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    Woodstock Podcast Transcription

The name Woodstock is an accident. We didn’t call it Woodstock, it just became known as that.

So it..it was really just an exposition of the arts.

…from the way the site was prepared to the fact that anybody who came would be able….would be welcome if you didn’t have a ticket, if you didn’t have any money. There were free kitchens, there was a free stage there was free camping…

The media, the culture, everything was dominated by the establishment. And you got the feeling that you were alone in your thoughts, or maybe there were a few like you. Then all of a sudden, in August of 1969, there were millions like you. And for the first time people thought, ‘we are not just a little counter culture, we’re not just isolated others, we’re a whole movement’, and it…that became a generation.

Producers Joel Rosenman and Michael Lang had very little experience in planning a festival. Woodstock became their crash course in organizing.

It was a shock to all of us when, Tuesday before the festival, 50,000 people arrived just to get good seats. That was our maximum, and they arrived 3 days in advance.

Joel Rosenman:

You need sanitation, you need health, you need roads, transportation, you need security, you need shelter, you need food. The needs are the same as they would be for any city. In fact, population wise, Woodstock at the festival was the third largest city in New York State that weekend.

It was the first American people’s festival.

Singer and songwriter Richie Havens opened the festival on Friday, August 15th, 1969:

It really brought together sharing, I would say. Y’know, sharing all ages, all influences. I…I knew the world had changed when, in the movie, the.. New York Times guy is interviewing a policeman standing there and he’s saying ‘hey, you’re an officer around here, wha…what do you think of all of this stuff?’
He says, ‘What’s there to think about? They’re having a good time.’ Y’know…

…and he says ‘you mean you condone stuff like this?’

He says, ‘What do I have to condone? My daughter’s out there.’ The interesting thing was when he said, ‘But you’re a...you’re a cop, you’re a policeman.’ And he said, ‘no, no, no I’m chief of police.’ That one sentence was the glue that brought out our Ark. You know we went form ‘us’ to all of those people who say ‘What do you…what do you scared of them or what? Y’know. ‘Leave them alone, they’re having a good time.’

Two members of Sly and the Family Stone tell us about their show at Woodstock:

When we got there to play at Woodstock, we..we arrived by helicopter, it was like 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning.

Singer and keyboardist Rose Stone:

And so..of… of course it was dark. So by the time we went on it was still dark, and we went on right after Janis Joplin. We played and we pla…we were playing a very long time, and all of a sudden the sunrise started to come up there were just people everywhere, you couldn’t see land, and that …everybody kind of took a step back and like, ‘Wow!’ We didn’t realise that that many people were out there.

Bassist and singer Larry Graham:

And so, we..we do this run of music, and it’s building, and it’s building, and it’s building, and finally we come to the conclusion, and the response from the audience was something like I have never heard, or…or felt, in my life. It was just this roar from this sea of humanity that’s coming at us like full force.

Nobody knew, of course, that Woodstock would turn into what Woodstock has turned into.

Keyboardist and singer Rose Stone:

It was just another gig that we …we thought we were going to. But..er..but it turned out to be, of course, much more than that, a historic event.

Bassist Larry Graham:

The camaraderie of musicians that was going on backstage was just incredible. Everybody was just…it was just like, we were in different bands, but it was all one big band. Just segments of it going on at different times. But everybody had the same love, and everybody’s hoping that the other person is successful. Everybody’s happy that you just came off and your show was just slamming.

The type of music that everybody was playing was conducive to love and peace and unity and so, y’know, we were feeding off each other; the audience with the band, the band with the audience. And so backstage, all the bands had that same desire, had the same…they all wanted to go out there and spread the love.

Many groups got there big break at Woodstock, Santana was one of them.

Yeah, Santana was..er.. a surprise to everybody.

Woodstock producer Michael Lang:

Y’know, it’s one of those moments when you know a star is being born. You just see…see the reaction in the audience and then just out of left field because there wasn’t a lot of Latin rock around then. Erm…the performance was…was amazing. It just…you just knew that this band was going to be around for a long, long time.

Guitarist Carlos Santana:

Some people would prefer for me is to shut up and play the music. I can only express what’s in me. And it turns me on to turn people on, and to their own light. I’ve been doing this since ’64, ’67 with the music an..and my aspirations, and we are multi-dimensional warriors, we’re assigned and designed to utilize what God gave us to ignite, integrate, infuse and..and rearrange humans so they can claim, we can claim, what is already ours: The light.

What was happening in..in the 60’s wa…, especially as far as..er..as the younger people were concerned, there was a lot of tension. There was the Vietnam War going on. There was the st…the struggle for human rights, y’know,..er.. for..for…for African Americans, and for women..er.. and for poor people. Er..it was a …it was a time of great upheaval.

Graham Nash:

And what the singer-songwriters were doing were reacting to the headlines in the newspaper and the headlines in the news, and that became part of what we wrote about because it was happening to us as people. I mean, there was a lot to write about and…and we just were there at a time with an art form in our hands and our hearts and we utilized it to the best way that we knew.

