Rock History week Part 4: Woodstock and Altamont

The Hippy era, in essence runs for about two and a half to three years, as with all great musical and cultural trends, it had a fairly brief lifespan. The era was at its zenith in 1969 with the Woodstock Musical Festival, in New York State, at its time, the largest free music festival in history. It was billed as 'Five Days of Music and Peace', implicit in the title was an opposition to the Vietnam War. The Who were one of the headlining acts.



Rolling Stone has called it "the most famous event in rock history." The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, on a 600-acre farm in the township of Bethel, New York, from August 15-18, 1969, represents more than a peaceful gathering of 500,000 people and 32 musical performances. Woodstock has become an idea that has suffused popular culture, politically and socially, as much as musically. Joni Mitchell, who didn't attend but wrote an anthemic song about it, once said, "Woodstock was a spark of beauty" where half-a-million kids "saw that they were part of a greater organism." According to Michael Lang, one of four young men who formed Woodstock Ventures to produce the festival, "That's what means the most to me – the connection to one another felt by all of us who worked on the festival, all those who came to it, and the millions who couldn't be there but were touched by it."

Lang met Artie Kornfeld, a Capitol Records A&R man and songwriter, in late 1968, and the two envisioned producing a festival in Woodstock, New York.and building a building a recording studio there. In search of financing they connected with John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, a pair of young venture capitalists who were already building Media Sound studios, a large-scale recording facility in New York City. In February of 1969, the four men incorporated Woodstock Ventures, Inc., and they began work on the festival. Soon, the conservative townsfolk of Wallkill became alarmed by the growing number of longhairs arriving to prepare the festival grounds, and a number of lawsuits were filed to stop the festival. After weeks of tension, town meetings, and legal maneuverings, Woodstock Ventures were refused permission to produce the festival.The studio project was put on hold so they could focus all their energy on saving the festival. Miraculously, 600 bucolic acres belonging to White Lake dairyman Max Yasgur, in the township of Bethel, New York, were discovered after Lang recieved a call from a local motel owner Elliott Tiber the day after the Wallkill site was lost. Work rapidly got underway to turn the rural acreage into a concert site with camping areas for 200,000. Three weeks later, during the week of August 11, thousands of people from all over the country began flocking to the festival site.

By Wednesday, August 13, the lush green bowl in front of the massive 75-foot stage was already filled with some 60,000 people. On Friday the roads were so clogged with cars that the only way most artists could reach the festival was by helicopter from a nearby airstrip. Though over 100,000 tickets were sold prior to the festival weekend, they became unnecessary: The fences and gates were never finished and people simply swarmed over those that were in place. "It's a free concert from now on!" was announced from the stage. As John Roberts later pointed out, "It took us eleven years to break even, but it was a success in every other way."

The music was scheduled to start at 4 p.m. on August 15, and just after 5 it did, thanks to New York-born folksinger Richie Havens. His improvised and rhythmic "Freedom" set the tone for the weekend. "The vibe at Woodstock was an expression of the times," says Joel Rosenman. "Energized by repugnance for a senseless war and for the entrenched discrimination of the establishment, a spirited but nonviolent counterculture was sweeping the country. That counterculture burst into bloom like the mother of all Mother's Day bouquets at Woodstock."

The occasional cloudburst delayed the primarily acoustic music as Friday night wore on, but eight acts, plus a swami, made it to the stage. Around 2 a.m, Joan Baez closed the first night with the spiritual "We Shall Overcome."

Saturday boasted the most music of the weekend, starting just after noon and continuing until Sunday at dawn (with Jefferson Airplane performing "morning maniac music," as described by Grace Slick). Highlights included the then-unknown Santana in mid-afternoon, and that night spectacular back-to-back performances by Sly and the Family Stone and The Who. Blues-rock was featured via Canned Heat and Mountain, followed by such legendary California-based artists as the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Janis Joplin. Sunday featured another long span of music, though violent thunderstorms wreaked havoc just after Joe Cocker and The Grease Band's finale of "A Little Help From My Friends." The music was delayed until late afternoon but carried on throughout the night with more highlights including the Texas bluesman Johnny Winter and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (their second gig). On Monday morning at 8:30, Jimi Hendrix closed out the festival. His magnificent, improvisational version of "The Star Spangled Banner" has come to symbolize the weekend.

Around 10:30 a.m. on August 18, the festival came to an end. The innovative concert film Woodstock, directed by Michael Wadleigh, was released in March of 1970 and took the festival's message around the world. The movie documented a community of a half million people who managed to peacefully co-exist over three days of consistent rain, food shortages, and a lack of creature comforts. "Woodstock is a reminder that inside each of us is the instinct for building a decent, loving community, the kind we all wish for," according to Joel Rosenman. "Over the decades, the history of that weekend has served as a beacon of hope that a beautiful spirit in each of us ultimately will triumph."

