Woodstock 45 years ago
springSome people invited me to go ... but I was a sports guy and a Nixon supporter.
Didn't really think I'd fit in.
Often think back and say to myself, 'shoulda gone, what were you thinking?' What an experience it would have been. I did like the music by groups like Crosby, Stills and Nash and all that late 60s scene, I understood what they were about to some extent, but by the standards of my generation at the time, I was rather conservative.
I don't think I've changed much, but now people tell me I'm "too liberal."
I'm as idealistic as I've ever been, while some of those freaky friends at that time became hard core capitalists. Go figure.
There was that line in Boys of Summer, by Don Henley:
"out on the road today, saw a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac.
voice inside my head said don't look back, you can never look back."
Andy Loigu I was there and I can tell you that being rained on and sleeping in mud was not as fun as people seem to remember LOL. I only had a one day ticket but once the fencing came everyone stayed for the 3 days. The music was incredible and the people were mellow and great, so helpful to one another. If you saw the movie I am in it, full of mud, standing by the mudslide waiting another turn to slide. You are only young once and that was an experience that I will never forget.......I still get goose bumps listening to Jimi Hendrix doing "All Along the Watchtower".
MK 
Christine hmmm where was I --- definitely not too young - probably working as a camp counselor --
made it to a few Newport Folk Festivals though----doubt I would have been comfortable in the huge crowds at Woodstock..............
5catmom I had planned on going but I was expecting my baby on August 15th. The doctor said I should not go for obvious reasons...I had my son a week later but many of my friends did go and said they will never forget it. 1969 was the best summer ever!
lily pad 
ignatz Was already a young Mother living in Hackettstown but born and raised in upstate New York. Woodstock was quite a big newsmaker and hot topic back then in and around the area I grew up and where most of my"conservative" family still lived. To be perfectly honest ..I am glad I was not able to go...I never would have "fit" in....
joyful if everybody who 'claimed' they went to woodstock actually were there that would have been in the millions instead of the hundreds of thousands. couldn't have been that many.
i have found many charlatans falsely claiming thye went there when the really did not go.
kinda like the phony Vietnam vets floating around, guys who never went making up stories about it, (not you oldred, i know you are legit)
i was supposed to go and had been invited to go with a rock band i knew at the time, but didn't make it up there, the rock band i was associated with went and had the experience of their lives, sorry i didn't go now.
song of note for me was 'sea of madness' by Neil young and of course in my view the best performance of the weekend was the medley by '10 years after'; but, that just be this humble dog's opinion, others may have a different take. I thought that 'the who' were horrible at woodstock not a good performance for them.
i always wondered what happened to rest of the reel to reel tapes they made. want someone to re-engineer them and just spool them out onto cd's
and yes, i was a conservative/libertarian even back then, so go figure, not christian yet though, that came later for me, i'm still on the conservative/libertarian side of things,
BrotherDog I lived fairly close by, but was not yet in kindergarten. But my father taught college, and *all* the students were going. With two little kids my parents really couldn't consider it. I remember being on the playground across the street with all the new kids we just met when we moved. The traffic jam and how they were all basically trapped there was on the radio and what everyone was talking about.
GC Trivia......What famous guitarist closed Woodstock?
What town was Woodstock actually held?
hendrix?
saugeties, ny? (yasgur's farm was second choice as the town of woodstock got scared and backed out, if memory serves me correctly, didn't look it up, that'd be cheating, right?)
It was held at Max Yasgurs 600 acre farm in Bethel, New York, August 15-18, 1969 and I think the famous guitarist that Christine is referring to was Jimmy Hendrix.
I visited the museum stood on the concert field,the spot where the stage was and the memorial stone ...loved it,definitely had a great time !
Dam Spring.. Honest mistake....I did not know of him or any of his music.....only remember how people pronounced his name so wrote Jimmy instead of Jimi......Sorry!
I attended...had just graduated from Newton High School and was working at the "Big N" (now Bed/Bath&Beyond)...bought tickets through the New York Times for a TOTAL of $18.00 for the three days (still have two of the three...framed)....a group of Big N workers decided to go...took seven hours to get there...was and still am a big Richie Havens fan so his opening was my highlight....it was only the second time CS&N performed together and they were not great....the food was gone after day one and many of the food stalls were set ablaze so that folks could dry their mud soaked sleeping bags...waking up to Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane was pretty cool....
Evergreen '69 
mistergoogle My nephew came by my house from Virginia in an old VW Bus with all there belongings and his girl friend. (Who he later married) I did some work on it change oil and sent them on there way. They are now Grandparents.
Old Gent Too young but we visited the field and museum in Bethel this past spring, took my teen son. Tried to explain what it was all about. Met Duke Devlin there, he told us some of his stories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkT15QY4vR0
They do concerts up there near the museum at Bethel Woods.
hktownie Didn't go, was home on Rt. 46 with my young children, but talk about traffic on Rt. 46. Rt. 80 didn't exist back then and all the folks returning home had to take 46. My sister and bro-in-law were amongst them. The local bars went dry, and so did the radiators in many of the cars. My husband dragged the hose out to the road and filled buckets to fill some of them. The traffic was backed up for hours. My own sister couldn't get out of line, or nobody would have let them back.
Ms Fishy 
Great stories thanks folks! As for me I was still a whole 4 years away from being born.
A little known fact..........Sorrell Booke (Played the Boss Hogg character on The Dukes of Hazzard) was actually related to Max Yasgur. They were cousins.
