Has Anyone Seen Woodstock on PBS's American Experience?

"They don't care about hungry or homeless people."

Generalizing much, hon?

I saw it and was impressed by all the hot bodies on most of the guys. Not many fatties at all.

Today I think the reverse would be true.

I've seen the photos in the "anniversary" coverage too, and I'm surprised that the audience seemed to have been overwhelmingly male. I had never noticed that about crowd scenes from the festival in the past. It's kind of odd.

The locals were charitable because the people behaved themselves. It was a kind of disaster but it went on smoothly. Not enough to eat, not enough bathrooms, no way to drive away because of the crowding and abandoned cars, yet the people kept their cool, even with the bad weather. It was an eye-opener for the whole country that this kind of "underground scene" had become a huge, popular, counter-culture.

Is there really anything new left to say about Woodstock? Done to death! Get over it already. Move on.

It's a myth that these "hippies", most of whom did not look like hippies but were just your average kids who wanted to see some good bands, turned into Reagan voting boomers. Those boomers were part of the silent majority that did as their parents wanted, joined the military and got married young.

I'm from the area and was a boy. I know how many woodstock attendees turned out, and its not fat couch potato cynics mainlining Trump and Fox News. Please, just because you can type something on the Intertubes, isn't an invitation to SHART OUT your blithering ignorance and judgements.

It was interesting - a moment, a glimmer of hope that better ideals could triumph. Crushed viciously by the Reagan Revolution. So disappointing to see what could have been. Not that Woodstock was realistic - but it showed a large mass of people who remained largely non violent and capitalists who funded it being willing to sacrifice their money for the greater safety and good. All the most noble ideas - many of which are continued forward by Dems - evidenced but ultimately crushed. A reminder that the fight against REPUBLICAN evilness has been going on for 50+ years.

[quote] Such a difference in the pre-Fox News world. It was sad to realize that so many of those hippies grew up just to sit in front of a TV and watch "news anchors" spew bile at them 24/7. They don't care about hungry or homeless people.

Those folks have had 60-70 years of their lives where they were given everything and celebrated just for basically being eating/sleeping/shitting/fucking machines, and they're mad now because other people on earth dare to breathe and/or would like a small share of the basics.

R9 What did your mommy and daddy do to you to hate an entire generation?

R8 - Woodstock itself is what turned the tide. The unexpected inundation of 400,000 attendees showed the whole country that the "market" for this music was in the MILLIONS of young people. Marketeers saw their path. It became all about money and promotion. I can't remember the timeline without looking it up, but Woodstock was one weekend in August of '69, and then the Manson murders were 2 other weekends in August (first, the LaBiancas, and then the people at Sharon Tate's house the following weekend) . The dewey-eyed optimism of the Sixties was over with.

You've read Joan Didion, R11

No, I haven't. I read a paragraph or so of The White Album, but what she is talking about is/ was obvious to the people who were "there"; it was obvious, when all this stuff happened. Egghead explanations weren't necessary - Joan Didion was was offering explanations of this for squares, after the fact. I was 14 that summer - I had older cousins who were into the music, the drugs, etc. It was clear as day what was happening to the youngsters who were involved.

The meaning of the Manson thing was like afterburn, because it took the cops such a long time to find the "Helter Skelter" door and associate those murders with the Beatles/hippie/ Manson scene.

Boomers who identify as conservative have slowly increased over the years, from 19% in 1996 to 23% in 2014, and 34% today.

Link for the 34%:

[quote]the Manson murders were 2 other weekends in August (first, the LaBiancas, and then the people at Sharon Tate's house the following weekend) .

Actually, the Tate murders were August 8-9, 1969. The LoBianca murders were the next day, August 10.

Would've been INFINITELY better, if only I'd blown off that goddam appearance on Cavett.

Ted Kennedy's ill-fated cruise with Mary Jo Kopechne happened on one of those other August '69 weekends. The Sixties were a busy time...

it was a different time. did you see where the police thanked the concert goers for not causing any problems and for being so respectful. The cops acted likewise.

but don't kid yourself. It was completely a drugfest and that was why everyone went and wanted to go. The music was a bonus. Again, there were more guys because of the drugs.

I cried a couple times watching this documentary. I know, Mary! And it pulls strings and it's one-sided, but still, I cried when they described how kind people were - about food. And also the mentions of Wavy Gravy and some others. I remember him, my mom was friends with some of those guys including Chip Monck. She worked for him for The Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire (Muhammad Ali George Foreman match and music festival).

