FUNNY, IT DIDN’T FEEL LIKE STARDUST

Everyone in the whole country thinks they were at Woodstock. No; they saw the movie. I was there. The Woodstock Music & Arts Festival, August 1969, was the biggest hype America’s ever seen. Three days of peace, love, and music? It was three days of heat, rain, mud, and stench. 

That’s right, stench. We’re talking Calcutta. My most indelible memory of the greatest rock festival of all time? The Portosans. We smelled 'em 100 yards away. I didn’t bathe, eat, or pee for two days—that, friends, is the reality of Woodstock. 

The concert promoters completely underestimated how much food and water 100,000 people need for three days. Make that 500,000. Before most pilgrims even got there, food ran out; the water soon after. (Except for the rain.) They also underestimated the ultimate results of 500,000 peoples’ food and water. They had helicopters, backstage showers, cooks, hotel rooms, groupies, drug dealers, and even an obstetrician for some idiot who went to Woodstock 9 months pregnant, but they were too high to make sure the rest of us had drinking water. Or toilet paper. 

Lest anyone believe tales of welcoming locals feeding and housing us—HA! Most farmers were hostile about freaks invading their turf. When they realized we had no water, they filled little plastic bottles with tap water and sold them for $1. In 1969. Before anyone ever paid for bottled water. Peace and love, man. 

When I set out for Yasgur’s Farm, the weather was perfect, sunny. I dressed accordingly: jeans. By the time I got to Woodstock, after five hours of travel by train, subway, and bus (none of them air-conditioned) and a two-mile dusty trek from where the bus was hemmed in by parked cars to the festival entrance, in the blazing open fields of farm country, I was sweating. 

We trudged through a jungle, a swamp, a prairie, up a cliff, over a mountain and a barbed wire fence, through a well-fertilized cow pasture, and under more barbed wire to the festival grounds, where we discovered we didn’t need our $18 tickets. The festival had turned free. A chicken-wire fence to separate paying customers from the riffraff had been torn down; tickets were now mere collector’s items. (Who knew? I threw mine out.) I was really P.O.d that I’d paid. I never did get the hang of Abbie Hoffman’s freebie mentality. Oh well; I still have the poster.

From the ex-fence to the playing field: another two-mile hike. When I saw the field, I wobbled: two mountains of people—solid people as far as I could see. To get within earshot of the music, we waded through knee-deep mud and weeds as tall as we were, then crawled at a disturbing angle up a huge, rocky, yet soft hill. Cowpats. 

The stretch in front of the stage was staked out by jerks who arrived a day early and slept there all weekend to have a front row spot for their acid trips. So many special features were playing in their heads, they didn’t even watch the bands. 

Whoever coined the euphemism “festival seating” should be shot. There was no seat. We were all chumps slithering around in a six-inch deep mud wallow. Even if you could pick your way around the sodden bodies and wrecked Army blankets, your shoes were sacrificed to the muck. (I’m sure Max had a great Birkenstock crop the next spring.) We stayed barefoot—the only sensible way to cope with the slime. 

We’d missed Richie Havens while we were bogged down in the cow pasture, then endured folkie Bert Sommer, and caught Tim Hardin and Ravi Shankar. The rain and Melanie started simultaneously. I much preferred the downpour to her unstable helium voice. By the time Arlo Guthrie came on, we were completely sopping and thoroughly psyched for insanity. He surveyed the valley full of freaks screaming in the pouring rain, and uttered his classic: “Far out!” He started to giggle. “Wow! There must be a million and a half people out there!” He wasn’t too far off. 

Guthrie’s kid was fantastic. He told a long, ridiculous story of how the Israelites really got across the Red Sea, after eating hash brownies: “They was so stoned, man, they didn’t know what they was doin’—they swam across!” Then he led us in a chorus of “Pharaoh’s army got drow-own-ded, whoa, Mary don’t ya weep.” We all sang Amazing Grace, and he declined an encore so Joan Baez could sing. 

Everyone went crazy at the sight of her. She dedicated her songs to her David in jail and the other men resisting the draft. People sang along with Blowin’ in the Wind and I Shall Be Released, and wanted her to sing all night; they forgot about the cold, rain, and mud, and sat there smiling. Dawn was a few hours off, and everyone wanted her to be singing at daybreak, but the announcer said, “The little lady’s expecting a baby soon,” so she did her finale. 

I hate folkie soprano voices, but Baez’s a cappella Swing Low, Sweet Chariot was gorgeous: just her silvery voice ringing through the dark, echoing off the hills. I remember thousands of match flames twinkling like fireflies against black velvet night. Everyone was absolutely silent as the last note faded, then they rose and applauded and shouted for a long time—a cosmic moment. And no, I wasn’t high. I probably was the only person who wasn’t—which may explain why I was cranky. 

