They say if you can remember the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair from 1969, you probably weren’t there. But some of the musicians who played the festival beg to differ.
Fifty-five years later, the performers’ memories are clear as mud — well, make that about mud, as most of them well recall the rain-soaked wallow that was Max Yasgur’s farm during those “Days of Peace & Music” from Aug. 15-18, 1969. Some of braver ones even slogged their way onto the grounds to experience Woodstock from their fans’ point of view. And they certainly remember being flown into the site by helicopter as well as the late-running performance schedule and a backstage area where most were warned not to consume anything that wasn’t in sealed bottles or packages — unless they wanted to be on another kind of trip than they one they’d taken to get there.
Ten Years After drummer Ric Lee has good reason to be clear in his recollections; not only is it a significant chapter in his 2019 memoir From Headstocks To Woodstock, but on Friday (Aug. 16) the group releases Woodstock 1969, its entire six-song performance from Sunday, Aug. 17, 1969 — including a rendition of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl” that had to be restarted when Alvin Lee’s guitar was out of tune. It was a ferocious hour on stage for the British blues-rock band, and the epic version of “I’m Going Home” — immortalized in the Woodstock concert documentary that came out the following year — elevated the quartet’s fortunes during the ensuing decade.
“Crikey, we played as well as we could under the circumstances, I think,” Lee, the younger brother of late Ten Years After guitarist Alvin Lee, tells Billboard. “And ‘I’m Going Home,’ you can see it in the movie. When we went to see it a year later at a cinema on Wilshire Boulevard…a lot of the other acts were there, and when ‘I’m Going Home’ played everybody in the theater gave us a standing ovation, which was incredible from our peers. Alvin and I talked about it a few times; we wondered what it would have bene like if, for example, ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ had been used instead of ‘I’m Going Home’ — although it’s very different to speculate about those things.”
Lee says TYA was not aware of how significant Woodstock would be leading up to the festival. The group was on the road in the U.S. and was even resistant to adding it to the schedule, but its agent, the late Frank Barsalona, persisted. “Chris Wright, our manager, kept turning it down,” Lee says. “Frank kept saying, ‘You really ought to get on this. This is gonna be a big festival.’ He finally said, ‘Look, Janis (Joplin) has signed, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are gonna do it and (Jimi) Hendrix is doing it, so you’d be crazy not to do it.’ Finally Chris caved in, and we did it.”
That meant flying to New York at “some daft time” after a show the previous night in St. Louis, then taking cars to the Holiday Inn, aka “Tranquility Base,” in nearby Goshen, N.Y., where the musicians were lodging. “Janis and her band were in the room, a bunch of other people,” says Lee, who was traveling with his first wife. “I had a carry-on bag with me, a rucksack; I put that down on the floor (in the lobby) and was gonna use that as a pillow and get some sleep, but then they said, ‘You’ve got to go to the site.’” TYA was pushed off its initial helicopter site by Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, but the next one got the band to the site on time to watch Joe Cocker perform — and also to be warned “don’t eat anything that’s not been cooked ’cause we got hepatitis breaking out.” The musicians sheltered in trailers during the Sunday afternoon rainstorm that pushed TYA’s slot into the evening.
Despite the “Schoolgirl” snafu (the aborted attempt is also included on the Woodstock 1969 album), Lee says TYA was satisfied with its performance but was more than ready to get out of Bethel, N.Y. — which was an adventure in itself. Though the roads were blocked by cars abandoned by concert goers, Lee found a limousine driver who was ready to get out of Dodge, too. “We found a state trooper who was very helpful,” Lee recalls. “We said, ‘Can you find us a way out of here?’ ‘I can, but you’ve got to be very careful. You’re going to be driving between the tents, so you have to be careful not to hit the ropes — and there are people sleeping between the tents, so you’ve got to be careful not to run them over.’ So we did that and got out of there.”
The restaurant at Tranquility Base was closed, however, so the by-then famished band found a late-night diner down the road. “The waitress said, ‘What would you like?’ We said, ‘Everything!’” Lee says with a laugh. “So she went away and came back with food. Then we had to jump back in the limousines and leg it down to New York. When we got there they’d sold our rooms ’cause we were so late, so we managed to find another hotel that could put us up, then the next day we drove down to Baltimore to get back on our tour.”
It was a lot to go through, but like many of its Woodstock peers, TYA has no regrets about being part of the experience. “Especially when the film came out, we were suddenly on the world stage, and we started playing in Japan and all sorts of other places,” says Lee, who’s planning to publish an updated edition of his memoir. “Our U.K. and European audiences got larger. There was a definite shift that was the result of playing (at Woodstock).”
Seen, Felt, Touched, Healed
While The Who were already enjoying Stateside popularity when they brought the rock opera Tommy to Woodstock, Pete Townshend — who was also cajoled into accepting the gig — felt a boost from the festival and the film, too.
