I always tell people that I try to live my life without any regrets, but of course that’s nothing more than a crock. We all have regrets; they can’t be avoided, even if they’re different ones for each of us. ‘I shouldn’t have married my third wife a second time.’ ‘Did we really need to drive 5 miles out of the way to see the world’s largest ball of paint?’
The biggest regret in my life is that I never made it to Woodstock. Oh sure, most of you reading this now weren’t even born in 1969 or were living on another continent, but I don’t have that excuse. In August 1969, I was 15 years old and about 15 miles away from Yasgur’s Farm. I was spending that summer (as I did every summer up to that point) at sleepaway camp.
I certainly knew about Woodstock. I’d seen all the ads, read all the press coverage, loved most of the groups that were appearing, and I was fairly desperate to go. The day before it started, I ran all around the camp, asking practically everyone I knew if they wanted to run off (a relatively serious offense) and hitchhike to the festival. Everyone said no and, to my everlasting regret, I simply didn’t have the cojones to do it on my own. So I stayed in camp, listened to the news on the radio, and we had our own little mud slide down the hill on Sunday because of course we got the same torrential downpour that they got.
Even today, there are times I’ll sit around and wonder what might have happened had I gone? Would I have been sitting there miserable in the mud, wet and shivering from the rain, alone in the middle of half a million freaks? Or would I have met some cute, curly haired, braless hippie chick only too happy to share her drugs and perhaps her body with this cute kid who was there all alone? Alas, I’ll never know.
The promoters of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair – ‘An Aquarian Exposition - Three Days of Peace and Music’ may have lost their shirts on the festival itself, but they had the foresight to both record and film the concert. And while the cynical amongst us may focus in on the fact that 40 years later, money is stilling rolling into them as a result, the fact is that this unique moment in history was preserved for all of us to enjoy.
The 40th anniversary of the festival is of course a time to cash in, and the record companies are going nuts with Woodstock-themed reissues. Rhino Records has already released newly remastered versions of the Woodstocks 1 & 2 sets and has a six disc boxed set coming out later this month. If that’s not enough for you, search the usual internet sources and you can come up with more than 18 hours’ worth of performances from the festival.
And of course, on the home video front, there’s the 1970 feature film Woodstock. Directed by Mike Wadleigh, the film was a huge hit when it was first released and won the Academy Award for best documentary feature. Fifteen years ago, Warner Home Video reissued the 3 hour film in an almost-four hour long ‘director’s cut’ and have now re-reissued that director’s cut in a new deluxe edition on both standard definition DVD and Blu-Ray. There’s even an ‘Ultimate Collectors Edition’ that comes packaged in a mini fake suede fringe jacket and stuffed with all sorts of stuff you couldn’t possibly need. But one advantage of buying this on Blu-Ray, aside from the improved sound, is that the entire film is contained on one side of one disc – no more getting up halfway through the movie to flip a disc over. But then again, the movie is so long, you’ll probably need several trips to the fridge and the inevitable bathroom breaks to get all the way through.
This new reissue features hours of bonus footage. Notably there’s an additional 21 live performance clips, including some from bands who aren’t in the feature film, including the Grateful Dead and Mountain. Creedence Clearwater Revival is particularly hot, despite John Fogerty’s extremely unfortunate hair style. There’s also 26, count ‘em, 26 documentary bits about the making of the festival and the film. If you sit through all of this and then try to impress your friends with these tales at a party, I guarantee you’ll be sitting there all alone.
Watching the film, it may seem as if every band in existence at the time was there, but actually there were only 32 bands – for various reasons the Beatles, the Stones, Zepp, the Doors and many others didn’t make it. But of those that did, many rose to the occasion and delivered career-defining performances.
Even so, there are definitely some odd choices here. Santana’s one song, Soul Sacrifice, smokes but the song is more about Michael Shrieve’s extended drum solo than Carlos’ guitar. And if you’re going to pick just two songs from Jefferson Airplane, why did one of them have to be Jorma Kaukonen putting the audience to sleep with Uncle Sam’s Blues? I hate how the editing makes it seem as if John Sebastian came out (reputedly tripping his brains out on LSD), did one song and left when he actually managed five.
Great musical performances aside, I’m not a big fan of the film. The almost constant use of split-screen, so in vogue at the time, is even more annoying than the completely out-of-place performance from Sha Na Na. I want to scream at the filmmakers, ‘Make a choice goddammit!’ And they eventually do, because they drop the split screen for most of Hendrix’ set – but then choose to show footage of people picking up garbage rather than Hendrix for minutes on end. It’s really hard to believe that the lead editor here was Thelma Schoonmaker and that she was nominated for an Oscar for this film. (She was nominated five other times and won three of those, including editing for Raging Bull.) And yes, believe it or not, Martin Scorsese was an assistant editor and second unit director here.
I understand that the intent was to portray the entire festival, all its ups and downs, to give some idea of the full experience. But do we really need to watch a man clean out portable toilets for literally five minutes just to get to the payoff that he’s got one son at the festival and another serving in Viet Nam? I think not. But I suspect that if you sat there with a stop watch (and no, I’m not that anal), performance footage makes up far less than half the film.
Of course, after sitting through the entire thing just once, it’s easy to just skip right to the music. Hendrix’s bits are justly famous, but don’t ignore The Who, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone and even Crosby Stills & Nash (Young, typically cranky, refused to give permission to be filmed because he thought the cameramen onstage were distracting).
Forty years later, massive summer music festivals from Glastonbury to Mt. Fuji have become commonplace, routine events. There will never be, can never be an event with the cultural impact of Woodstock. For a short time, Woodstock represented the acme of all our hopes and aspirations, all of which came crashing down six months later at Altamont. I’m happy this film exists, because for all of its flaws, it does capture a moment in time that will never be repeated. And despite all the traffic and mud, despite the reminders not to take the brown acid, despite Sha Na Na and Ten Years After, I still regret that I didn’t get there.
