25 YEARS LATER - FORGETTING WOODSTOCK

AKRON BEACON JOURNAL
Copyright (c) 1994, Beacon Journal Publishing Co.

SOURCE: BY STEPHANIE SALTER, San Francisco Examiner

About 3 feet by 2 feet, it hangs on my office wall, the best thing I remember about Woodstock.

It's a large black-and-white photograph of a comely female hippie, sitting under the Woodstock poster that advertised "3 days of peace & music." A college chum shot the photo in 1969 in Greenwich Village, not at the Woodstock Festival or anywhere near it. That's why I like it.

I was at Woodstock. I hated Woodstock. I left Woodstock about 16 hours after it started and felt as if I had gone over the Berlin Wall. We are fast approaching the 25th anniversary -- August 15-17 -- of the rock festival that launched a brave new world, so the nation is awash in Woodstock nostalgia. Commemorative festivals are set for this weekend, the largest in Saugerties, N.Y. They only heighten the recollection and deepen the resultant sentimental doo-doo.

Lest I mislead, I don't think it's cool to remember Woodstock as I do. It's a drag. I mean, you saw the movie, read the Rolling Stone magazine testimonials. Maybe you know someone who wrote a doctoral thesis on what it meant. Woodstock was a big deal.

To say you were there, 25 years after the fact, still earns you a kind of badge of honor. (Although, as with Babe Ruth's 714th home run, an awful lot more people say they were there than could have been.) But, to say you were there and that you hated it and left on the second day -- well, that earns you a lot of barely veiled contempt.

People hear I was at Woodstock (OK, sometimes at a party I'll let it slip), and they want to know who I saw perform. I don't remember, I always say, which is the truth. I cannot tell you whether I saw Joan Baez, Richie Havens or what. I could almost swear I didn't see Janis Joplin. I know I didn't see Jimi Hendrix. But I have no idea who I did see on that teeny-tiny little lighted stage so far down the muddy hill.

Wow, people always want to know, did you forget because you were really tripping out on acid? I wish, I usually say, which isn't true. But it's close. If I had been on any kind of drug (stronger than the oregano-grade of grass my friends and I brought to the festival), I probably wouldn't have left Woodstock 16 hours after I got there.

If I had been tripping, maybe I wouldn't have noticed the mud. Maybe I wouldn't have cared that it rained incessantly on a half-million kids who hadn't brought camping equipment. Maybe I'd have laughed off the fact that, despite the promises, there was no fresh drinking water, no toilet facilities, no "free rice kitchens." And there was no way to turn one's car around and get out of the Bethel-White Lake area.

But I wasn't tripping, and I did notice. I was so miserable, Jimi and Janis themselves could have strolled up to our car and said, "Hey, man, what do you wanna hear?" and it wouldn't have made any difference to me. I haven't even mentioned the borderline dysentery I did bring back as a memento. Nobody at any cocktail party ever wants to hear about that.

Combing through the retrospectives written lately about Woodstock, I came across an ironic item. John Scher, the promoter of this weekend's big do in Saugerties, reminisced to the Chicago Tribune about his own Woodstock

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