R20 The drugs were pot, hash and acid. Didn't see or hear about anything else there.

The people in the community still seem very nice, and friendly. I'm not surprised in the least at their hospitality. Awfully nice place to visit. Much of NY state is.

Your mom sounds cool, R21

Let's not forget that the LA police were RIDICULOUSLY incompetent regarding Tate/LaBianca. The murder weapon was found by an 11 year old kid who made sure not to get his fingerprints on the gun. The boy's father called police & suggested it may have been involved in the murders, and the cop took it in his bare hands and turned it over, looking at it, obscuring any fingerprints that may have been in the weapon, and emptied the gun if bunkers and spent cartridges, getting his prints all over those, too. Then, he filed it away. It wasn't until the boy's father called the police 4 months later and reminded them about the gun that it was "rediscovered." Most likely fingerprints would've led straight to Spahn ranch as all of the killers & Linda Kasabian had prior arrests.

Ah, the good old days.

But really, the announcers on stage at Woodstock deserve a lot of credit for keeping people calm. The crowd got a little hot when they say an Army helicopter coming in, but the announcers told them the army was there to help and to give them a big hand. They also had the crowd applaud police and townspeople for their efforts.

R19 Mid-July, actually: the 18th. for Teddy and Mary Jo. Busy summer, to be sure - Judy Garland died the month before that in June. Stonewall. The Tate-LaBianca murders in August. Bombing Cambodia.

Nixon and Agnew were winding people up, older people especially, who really thought the country was coming apart that summer. Nothing - in some ways - like now and very much like now in others.

I love the type of natural bodies men had in 1969: Slim, not muscular, no tattoos, no piercings, no rings and like a previous poster said -no fatties.

[quote]like a previous poster said -no fatties.

Everyone smoked cigarettes.

They were also used to getting out of their houses and walking. They had no problem walking a few miles back and forth from the concert grounds to their cars.

Today all the young men would have to take a 6 pack of energy drinks with them along with their asthma inhalers and stop to post on Instagram every 5 minutes. The women would be looking for Starbucks. "OMG, I NEED my Grande Iced Sugar Free Vanilla Latte With soy milk! I'm dead here! Fuck Jimi Hendrix waking me up at 6:30!"

No fatties? There's a good reason for that: no internet. People actually got off their asses and moved around back then.

OP they made a movie about the people...

[quote]It's a myth that these "hippies", most of whom did not look like hippies but were just your average kids who wanted to see some good bands, turned into Reagan voting boomers. Those boomers were part of the silent majority that did as their parents wanted, joined the military and got married young.

Maybe that's true in general, but I noticed that the couple on the album cover, who do interviews about it pretty often, are pretty conservative now.

My sister's best friend came to our house on Friday evening. She and her BF were going to the Pepsi music festival "outside the city" (we lived on LI). She wanted my sister to go with them. My sister said no, she had to watch me because my parents weren't home (I was 13 and she was 17). Her friend suggested I come along because I was "old enough." Her friend was a typical loopy hippie and my mother was a strict - as in physically abusive - Catholic fanatic. She would've beaten the shit out of my sister if she'd gone with them.

We made two roast beef sandwiches for Patty & her bf. They left about 8pm. At 11 we watched the news and they reported that there was a lot of traffic going upstate to the festival. By Saturday night Gabe Pressman was reporting from Woodstock about the huge number of people at the festival and showed all the cars stopped on the NY State Thruway. It was a Big Story. My sister was so mad she hadn't gone.

When Patty got back she called my sister & told her she was: so lucky she didn't go. She & her bf ate the roast beef sandwiches on the way there. They only had 2 hard boiled eggs after that. They were starving, she said. It rained and she was drenched and got mud all over her. She couldn't see the bands and could only hear drumbeats and the crowds that were closer to the stage. They couldn't leave because they couldn't figure out where the road was, they walked through crowds but couldn't get out until the festival was over. She said it was the worst experience of her life.

As the days went on, local tv news was all about Woodstock and how great it was. There was going to be an album! When Patty saw and heard all of this, her story changed. By the time the movie came out she was gushing about what a great experience it was.

Sometimes it does seem like there is more of an underlying cruelty in conservatism today. But that was still the era of laws against miscegenation and "sodomy." And a generation earlier there was no safety net; if you were poor, you were fucked (although your family felt a duty to help you). Some people might be willing to help out a group of mostly white middle class hippie kids but wouldn't have been so sacrificing if this were some sort of gay or black liberation event. Not all of them, but don't discount that possibility. (I've literally encountered white nationalists who are "conservative" in the world we live in, but say that they think socialism would be a perfectly good system for a small nation of white folks.)

