I just returned to Chicago from a trip down the west coast. Adding to the usual amount of sporadic shooting and hassles hippies and psychedelic VW microbuses got, I picked up a heated debate on a Newport, OR radio talk show. Newport is on the coast highway. You have to pass through. The locals didn’t see it that way. They wanted roadblocks on both sides of town to keep the freaks out. Hippie vehicles would be forced to bypass Newport and detour a few hundred miles inland. The liberals felt that was unAmerican. They favored holding the vehicles until enough had been stopped, and then give a police escort through town. No stopping for gas or a pee. This would assure the freaks wouldn’t have a chance to corrupt or steal their young. Perhaps they saw it as a Pied Piper thing.
Back in Chicago. I was staying at a crash pad, which back then was pretty much any hippie’s place. Long haired freaks unquestionably took each other in. I was enjoying a break from being hassled. Easy Rider an’ all. Darin ran in, let out a hit, and wanted to know if I wanted to go with him to a concert in New York. “Why would I want to go to New York? There’s plenty of concerts here.”
“It’s outdoors.”
“Outdoors? That’s going to make for lousy acoustics. Hey, wait… is that the freak show they pulled the permit for?”
“They moved it to a farm.”
“A rock concert on a farm? What if it rains? Do you have a car?”
“We’ll hitch, man.”
“I just did that, man. One of two things is going to happen. It’ll be rained out and all the wandering freaks will be like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean, hey, they already threw us out of one town before we even arrived. Or, since they already have us all in a fenced in field, they won’t even have to take us anywhere when they bust everyone.”
“Wow,” said Darin, confused.
I took a hit of Darin’s joint, but it didn’t make the concept seem any better. “So you’re hitching to New York, might get shot at, for a rock concert, in the rain, in the middle of a cow field with lousy acoustics?”
And that’s why I didn’t go to Woodstock.
Darin smiled as he headed out the door, with a hand scrawled Woodstock sign. “Sometimes you just gotta believe.”
cool video clip.
Thanks. Supposedly Woodstock got its icon status because of the movie, which came out the following year. There’s a great Dick Cavett Show on DVD which features The Airplane and CSN (with mud still on their pants) fresh from the concert. They don’t talk much about it, other than as fun festival and traffic nightmare. “You had to be there” versus “The forest through the trees.” I wonder if Bob Dylan, who lived nearby, regrets not going.
The reason I and my hippie friends didn’t travel from Detroit to Woodstock, NY, is that none of us had a vehicle reliable enough to even get there, let alone complete the return trip. We sure thought about it, though.. we’d been attending festivals all over the Midwest. I misspent my youth in Detroit’s Grande Ballroom.. saw the Who, Blue Cheer, Cream, Procol Harum, Fleetwood Mac (as a blues band), Buddy Guy, Led Zeppelin (really!), of course all the Michigan greats, Ted Nugent, Seger, Third Power.. I even remember some of it!