Vic I went with friends,I just got married,my friends came by to see me,asked if I would like to play some pool, have a couple beers.My new bride said go , have some fun. They kidnapped me, and I spent three days, having the time of my life, knowing in three days my life as a groom could be over! Hendrix playing the Star Bangle Banner, covered in lighter fluid,burning was quite the show back then.Don't Bogart that joint my friend!
Lobo 
sientje smith I was three. I would have enjoyed the Grateful Dead and the Airplane singing "Saturday Afternoon". I love that song.
I've been to Bethel. I love the Catskills. Everything about it.
Singlemaleinnj Just heard some Richie Havens (RIP) - an Icon - My local radio station here in Hunterdon CtY. (WDVR) - Just sent shivers - When you hear all the bands that played, you are just sent back to the day and time it all happened.
LOBO I sooooooo would have loved to have been there........so envious of those that went. I hope the MRS. was cool with everything once you got home safe and sound.
abbadabbadoooo Summer of '69.... Woodstock. man on the moon, Miracle Mets, The Who's Tommy, Vietnam war, riding bikes on streets, playing stick ball, and a fun street game called ringolevio. Never worried about abductions, terrorism, & political correctness. I was only 10 and my parents had a few rules: be home for dinner, if you to a friend's house take off your shoes, and don't leave your bike, and toys in the front yard. Simple times, if I can have it back for a day. LOL.
mike l Where did all those cool hippies go? I wish I could have experienced the original Woodstock. Especially, The Who, doing Tommy... my favorite album of all time. Sounds like it was a great trip!.... except for "the brown". Half a million people, in the mud, with limited food, water and bathrooms, for three days. Today? Hell would probably rain down, with the craziness in this country.
Funny story: Long time ago, I bought "Live at Leeds", by the Who. It had all this paperwork inside, including the $6000 contract for The Who, to play there. I thought it was REAL, and worth thousands of dollars...LOL. They made tons of them.
sparksjbc1964 we're still here, we didn't go anywheres, and collectively did little else apparently
Greg 
Dansker ain't that the truth, yet we keep on, keepin' on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0Dm-OaTNk
Let's be clear --- best album --- Tommy or Live at Leeds? Cause if its Tommy or both, I'm a huge Who fan who says --- no way for Tommy. Come on.... Except for Anne Margaret and those beans......
Loved to see The Who in concert, Daltrey used to jog ten miles or more during the shows. Man must have had ADD or caught something from Moon.
But Tommy.....Pinball Wizard.....come on...nah.
Post Woodstock --- Who's Next, best Who album IMO and a must play every Spring or whenever Trump gets elected.
The Who hated Woodstock......at least at the time FYI.
strangerdanger Just as a matter of clarity since my brother is such a huge Hendrix fan - the Star Spangled Banner was Woodstock. Burning lighter fluid was not. That was Monterey while ending the show with "Wild Thing".
Driving from where I worked at Phillips Laboratories in Briarcliff Manor to Woodstock took four hours! But it was worth it. Jimi was my favorite. So sad when he bought the farm.
DannyC You can Monday morning quarterback it for years and probably not end up getting it right. No one may ever really know. But some say it was just a prescription gone bad where the EMS didn't keep his airway open. But in any case the autopsy said choking on vomit, not toxic over dose.
Not a Hendrix fan growing up but caught the re-mastered CDs years later. I know in some circles re-mastered is uncool (especially not by the artist), and even CDs are uncool, but I became a devotee overnight because of it.
To bad we could not see what he would have become over time as he grew up.
I have liked Mick Ronson, Bowie's lead for the Spiders, who played the same Les Paul Custom for years, often with new necks, and had a raw talent unmatched since. On those early Bowie albums in the Ziggy period, Ronson would turn up, get some input from Bowie and then nail the song in one or two takes: "What we did on stage, the playing off each other, that was all instinctive. When I play, I play. It's not planned. You can't think about it too much. You get messed up if you think too much." That was his genius, he just turned the dials up, pressed all the buttons, and beat the crap out of that thing.
Sounds unprofessional but the man rarely scrapes the strings, uses and controls each piece of distortion, and he and his guitar are one. He makes that thing do stuff it was not intended to do.
After Ziggy, Mick played with some majors, cut a few albums, and started to take that next step into guitar maestro extraordinaire losing the full volume, full tilt allure of Ziggy. Here's the song he likes the best from that period. Sure, not catchy, not flashing, but check out how clean that guitar is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3lfD9x4PJg
For the stuff that made him famous though, try... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g6--QoPsDM go to 3:15 for the solo start.
Width of a Circle is his heaviest solo from that period: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4e8vDHDcBs
But at the root of it all, he was just a humble working class boy from blue collar Hull. Check out at least the beginning of this interview where he explains, just put the peddle on full and leave it there, turn up the dials, and play that thing. We did Jean Genie in two takes, one bad followed by one good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYL-WRqBehs
Died young, pancreatic cancer I think. So sad. He had only started to take that next step that Hendrix never got to take.
We visited Bethel NY a couple years back for a milestone b-day.. Went to the museum and the site- the best part was talking to this guy- Duke Devlin. He has that great hippie voice and he told us his stories.
He went there for the concert and just never left, stayed local the rest of his life.
http://old.post-gazette.com/ae/20030814woodstockae2.asp
Another interesting guy to read about is Michael Lang.
They have concerts up there still, but not at the actual site, across the field at Bethel Woods.
http://bethelwoods.center-ny.com/index.php
I miss the look of halter tops, bell bottoms, and large floppy hats. Boy am I dating myself.
dan l Commenting is no longer available.