I really enjoyed the documentary last night. Yes it’s been done to death, but I thought it was a great contribution. I can’t get enough of the footage of the crowds. All of the beautiful young people. so many of those shirtless boys were slim and sexy, and some of the women were breathtaking. And of course I love watching all of the “regular” looking people too. I could hours of that crowd footage. Compared to these days with either overweight or overly muscled men, give me a skinny young hippie any day. I also loved the yocals- their response to it all was so amazing, but those kids largely earned that response in how amazingly peaceful the gathering was for the size (the pot sure didn’t hurt). I wonder about the gay activity? I know “free love” didn’t eliminate some hefty homophobia in that crowd but damn some of those guys must have been getting it on.

Please don’t say flabbergasted

Actually r34, laws against miscegenation had already been struck down by the Supreme Court 2 years earlier, in 1967.

[quote]Has Anyone Seen Woodstock

I keep wondering who "Sean Woodstock" is.

Were there ever miscegenation laws in New York? (I should just google that.)

My father was at Woodstock and so I heard a lot about it over the years. He got there very early with a friend. They scoped out a great camp site and set up their extensive (for that crowd) gear. Then Wavy Gravy came in, kicked them out and commandeered all their stuff. 50 years later, he’s still bitter. I’ve always imagined Wavy Gravy as some malign version of Waffles the Clown. Watching the documentary gave me context for my Dad’s story. My Dad can be a pretty tough guy when appropriate and it never made sense to me how he’d let some random trickster take his cooler, car and tent.

As for drugs, my Dad took speed to stay up for all three days once the concert started.

FWIW he’s still a hippie and he hates Fox News.

R10 I'm 50. My "mommy and daddy" were and are great, kind people. But so many others from that era got theirs and are now being total cunts and assholes about anyone else having a turn at bat.

No one is as assholescent, r40, age 50, as cunts like you who stereotype according to "era."

Old people didn't used to be so jealous against young people then. They accepted their aging and didn't carry a grudge that their youth was gone like the current elders.

These 400k people totally ruined the farmers land, but he still went on stage and thanked them and said he loved having them. That surprised me. Kindness all around. Woodstock 2019 never happened bc everyone was fighting before the festival even started.

R41 I don't stereotype by era, you fetid sow, but it's my experience that many people of that age behave that way. I have worked with them and see them all the time in my hometown.

Millennials get a lot of unearned labels because people stereotype them by age, but in the case of these old cunts, it's well deserved.

r22 when I was in 10th grade in 𝟭𝟵𝟲𝟱 friends would bring in drugs from their mothers medicine cabinet and sell them. I always laugh when they say the opioid epidemic started because people STARTED selling drugs from their home. They were selling them from home from the very beginning.

Baby Boomers could of been a great generation but they just became entitled, greedy, reckless fucking shitheads.

Yes. My impression was it was a really dumb idea (like all the airy-fairy ideas of the 'flower children'). It was a humanitarian crisis disguised as some kind of nirvana (they were all incredibly lucky there wasn't a mass electrocution from that thunderstorm).

The music wasn't even that great. Just the same stuff you'd hear in any concert, except you wouldn't have to sit starving and dehydrated in the mud, swatting mosquitos.

I also think the naturally lean bodies from back then looked better than the insanely worked-out gym bodies of today.

... aaaand 2019.

Amazing how overwhelmingly white the crowd was. It would be much more diverse today.

There was a shot of an amazingly gorgeous black woman who j think had a baby in her lap. But she had a massive flossy white/silver fro wig, I’ve probably seen something similar on the girls in Sly and the Family Stone. Was that a popular style, or just among the small hippie niche?

The entire Sly and the Family Stone performance was included in one of the Woodstock "reissue" movies, including longer takes of the show, and it is mind-blowing, a full-out funk performance, several years before Bootsy and George Clinton and Parliament. It's such a shame what happened to Sly Stone; he should have ended up really wealthy.

....

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I've also wondered about how much homosex was going on. There must have been some.

In the documentary they hired dozens and dozens of "local kids" (their words) to build the stage and other things on the site. Can you imagine that today? Local teenagers from the area doing all of that? What a different world.

[quote]Woodstock 2019 never happened bc everyone was fighting before the festival even started.

They should have learned their lesson from Woodstock 99 which was an overpriced, corporate fueled disaster that ended in violence and arson.