Recordings of the music played that weekend still evoke the magic and power felt by those who were there. "It was a privilege to help found something that has meant so much to so many," adds Rosenman. "Woodstock turned out to be a sort of permanent relative of the Family of Man—the adventuresome, kind-hearted uncle you're always happy to see at Thanksgiving and graduation. I'm really grateful that we both ended up in the same family."

Two days after Woodstock ended, the New York Times ran an editorial praising what had happened at Bethel (a reversal from a previous editorial condemning the festival). It concluded with a quote from Shakespeare's Henry V, which seems appropriate upon the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock: "He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a-tiptoe when this day is nam'd."


If The Woodstock Festival captured the counterculture of the 1960s, Altamont Festival, later in 1969, killed it.
In a response to the success of Woodstock, the Rolling Stones planned a music festival at Altamont Speedway in California. The event had a line up that included the Rolling Stones themselves, the Greatful Dead and Carlos Santana. However the decision by the Stones to employ Hells Angels as security after the other security contractors pulled out proved fateful.
By some accounts, the Hells Angels were hired as security by the Rolling Stones, on the recommendation of the Grateful Dead, for $500 worth of beer — a story that has been denied by parties who were directly involved. According to Rolling Stones' road manager Sam Cutler, "the only agreement there ever was ... the Angels would make sure nobody tampered with the generators, but that was the extent of it. But there was no 'They're going to be the police force' or anything like that."



Hells Angels member Sweet William recalled this exchange between Cutler and himself at a meeting prior to the concert, where Cutler had asked them to provide security:
"We don't police things. We're not a security force. We go to concerts to enjoy ourselves and have fun."
"Well, what about helping people out - you know, giving directions and things?"
"Sure, we can do that."

Since LSD evangelist Ken Kesey had invited the Hells Angels to one of his outdoor Acid Tests, the bikers had been perceived by the hippies as akin to "noble savages", a naieve assessment if the book Hells Angels by Hunter S. Thompson is anything to go by. These were members of California's most marginalised underclasses and had not taken part in the great peaceful intellectual flowerings of the 1960s, civil rights and ban the bomb had very much passed them by. They were considered "outlaw brothers of the counterculture". They had provided security at Grateful Dead shows without reported violence. Further, the Rolling Stones may have been misled by their experience with a British contingent of self-described "Hells Angels", a non-outlaw group of admirers of American biker-gear, who had provided nonviolent security at a free concert the Stones had given earlier that year in Hyde Park, London.

Although peaceful at first, over the course of the day, the mood of both the crowd and the Angels became progressively agitated, intoxicated and violent. The Angels had been drinking their free beer all day in front of the stage, and most were highly drunk. Fueled by LSD and amphetamines, the crowd had also become antagonistic and unpredictable, attacking each other, the Angels, and the performers. By the time the Rolling Stones took stage in the early evening, the mood had taken a decidedly ugly turn as numerous fights had erupted between Angels and crowd members and within the crowd itself. Denise Jewkes of local San Francisco rock band the Ace of Cups, six months pregnant, was hit in the head by an empty beer bottle thrown from the crowd and suffered a skull fracture. The Angels proceeded to arm themselves with sawed-off weighted pool cues and motorcycle chains to drive the crowd further back from the stage.

Some of the Hell's Angels got into a scuffle with 18-year-old Meredith Hunter when he attempted to get onstage with other fans. One of the Hell's Angels grabbed Hunter's head, punched him, and chased him back into the crowd. Footage from the documentary that was filmed at the concert shows Hunter drawing a long-barreled revolver from his jacket, and Hells Angel Alan Passaro, armed with a knife, running at Hunter from the side, parrying the gun with his left hand and stabbing him with his right. In the film, Passaro is seen delivering only two stabs, but he is reported to have stabbed Hunter five times in the upper back. Witnesses also reported Hunter was stomped on by several Hells Angels while he was on the ground. Passaro was eventually tried for murder but acquitted.

Many people looked at the Altamont festival as the end of the hippy dream, it was the argument that conservatives put forward, that too much freedom, too much experimentation led to man's worst instincts coming to the fore. The argument of the hippy generation was that man set free was inherently good and peaceful. The establishment pointed to Altamont and begged to differ. It seems that the Hippy era was drawing to a close anyway, in three years America's direct involvement in Vietnam had ended, many people who had experimented with drugs either moved on from them or beccame lost in addiction, and for many great acts of the 1960s, The Greatful dead, the Byrds, Bob Dylan and Crosby Stills and Nash, psychedlia had had its day, the next albums all the above acts made were country albums.

Rock music critic Robert Christgau wrote in 1972 that "Writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an era ended"

Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director's Cut (40th Anniversary Two-Disc Special Edition)Music from the Original Soundtrack and More: WoodstockWoodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director's Cut (40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition and BD-Live) [Blu-ray]Woodstock: 40 Years on: Back to Yasgur's Farm (6CD, Limited Edition)Woodstock 69 Music Festival 3 Days of Peace & Music Charcoal T-shirt Tee (Medium)