Singer and songwriter Country Joe McDonald:

I never saw on fight or..or a real argument over anything in those three days. Everyone helped everyone else. At one point, ..er..in front of the stage, two guys got up and started to have a fight with each other. And the crowd separated, so they cleared a little space out so they could do it, y’know. Then the crowd began saying ‘don’t so that, cool out’, and then the guys cooled out and hugged each other, y’know, and everyone went around hugging each other and ..er.. saying ‘Oh I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ and stuff like that. And then they all sat down, y’know. That’s not normal behaviour at a..at a rock concert.

At Woodstock, Country Joe McDonald had a sing-a-long with almost a half a million people:

I was sort of an act of faith to relate to it as an audience. I mean, we were kind of an echo delay or something..err..on their response. You heard it, but it’s kind of a disconnected roar or something. And that’s why I …… I emplored the audience to..er.. sing louder because I couldn’t hear them.

Woodstock was a grandiose example of hippy counter culture ideals. But Richie Havens watched them work on a smaller scale too:

They had such a wonderful sense of caring for other people. They…they had free stores. You could walk in if you need a coat. You walk in, you take one, you leave. And these guys got up early in the morning and they sweep four blocks around, all of the garbage is not there anymore, y’know, and everybody’s saying ‘wow, it’s something different’. Yeah, it’s clean.

Singer and songwriter Richie Havens:

I could feel it, y’know, it’s…it’s something that we all were… waiting for… it’s just like Obama being elected…y’know,….or Kennedy being taken away from us. So, we had very much a..a..a genuine experience of our times back then. And I expect on the 40th it’s going to be, probably, 2,000 festivals saying ‘we want to be a part of this by just being somewhere’. We’re in a great time.

It rained a lot in Bethel, New York on the weekend of the festival:

There was water on the stage and the microphones weren’t grounded. So, er..when the vocalists were going up to the..er..microphones they would get shocks.

Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart:

The stage was collapsing, they said. Too many of our friends were on it jumping up and down. People were screaming ‘get off the st..stage’ it’s going to collapse. Half of the P.A. went out. It was a frightening experience on stage for us.

Chip Monk ran the production and stage design:

One of my production people thought it would be a good idea to get rid of the rain that had accumulated in this one piece of canvas that was over the downstage centre area where…er…where you would perform.

Well, normally what you would do is push it up in the centre by a two by four or, y’know, anything that you could find that could reach that piece of fabric. Unfortunately, this guy had a better idea; he taped his penknife to the end of a stick and cut a hole in the middle if it. And you wonder why Joe Cocker looked like he did? The entire contents on Cocker!. I…I’m not sure whether that enhanced, helped or degraded his performance.

Jimi Hendricks closed the festival with a set at 9am, Monday August 18th 1969:
Pete Fornatale wrote Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock:

As good as the first part of the set was, there was nothing in any of it to suggest what was about to come next. Without any warning, your ears tell your brain that you’re hearing the opening notes of one of the most familiar, one of the most played, one of the most sung songs in the nation’s history: The Star Spangled Banner.

Your ears are also telling your brain that, depending on your politics, you are hearing one of the most profane, or one of the most profound versions of that song that you have ever heard. It is searing, it is soaring, it is stirring, it is majestic, it is mocking, it is shocking, it is appealing, it is appalling, it is calming, it’s alarming, it is Jimi Hendricks playing the Vietnam War on the strings of his white solid body electric guitar, with Taps thrown in for good measure.

The film, which turned out to be one of the biggest films for Warner Brothers that year and probably still the biggest grossing documentary ever, was an after thought.

Joel Rosenman co-produced the Woodstock festival:

It seemed like such an imaginary idea until we got much closer to the festival. And when I say much closer I mean Wednesday of..of that week: Same old story for Woodstock.

The documentary Woodstock, released in 1970, and singer-songwriter Richie Haven saw its effect far and wide:

I went to South America, to Rio, and the movie had just come out there. And one week later they had their own Woodstock. It was bigger than ours. They just went for it.

Over the years, many Woodstock-inspired festivals appeared. According to festival co-producer Joel Rosenman, Woodstock helped close the proverbial generation gap, for a while anyway:

The older generation watched kids get together in mud, chaos, disarray. And there was a lot of ‘tut-tutting’ about it and how ‘wasn’t this just like the younger generation’. And I think the New York Times called it ‘nightmare in the Catskills’.

But, very soon after that, the same event was characterised as a miracle at Bethel. The difference was that the older generation watched the younger generation pull itself together. They built a community. That community functioned. It took care of itself.
It took car of its neighbours. It was responsible to all of the needs that arise in more or less difficult circumstances.

The older generation was impressed at this younger generation which had previously thought maybe didn’t have the maturity, or the wisdom, or the consideration for others. They suddenly felt that this was a generation worthy of respect. And they started listening to what that generation had to say. I think th…there was a..a new respect on both sides, both generations, and a new exchange of ideas. That led to some pretty significant changes in the 1970s.

The material on this podcast was adapted from the Woodstock podcasts produced by Joyride Media and posted by Andy Cahn on
https://podcasts.legacyrecordings.com