Woodstock 94 was probably closer in spirt to the original, but there were still complaints over the commercialization (it was aired on Pay Per View with a hefty price tag)

I know Joan Didion said this, but the hippie culture died after the Manson murders and I also think rock music died after Woodstock. It limped along for another 20 years. Cobain and Guns & Roses were the last of the rock stars

Rap music/ culture officially killed it by the end of the 90s

R58 Indeed, late 90s & early 2000s mainstream pop and rap/hip-hop killed entertainment culture altogether. 9/11 was the final nail in the coffin of any class, as it brought about the onslaught of blind patriotism, which spawned patriotic country (think Toby Keith) and was the beginning of a new wave of confederate flag embracing rural hillbillies, that ultimately led to Trump. And also those retard buff male & dumb slut stereotypes in movies (Stifler-American Pie), degradation of an entire generation. Class is dead! How depressing... I’m bumping the old ‘je nais se quoi’ thread now.

Rap sucks.

And a lot of people, back in the day, thought rock music sucked.

Can you imagine Boomers these days handing out donated food, eggs, sandwiches to young concertgoers?

Maybe if hell freezes over first.

[quote] Baby Boomers could of been

Oh dear

Here's the testimony of someone who attended Woodstock who was NOT enchanted by it:

As an authentic Woodstock attendee (or should I say victim?), I hate to rain on the procession of warm memories and good vibrations, but I will say this: wake up, folks. For some—maybe quite a few of us—who made the journey, Woodstock was, if not a nightmare, then a massive, teeming, squalid mess. If you like colossal traffic jams, torrential rain, reeking portable johns, barely edible food, and sprawling, disorganized crowds, then you would have found Woodstock a treat. For those of us who saw those things as a hassle, good music did not necessarily offset the discomfort. OK, for a lot of us who figured on buying tickets at the gate—and then arrived at the site to find that no box offices had been built—the fact that we got to hear top acts gratis was some compensation for the unpleasantness. And the spirit of the massive crowd, even if chemically mellowed by THC and other mood enhancers, was congenial, tolerant, and at times stoic. But in hindsight, what was Woodstock's bottom line? That 500,000 people jammed into in a mudhole didn't fight, riot, or annihilate each other? Is the fact that such a large crowd didn't become violent and start killing each other (albeit serenaded by sometimes brilliant musical performances) Woodstock's principal legacy? What's the big deal?

I can only imagine what would happen today if you put 500,000 young people in a field with no food, water or toilets in the pouring rain for four days. It would get really ugly really fast, imho.

So like Altamont, R65?

Altamont was only a few people, a modern Woodstock would be pandemonium, I think.

I doubt it. Boomers were more violent with constant riots and the highest criminal rates in the 20th century. I don't think I can think of any recent concert with actual murder and motorcycle gangs brawling.

A giant event like Woodstock with no food and facilities would be a lot different, with such a huge concentration of people. This wouldn't be like Coachella which has 1/10th of that many people and you're basically waited on hand and foot the whole time you're there.

I am forever bitter that I just missed out on Woodstock. I was a high school sophomore when it happened.

You could have attended, Berry. I was 14 the following summer and went to the Atlanta Pop Festival way down in South GA. The last place Hendrix performed, in the US, if I remember right. I had older cousins who took me along. I had a friend whose parents flatly forbade him to attend. That Saturday evening, the CBS Evening News ended its coverage of the event with a long, pensive shot of their son, standing in the crowd, totally zonked on LSD. They made him stay in his room for months after he got home.

[quote] Is the fact that such a large crowd didn't become violent and start killing each other (albeit serenaded by sometimes brilliant musical performances) Woodstock's principal legacy? What's the big deal?

That a half million people who were basically confined to a mud hole for 3 days with inadequate food, water, sanitation and were exposed to the elements including drenching thunderstorms, didn't riot.

Yes. That is an accomplishment. People seated in airplanes for 6 hour flights lose their shit all the time nowadays. Death and injury from road rage is a real thing. No one tried to shoot the singing stars. There were no massive fights. This was a group of people who were used to protest rallies. They sometimes turned over police cars in their anger about being sent to a war that existed only for the profit of rich people. Unlike today, they dust believe in killing other people or being killed to line someone else's pocket. And as Muhammad Ali said, "No Vietnamese ever called me n....."

So you had a half million uncomfortable people, all of whom were against a war, were anti-military, anti-establishment people, listening to Coubtry Joe and the Fish singing "1,2,3 what are we fighting for? .... there ain't no time to wonder why, whoopee we're all gonna die" and didn't lose it.