“I would have preferred not to have done it,” Townshend told us some years ago, “but it did actually cement our career in America. And then the film came out and it re-cemented it. Tommy was finished; it had sold maybe a million and a half copies. Woodstock put it back on the charts, and then the film came out and Tommy sold another four million copies. It was a huge part of our career, and I was very grateful we were there.”
But, Townshend added, “I can’t say I enjoyed it. It was chaos, wasn’t it? It was completely nuts. What was going on off the stage was just beyond comprehension — stretchers and dead bodies and people throwing up and people having bad trips. And all they could say was, ‘Isn’t this fantastic?! Isn’t this beautiful?!’ I thought the whole of America had gone mad at that moment.”
The Who frontman Roger Daltrey, meanwhile, remembers a scene that “was muddy, smell, but great to see old friends.” Fifty-five years later, however, he has a different perspective on what made Woodstock great.
‘”I’ve always felt that the stars of Woodstock were the audience, never the bands,” he explains. “It was the audience that created a wave that…To me it was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War, even though casualty-wise it got worse. But it was start of making the government realize that you’re gonna have to get to grips with this, ’cause they’re gonna have a rebellion on their hands. It was the Woodstock audience that did not, not the bands.”
Souls Sacrificed
Carlos Santana echoes Daltrey’s feelings about Woodstock’s impact beyond the music. The band that bore his surname was one of the unquestioned highlights of the festival, with a fiery, reputation-making Saturday performance that preceded the release of its debut album by a week — and also translated well to film with a galvanizing rendition of “Soul Sacrifice.”
“Woodstock is a spiritual frequency, a spiritual event,” says Santana, who’s used footage and sound from the film during his own shows for quite some time. “When you think of Jesus walking around on the mountain, passing out gluten-free bread and mercury-free fish — people made Woodstock sort of like that kind of event. It’s out of time. Woodstock was not a commercial, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola event. It was three days of unity, harmony, oneness to bring awareness to equality, fairness and justice. The people at Woodstock, if you look at them, they’re hippies who believe in something different than the corrupt corporations of religions and politicians. We believed then and we believe now that peace is possible in our lifetime, on this planet. That’s why Woodstock is still relevant. We still need peace.”
Santana, who also performed at Woodstock ’94, recalls arriving at the site and seeing the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia “already playing his guitar on the hill, with this beautiful, blissful smile on his face.” As for the crowd, he remembers “an ocean of flesh and hair and teeth and arms and eyes. Woodstock was like a living ocean of people. Then you could just feel the sound, which had a different kind of reverberation when it bounced of the people and came back to you.”‘
Long Time Gone
The four members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were admittedly nervous when they finally took the stage at 3 a.m. Monday for only their second performance as a quartet — including both acoustic and electric sets. As David Crosby noted years ago, “Everybody we knew or cared about in the music industry was there. They were heroes to us — The Band and Hendrix and The Who…They were all standing behind us in a circle, like, ‘OK, you’re the new kids on the block. Show us.’” Stills, in fact, told the crowd that the group was “scared sh-tless.”
Graham Nash concurred more recently that, “Stephen was pretty nervous that night, but I thought we did well. I didn’t give a sh-t how many people were there; I had already been through that with the Hollies for six or seven years before I had ever met David or Stephen. My fondest memory was playing ‘Guinnevere’ with David, just his guitar and the two voices trying to reach however many thousands of people were there.” Another good memory, he adds, was that “the first thing we did was go to John Sebastian’s tent and get high on weed. (Woodstock) was a brilliant piece of work. It should not have happened as well as it did, and I think that (co-producer) Michael Lang really put his all into it and pulled it off. It was a wonderful idea, and it came off really well.”
Brotherly Love
Edgar Winter got to experience Woodstock “from both sides,” as a performer and a fan. The former was playing three songs with his older brother Johnny Winter and his band on Sunday at midnight, after The Band. But Winter, who had yet to release his first solo album and launch his band White Trash, also spent time in the field, checking out the other performers.
“I loved Hendrix,” Winter reports. “I loved Sly. I loved Richie Havens, Crosby, Stills & Nash. Janis, of course; we knew her from back home (in Texas). There was so much great music. It was just an amazing diversity of music; I enjoy festivals that are organized like that as opposed to the ones that say, ‘OK, we’re gonna get three blues guitar players.…’”
Winter also recalls that, “There was no real schedule. It was just organized confusion, like whoever they could find that was capable of getting on stage and doing a performance was next. That was crazy.”
Winter also credits his own time on the Woodstock stage as putting his career into motion in earnest. “Johnny was the guy who had the ambition and the drive, much more than me,” Winter says. “I had been more interested in jazz and classical, but he had decided he was gonna be a star at a very early age. After Woodstock, that indelible moment of being on stage in front of hundreds of thousands of people, this endless ease of humanity, that made me realize music can be so much more than just my personal world. It can reach out and transcend so many boundaries and bring people together. That’s when I thought about being an artist, writing songs and doing something in popular music, and the rest is history.”
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