Woodstock did not even occur in Woodstock.
The fabled music pageant, seen as one of many seminal cultural occasions of the Sixties, happened 96.5km away in Bethel, New York, a fair smaller village than Woodstock. It is a becoming misnomer for an occasion that has turn into as a lot legend as actuality – and has much less to do with location than the reminiscences it evokes a couple of society’s frame of mind on the shut of a jumbled decade.
An estimated 450,000 individuals converged on a swath of land owned by dairy farmer Max Yasgur to attend an Aquarian Exposition promising “three days of peace, love and music” from Aug 15 to 17, 1969. Most have been youngsters or younger adults – individuals now approaching the twilight of their lives in an period, the place solely a small portion of the inhabitants has dwelling reminiscences of the Sixties.
That ticking clock is why the Museum at Bethel Woods, situated on the positioning of the pageant, is immersed in a five-year challenge to sift information from the legends and gather firsthand Woodstock reminiscences earlier than they fade away. It is a quest that has taken museum curators on a cross-country pilgrimage to report and protect the recollections of those that have been there.
“You might want to seize the historical past from the mouths of the individuals who had the direct expertise,” says music journalist Rona Elliot, 77, who has been working as one of many museum’s “group connectors”. Elliot has her personal tales in regards to the pageant; she was there, working with organisers like Michael Lang, who entrusted her together with his archives earlier than his loss of life in 2022.
Woodstock, says Elliot, is “like a jigsaw puzzle – a panoply of all the things that occurred within the ’60s”.
A QUEST FOR ORAL HISTORIES
Woodstock attendees have carried out a whole lot of interviews via the a long time, significantly on main pageant anniversaries. However the Bethel Woods museum is plunging deeper with a challenge that started in 2020, counting on strategies much like these of the late historian Studs Terkel, who produced a whole lot of oral histories about what it was prefer to dwell via the Nice Despair and World Battle II.
“There’s a distinction between somebody being interviewed for a paper or a documentary and having an oral historical past catalogued and preserved in a museum,” says Neal Hitch, senior curator and director of the Museum At Bethel Woods.
“We needed to go to individuals the place they’re. When you simply name somebody on the telephone, they are not fairly positive what to say once we ask you to inform us about these private, personal reminiscences from a pageant when they might have been 18 or 19.”
To search out and meet individuals keen to inform their Woodstock tales, the museum acquired grants totaling greater than US$235,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Providers – sufficient cash to pay for curators and group connectors equivalent to Elliot to journey the nation and report the tales.
The odyssey started in Santa Fe, New Mexico – dwelling to the Hog Farm that supplied hippie volunteers equivalent to Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney and Lisa Regulation to assist feed the Woodstock crowd.
Museum curators have travelled to Florida, hopped on a Flower Energy cruise ship and visited Columbus, Ohio, earlier than making a California swing earlier this yr that included a San Francisco group centre situated close to the previous properties of pageant performers Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Useless.
Richard Schoellhorn, now 77, made the journey from his Sebastopol, California, dwelling to San Francisco to debate his expertise at Woodstock. He was initially employed to be a safety guard on the ticketing sales space when the pageant was speculated to happen in Wallkill, New York, earlier than a group backlash prompted a late change to the Bethel website.
Schoellhorn nonetheless reported for work in Bethel, solely to promptly uncover his providers weren’t going to be wanted as a result of the pageant turned so overwhelmed that organisers stopped promoting tickets.
“I used to be strolling round at Woodstock and Hugh Romney comes as much as me and says, ‘Are you working?’” Schoellhorn recalled to The Related Press earlier than sitting all the way down to have his oral historical past recorded. ”And I am going, ‘No, I simply obtained fired!’ He goes, ’Properly, would you prefer to volunteer?’”
Schoellhorn wound up working in a tent set as much as help individuals having dangerous experiences on hallucinogenic medication that they had taken. He wound up getting stoned himself whereas revelling within the first live performance he’d ever attended.
“It felt like everybody was in the identical freaking boat,” Schoellhorn stated. “There wasn’t like one part the place individuals have been wealthy. No one was particular there, proper from the get-go.”
Earlier than attending Woodstock, Schoellhorn stated he was a loner intent on pursuing a profession in advertising and marketing. After Woodstock, he turned so extroverted that he wound up dwelling in a Colorado commune for a number of years earlier than spending 35 years as a dialysis technician.
MEMORIES OF UP-CLOSE EXPERIENCES
One other Woodstock attendee, Akinyele Sadiq, additionally got here to see the curators in San Francisco to excavate his reminiscences of watching the pageant from 7.6m away from the stage.
Though the pageant wasn’t supposed to start till a Friday, Sadiq departed on a Bethel-bound bus on a Wednesday. When the bus broke down, he hitched a trip that delivered him to the pageant website by midday Thursday, permitting him to assert a spot so close to the stage that he’s seen in photographs taken in the course of the performances.
By the point he left Bethel a couple of days later, in a hearse {that a} fellow festival-goer had transformed right into a van, Sadiq had modified.
“Earlier than Woodstock, I did not have actual path. I principally did not have a number of pals however I knew I used to be on the lookout for peace and justice, and wished to be with artistic individuals who have been trying to make the world a greater place,” Sadiq, now 72, informed the AP earlier than having his oral historical past recorded.
“Earlier than Woodstock, for those who have been dwelling in just a little city, you thought there is perhaps a dozen individuals on the market you would possibly be capable to get together with. However then you definitely realised there was a minimum of a half one million of us. It simply gave me hope.”
Hitch says curators have heard many life-changing experiences whereas accumulating greater than 500 oral histories to this point – and are satisfied they may amass much more in the course of the subsequent yr. Neighborhood connectors hit Florida final month and are heading to Boston in March and New York Metropolis in early April. That will probably be adopted by return journeys to New Mexico and Southern California.
The museum intends to concentrate on discovering and interviewing pageant attendees scattered throughout New York state, the place Hitch estimates roughly half the Woodstock crowd nonetheless lives.
The museum will spend 2025 combing via the oral histories earlier than turning to particular tasks equivalent to reuniting pals who attended the pageant collectively however now dwell in numerous elements of the nation.
Elliot is satisfied – “each karmically and cosmically” – that the oral historical past challenge is one thing she was meant to do.
“I need this to be a educating instrument,” she says. “I do not need historians telling the story of a non secular occasion that simply gave the impression to be a musical occasion.”