After the first torrential rain, my jeans became a heavy liability. Chafing ensued. Another two-mile slog to a garage where we’d parked our sleeping bags. Starving, thirsty, bug-bitten, and mud-caked, at 5 a.m., we sacked out on the filthy floor, where 10 other people also had taken refuge. I slept on an oil slick, half under a car, my nose just inches from the front grill staring down at me. There were spiders, cobwebs, and other crawly things. At 9 a.m., some idiot started playing a guitar, so we gave up the idea of sleeping. It was also raining, needless to say. Now 20 people were in the garage, and even more bugs. 

By Saturday afternoon, we were filthy and furiously thirsty. In desperation, we paid $1 for 7-Up, gulped it down, then really started to worry about a bathroom--but since we were two miles from the nearest Portosan, we headed back to the music. I can’t swear to what bands I heard, but Credence Clearwater Revival wasn’t one of them; I would’ve remembered John Fogerty’s voice! I certainly didn’t stick around for the Grateful Dead: utterly boring. Again: I was on no drugs whatsoever. 

Between downpours, the drying mud stiffened my bell-bottoms into boards. My feet were encrusted, ankles ringed in crud. The next soaking washed away the dirt (except for what was entrenched under my toenails); the next slog to the field crapped me up again. “The sun came out and dried up all the rain,” and the territory under my bell-bottoms became the mosquitoes’ own private Idaho. 

Finally, we voted to bag it. It was just too hot to sit out there any longer with sweat rolling down our bodies. We were never going to make it to Monday. We joined the exodus. Coming at us was a continuous stream of people in clean clothes. We told them to go home. Cars were parked on the highway in a 20-mile radius. Radio stations advised people en route to turn around and go home, but people kept pouring into Bethel. Rockefeller declared Woodstock a disaster area. For once, I agreed with him. Everybody there was nice, but there were too many everybodies. We heard reports about diseases, drugs, deaths, and mean nasty ugly things, as Arlo would say, but more people arrived by thumb or wheels every minute. 

Here’s the crying shame of Woodstock (mine, anyway): what should’ve been the highlight of my weekend, my favorite band in the universe, The Who, gave a performance that I didn’t see. Every time a friend finds out, s/he gasps in shock. Since age 13, I’ve never passed up a chance to see The Who, no matter who the drummer is. But after two days of peace, love, and you know the rest, I was starved, stinking, and sleep-deprived. I couldn’t stand being filthy and thirsty any more. I also couldn’t hold it in any more, and I was not going to pee in the woods, without toilet paper, even to see my vocal hero (and future husband) Roger Daltrey. (He hasn’t proposed; doesn’t know me, in fact, and he’s married—but hey, it could happen.) So I did the one thing I’ve always regretted: I left. 

The Who made rock history that day: bare-chested Roger with his long golden curls and buckskin fringed shirt, twirling the mic cord like a lariat, belting out that magnificent rock roar; Pete ricocheting around in his white Esso jumpsuit, Moonie battering his disintegrating drum kit, Entwistle just standing there while his fingers were flying—and I wasn’t there to applaud. I wanted to sue Messrs. Lang, et al, for concertus interruptus. Now Michael Lang is in my social media network. Go figure. 

We found a handwritten cardboard sign saying “NYC,” left a goodbye note for my boyfriend’s bass player, Mr. Delirious—whom we’d stumbled across in the crowd—and sat by the roadside, waiting for a gaily painted VW bus full of gorgeous freaks who would deposit us in Manhattan after demanding our phone numbers. Instead, some greasers came by and said they were leaving, now. 

The car was littered with smelly clothes, empty beer bottles, old food, and garbage, had a broken axle and dragging tail pipe, and the top stayed down for the whole 5-hour drive. The driver thought he was Andy Grenatelli, the guy next to me couldn’t stop talking, and I got into an argument about racism. 

We stopped at a revolting hamburger stand, where everyone who hadn’t gone to the festival stared at us. By now, anyone from Woodstock was a celebrity. “Yeah, it’s pretty bad up there,” we told them. Later, waiting for a train in Grand Central, I met one of my sister’s friends. She hadn’t gone to Woodstock, and thought I was crazy to leave it. I began to wonder. You were crazy if you stayed, crazy if you left; crazy if you didn’t go, crazy if you did. The Catch 22 of My Generation.  A week later in Brentano’s bookstore, I saw a guy in jeans encrusted with old mud from the knees down: a badge of honor. We looked at each other and grinned knowingly. 

Woodstock was my last festival. Nowadays, if a concert requires overnighting, I expect a bed, indoor plumbing, and air conditioning. Oh, I’ve been to other so-called festivals (multi-act concerts in football stadiums—a bummer, even when the Stones are headlining), but there’s not enough money in the world to get me into “festival seating” again.