solid, flesh-colored mass,” he recalled. “There were people and more people and more people, packed tight into a blur that seemed to stretch from where I was standing into infinity.

“Describing it now, it would be like going up to the top of Mt. Soledad and seeing every citizen in San Diego get out of their houses, their cars, and their offices and just stand there, out in the open, right next to each other.”

Kenny Weissberg’s most memorable Woodstock experience came on the second night of the three-day festival, which was held Aug. 15-17, 1969, on a 600-acre farm near Bethel, N.Y.

“It was close to dawn, and The Who was doing ‘Tommy,’ ” Weissberg said. “And just as they got to the point where Tommy regains his eyesight, the sun came up over the surrounding hills.

“It was an incredible coincidence, an unforgettable moment.”

Alexander, 38, is a San Diego real estate broker who also sits on the city’s Park and Recreation board. Weissberg, 41, is a former rock journalist who for the past six years has produced the annual Concerts by the Bay series at Humphrey’s on Shelter Island.

Exactly 20 years ago this week, however, both men were self- professed hippies who, along with an estimated half a million other young people from all over the country, congregated on Max Yasgur’s alfalfa field for what had been advertised as “three days of peace and music.”

And three days of peace and music it was, Alexander and Weissberg agree--with virtually no arrests, no violence, no fights, and stellar performances by more than two dozen rock ‘n’ roll superstars, including The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Santana, the Grateful Dead, The Band, Country Joe and the Fish, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

“Everyone was just having a good time, grooving to the music,” Alexander said. “People were sharing food and dancing with each other, and the townspeople kept driving up with huge basins of water, just smiling and helping.

“Even the cops seemed caught up in the peaceful, communal atmosphere. People would offer them hits off joints, and all they would do was smile.’

“Woodstock was a very uplifting, 72-hour slice of life,” Weissberg added. “It was all the things they said about bringing together a community of 500,000 people, all at once, who were definitely peaceful and sharing things.

“And the music wasn’t superfluous. The music was great, and the lineup was incredible, which is why we had all come in the first place.”

When the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was announced in February, 1969, Alexander and Weissberg were living in New Jersey. Both men immediately made plans to attend.

“I was 17, and my dad was always saying ‘no’ when I asked permission to go to a rock concert,” Alexander recalled. “But I knew that by the time Woodstock rolled around, I would be 18, so I could do whatever I wanted to do.”

“I was a huge music fan, and I bought tickets within a week after they went on sale,” said Weissberg, at the time a 21-year-old senior at the University of Wisconsin who was planning to spend most of his summer vacation traveling through Europe before returning home in mid-August, three days before the start of the festival.

By luck, neither Alexander nor

Weissberg had to suffer through the infamous traffic jams while driving to the festival--Alexander “in my dad’s El Camino, with a couple of friends, sleeping bags and beer,” and Weissberg “with my girlfriend, in my GTO.”

“On the way there, we ran into this kid who lived around the area, and he said, ‘I know a back way, follow me,’ ” Alexander recalled. “So we pulled off the throughway and started to wind our way right up to the concert site on all these little country roads.”

“I knew someone who lived five minutes from Woodstock who owned a motel, so not only was I privy to all the back roads and thus able to avoid the traffic jams, I didn’t have to camp out in the mud--I had motel reservations,” Weissberg said.

“Here I was, this full-fledged hippie, and yet I was already displaying yuppie tendencies.”

Getting in was even easier than getting there.

“We had been planning to buy tickets at the gate, but, by the time we got there, the fences were coming down and everyone started shouting, ‘It’s a free concert!’ ” Alexander said.

“I remember giving the guy at the door my ticket and seeing this befuddled look on his face,” Weissberg said. “No one else was handing him tickets, and I’d say that, of all the people who went, at least 90% didn’t have tickets.”

Once inside, both men recalled, they felt they had stumbled into another world, a world filled with the proverbial peace, love and happiness, where everyone was free to tune in, turn on and drop out.

“I didn’t sleep at all for three days,” Weissberg said. “It was a totally positive experience, even though it was a mess. I remember when we decided to leave on Sunday, we looked over at our clothes and our blanket and everything was so entrenched with mud that we left it all behind.”

“It was like a Kobey’s Swap Meet for drugs,” Alexander said. “People would have these old flip-top Marlboro boxes, filled to the top with purple haze, brown dot, orange dot and mescaline, and, as you walked around the woods, you’d hear this constant chant: ‘Acid, mescaline, acid, mescaline.’ And, for a buck, you got a hit of either.

“I didn’t do drugs, and that was real unusual. I think I was the only person there who didn’t do drugs.”

But then again, he didn’t need to.

“All three days, I was on this constant, natural high,” Alexander said. “The very first night, I think it was Joan Baez who asked everyone to light up a match as a symbol of connectiveness.

“It was pitch black, and then all of a sudden the entire hillside came to light. And watching this from the side of the hill gave me the most indescribable communal feeling. I felt every bit as high as the people around me who were doing drugs, and I’d say that’s when the significance of Woodstock first hit me.”

Just as Alexander and Weissberg swear they’ll never forget Woodstock, they hope the festival’s legacy will never be forgotten either.

“The tensions that had built up throughout the 1960s finally found a release through peace and camaraderie and commonality,” Alexander said. “I left the festival with the feeling that we had really made a difference, a statement: It didn’t matter who you were, what you wore, what you drove, what you had and what you didn’t have. We could all get along, and, if we could get along here, we felt we could get along in the real world as well.

“And, looking back right now, my life took a major turn after Woodstock. I was enrolled in the ROTC program at Ryder College under a full scholarship, but after a month I walked out, saying this is not what it’s all about.”

“At the time, Woodstock was a sociological phenomenon,” Weissberg added. “It’s never been duplicated since, and it probably never will be.”