Woodstock, 2023

I was too young to go to the Woodstock festival in 1969. I was only seven, living in Minnesota at the time. Growing up in the ‘70s, hippie culture was certainly present all around, and I certainly remember the music of the era very well. My older brothers and sisters had LPs by groups like Deep Purple, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, and Emerson Lake and Palmer. Between that, transistor radios and hard rock stations like KQRS, I was as in-touch with the music scene through my childhood and teen years as a kid could be.

Today I am 61 and the spectacle of the Woodstock festival has become my latest obsession. Considering the tumultuous era of Vietnam, civil rights, and political assassinations, the thought of 450,000 people coming together for “three days of peace and music” speaks loudly to me as an idealist. Much of the older generation thought Woodstock was simply a hedonistic, drug-laced gathering of the lost. But, for me personally I’d like to think it was part of the revolution that Jefferson Airplane sings about in their song Volunteers.

When I was perusing videos Woodstock performances on YouTube, it was this song that captured my attention the most. The lyrics speak to the angst and desire for change from an entire generation.

Look what’s happening out in the streets
Got a revolution (got to revolution)
Hey, I’m dancing down the streets
Got a revolution (got to revolution)

As much as the lyrics captivated me, it was the combined energy of Marty Balin and Grace Slick that drew me to watch the video over and over. It also gave me an appreciation for the gifted Jack Casady on bass. The entire band’s collective performance for the whole set was masterful. In fact, until I watched and listened to their set, I was never a big Airplane fan. These videos made me an instant convert.

I became obsessed with talking to someone, anyone, who’d been to the festival. Once at a writing conference, an author was introduced before his presentation about his novel, and one of the interesting sidelights about his background was that he’d been at Woodstock. At the end of his talk about his (unrelated) book, I had to ask him about his Woodstock experience. He said he was a young cop in New York City at the time and they were looking for cops to work at the festival running security. He volunteered and went on to say when they arrived it was quickly determined that they were wildly understaffed considering the enormous crowd. As a result, the forces were directed not to worry about drug use but rather to focus strictly on keeping the peace. He said his biggest takeaway was how well mannered the whole event was. Nearly half a million people and almost no incidents. The crowd was completely respectful of the three days of peace and music slogan. He said as a cop, it touched him deeply.

Because we have family in upstate New York, I told my wife that someday I’d like to take a side trip to visit the site of Woodstock. When I looked into it, I found the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, a museum and amphitheater located on the grounds of the original site, was just a three-hour ride from where we were staying during an upcoming visit. After my 25-year-old son mentioned he’d be interested in going, we set a date for making it happen.

After a beautiful, sometimes harrowing drive through the mountains, we arrived and started with a tour of the museum. One of the first things we saw upon entering was one of the huge amplifiers that hung from the towers at the festival over 54 years ago. I think this artifact was the one that touched me the most. The rest of the museum was a plastic, fantastic trip back in time. I highly recommend it!

We finished up out on the field where it all happened. It was incredibly moving standing there looking out over sacred ground. If you listened hard enough, you could almost hear the echoes of Grace Slick wailing her backup vocals in her white tasseled top and her funked out hair.

Both my wife and son agreed that the whole experience was way better than they anticipated. The three-hour ride down was, in every sense of the word, a pilgrimage for me and as it turned out, for them as well. I’m glad we went back to the garden.

Stereo Story #750

Volunteers lyrics as written by Paul Kantner, Marty Balin.
Lyrics © Wixen Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group

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Jim has three non-fiction books, Cretin Boy, Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir and The Portland House: A '70s Memoir. Jim also has five poetry collections, Thoughts from a Line at the DMV, Genetically Speaking, Reciting from Memory, Written Life, and On a Road. His non-fiction stories have been published in Main Street Rag, The Sun, Story News, and others. His poetry has been featured in Rosebud Magazine, Portage Magazine, Blue Heron Review, and many others. Jim was the 2018-2019 poet laureate for the Village of Wales, Wisconsin.