Think about that the next time you see a video of a fight over chicken McNuggets in McDonald's.

PS - have you heard that Russia uses algorithms to make those videos of white and black people arguing over things like charcoal BBQing go viral? I always wondered how those kinds of videos took off so fast and went to number one in Twitter in the blink of an eye

The police state would never allow it today. That is probably the biggest issue. And we are so used to being heavily policed, we would complain if it wasn’t.

People didn’t have guns like they do now, nor was killing someone seen as a reasonable response to a disagreement.

I was there, it was a mess, we were all (me and three high school buds) high the whole time, and we got home filthy, bug bitten, and sunburned. The biggest issue was Dave’s mother’s Rambler wagon. She was pissed off because she thought he was taking it for the afternoon. My parents weren’t happy after the fact given what they saw on TV but pleased I got home alive.

R74 Did Dave have a big cock? Squirt or dribble?

"Yes. That is an accomplishment."

No, really. They were all incapacitated by drugs, which made them docile. If that crowd had NOT been drug-addled, I can't imagine what would have happened. Mass rioting, assaults, arson, things like that probably.

No, OP I didn't watch this because it looked as though it would be all schmaltz and over-generalised hype.

Actually R77 , I expected it to be standard schmaltzy PBS donor-beg but was surprised to find it was fact-based and informative and filled with info and film I had not seen or heard before. Worthwhile watching,

It was worth the time watching, IMO if one has any interest in that event or that era.

It was very good.

"I'm a farmer...."

"Sunflower Polanski?! Your insulin is available at the Main Entrance!"

(Or something like that.)

Then there was Woodstock '99: We did it all for the nookie.

Woodstock, 1969: Skinny natural bodies, peace and love and a little bad acid.

Woodstock, 1999: Skinny natural bodies, fighting, throwing shit, and lighting bonfires in the crowd. [italic]Before the Red Hot Chili Peppers took the stage on Sunday night, the anti-violence group PAX distributed approximately 100,000 candles meant for an anti-gun vigil during the band’s anthem “Under the Bridge.” Instead, those candles were used by many to light bonfires that quickly grew out of control, sparking mass rioting.[/italic]

Had there been a Woodstock, 2019: A couple of jacked cuties but mostly whales with BMI's of 35 and above calling for an Uber to go home when the violence started.

[italic]“Whenever you get large groups of people together,” the singer-songwriter Jewel (below, Woodstock 1999) says, “you’re going to see exactly where our culture is at.”[/italic]

[quote] Has Anyone Seen Woodstock

In the pool.

It was really good - prior to watching it, I was like - what else is there to say? But there was a ton of footage that I've never seen before. Tons of it.

I was surprised because I felt like I had seen everything so many times. It really was a good and fresh perspective. I was pleasantly surprised - but also shocked at how much I had not seen and did not know.

Where did they all pee and poop? I didn't see any port-a-cans. Did they even have those back then?

[quote]I know Joan Didion said this, but the hippie culture died after the Manson murders

Manson and not Altamont?

[quote]I didn't see any port-a-cans. Did they even have those back then?

Of course they had them. There just wasn’t enough of them. Did you watch the documentary?

The equation the person used to determine how many they would need was grossly miscalculated.

Poor Joni Mitchell stayed in Manhattan. Then she wrote the song... but she didn't sing it.

File under: Dumb Career Moves

That Woodstock '99 is almost more interesting than the documentary.

R89 Uh, she did sing it, but CSNY stole it and got their entirely different version on the air first.

I doubt it was a matter of theft. She had "dated" at least 2 members of the band. "Our House," also on *Deja Vu* is about her, by G. Nash.

[quote]It was interesting - a moment, a glimmer of hope that better ideals could triumph.

What better ideals? A bunch of young kids didn't feel like paying for a concert, so they crashed the gate. How is that a better ideal?

There were no gates anymore. People walked onto the fields who never saw any gates - they were a mile away.

I wonder how much money Michael Lang and the other promoters made off of Woodstock. That wasn't mentioned in the doc.

It was mentioned they lost money, r95. Especially when they were effectively forced to let people in for free since there was no way to stop them without gates and guards.

But royalties from the album and other stuff. I wonder how much they made off of that.

Oh, I gotcha, r97.

R83 haha. Leave it to a triggered BoomerXerwhatever to wax nostalgic about how great the fucking disaster that was Woodstock 1999 was!