Woodstock 1969 has long been a highly mythologised point in time. It is celebrated by droves as the defiant last stand of the hippie movement – which was fighting a losing battle against the changing zeitgeist. Yet, despite such fanfare, many who were there, including some of the most prominent acts to appear at that iconic weekend, have slated it.
While we romanticise the festival for obvious reasons, for most people in attendance, it was not a glorious swan song of the counterculture, but a shameless, chaotic, and mud-soaked cash grab. Famously, a young Billy Joel attended, but left early due to the unhygienic conditions. Elsewhere, The Who, one of the most significant acts on the bill, detested being there, with the mud and hellish pervasiveness of LSD being so immense, that guitarist Pete Townshend, who was there with his six-month-old baby, said it “changed me.”
Backing this up, frontman Roger Daltrey recalled: “Woodstock wasn’t peace and love. There was an awful lot of shouting and screaming going on. By the time it all ended, the worst sides of our nature had come out.”
These are just two deeply sobering takes from those who experienced it, which will undoubtedly have made their peers who weren’t on hand feel less bad about missing out on such a supposedly historic moment. While the bill for Woodstock was undoubtedly stacked, featuring the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Who, CSNY, Jefferson Airplane, Santana and more, many of the era’s biggest stars such as The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, and The Who were nowhere to be seen.
Those who weren’t there had their reasons for not attending, such as John Lennon of The Beatles being banned from America. Elsewhere, Bob Dylan, the man dubbed ‘The Voice of a Generation’, who musically and spiritually led the hippie movement into the future, was also nowhere to be seen, a surreal reality given he would have been a fitting headliner. However, at the time, the excitement for the festival was not what fans today might expect, as other more established festivals took precedence, such as The Isle of Wight Festival the following week, which many turned down Woodstock to play at, and travel across to the UK.
Allegedly, Dylan, who had been living in Woodstock in upstate New York for a while by the time the festival coalesced, was also worried that the masses of longhairs descending on the town might disrupt the tranquility he’d found there. Accordingly, he was more than willing to travel to the UK.
Although he wasn’t there, when he spoke to the Sunday Times in 1984, Dylan shared his negative view of Woodstock and warned against any rose-tinted take on the 1960s: “America is not like that anymore. But what happened, happened so fast that people are still trying to figure it out. The TV media wasn’t so big then.”
He said, “It’s like the only thing people knew was what they knew; then suddenly people were being told what to think, how to behave, there’s too much information.”
“It just got suffocated,” Dylan continued. “Like Woodstock – that wasn’t about anything. It was just a whole new market for tie-dyed T-shirts. It was about clothes. All those people are in computers now.”
Interestingly, ‘The Bard’ changed his tune, and ten years later, he played at the equally chaotic Woodstock ‘94. That doomed event captured the spirit of America at that time, which was a precursor to the grave destruction of the 1999 event.
