F
ar, farking out, man!
Okay, I’m entitled. It’s almost the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. I went. I am going to tell you about it. What this has to do with public policy in Virginia, I have no idea.
I was 16 and almost in 12th grade at a high school in suburban DC. Some guys at school (I went to a Catholic boys school) knew about Woodstock up in New York somewhere and wanted to get people to go. Back then, high school kids were divided into two groups: the “jocks” and the “heads.” I was a head. Only heads went to Woodstock.
I told my skeptical parents that it was some kind of arts and crafts thing. Hey, it was the 60s and things were a whole lot looser then. Only dorks like Jim Bacon were in some straight-jacket society like the Young Americans for Freedom. Eight of us climbed into Eric’s three-row station wagon with Maryland plates and set off.
Closest parking was seven miles away. (“The New York State Thruway’s closed, man!,” shouted Arlo Guthrie). The eight guys in our group hiked it through the throngs moving, Pied Piper-like) to the concert. There were girls in doeskin halters. One barely-clad man in a purple top hat led a goat. Lots and lots of freaks.
We got to the gates. The cyclone fences had been torn down and despite the concert now being free, I naively paid $20 anyway for a ticket. There was a gigantic bowl of mud covered with people. We picked a spot not far from the stage and lay down, eight in a row, like sardines in oil.
Oil it was since rain turned the mud to glop. The crowd grew to 500,000. Our biggest fear was getting separated from our group which we did several times. Believe it or not, I didn’t do anything illegal. But I saw lots of things both illegal and interesting. Water sold for five dollars. We got very thirsty. And we were very tired.
The performers grew into a blur. I remember Country Joe McDonald’s rousing and profane rant against Vietnam War. CCR jammed on “Green River.” “Freedom” was belted out by the toothless Ritchie Havens (I think he was one of the first the play). After a while, we didn’t pay much attention to the music. The crowd was too interesting. The loudspeaker guy warned us about bad trips from brown acid. Despite the profound anti-war nature of the crowd, forest green Army Hueys choppered out kids who were either sick or having bad trips. We got thirsty. And hungry. And tired. Pretty soon we were asleep again. After a couple of days in the rain and mud, you can sleep anywhere.
Later, when the movie came out, we learned about all kinds of things that we didn’t see or know about, notably the scores of kids skinny dipping in a lake. We didn’t know there was a lake.
Interesting time, 1969. As Rob Kirkpatrick’s recent book remembers, it was the year of big advances. The Boeing 747 revolutionized long-range air travel. Nixon was enjoying a brief honeymoon in office and was seen as a positive since he said he was going to end the war. The guys in my group were lucky since we missed the draft and Vietnam by at least a couple of years. “Vietnamization” was on the way.
Also, Nixon actually cleaned up the environment (he was a true “green” president, something people don’t remember). After all, that was the year the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. The lunar landing happened. Great movies such as “Midnight Cowboy” were in theaters.
Indeed, 1969 seemed a relief after 1968 which brought us Tet, the deaths of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
I can’t remember when we decided to go home. The performers were still on. We hiked back to the car and set off around two in the morning. At four a.m. we were still in New York driving through some darkened small town. A cop pulled us over. We didn’t know it but you had to be 18 to drive at night in New York. We were all 16 or 17.
The cop saw some Sweet Tarts in the front seat. He thought they were acid or uppers. He pulled his gun. We shouted: “No officer, they’re candy, they really are!”
Peter Galuszka
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