The Freedom of Woodstock

This Article Was Originally Published On: February 3, 2015 #Issue 15

The Woodstock Aquarian Art Festival was held in August of 1969, in upstate New York. The festival never was held in the town of Woodstock, having been rejected by the local town people after a legal harangue that left the promoters scrambling for a new site and finally ending up at Whitelake, in the town of Bethel.

I was in junior high school when I read about the unprecedented gathering in a mottled issue of Rolling Stone Magazine I snuck into study hall. That was back in the days when Rolling Stone was a true underground rock rag, folded up big and thick, with newspaper print, like the Sunday edition of the New York Times. I was too young to have had the option of attending the event, but was still very aware that something big was happening in the eastern part of the country and that it involved a load of people and music. 

A major shift in the cultural fabric of the nation and the world happened on that fateful weekend. No one, least of the producers of the event, could have fathomed the absurd idea that a half a million people would gather on a dairy farm to take part in a music festival that has since been described as many things, including arguably the most inspiring event to ever define a generation; and this is before we take into account the music. Of course, the music was important in the variety of solo and group performances that took the stage. The three-day festival reflected the rich diversity of the music created in the 1960s, from overtly political acts such as Tim Harden and Joan Baez, to the powerful blues-based rock of Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin, to mod-rockers from Britain, such as The Who, heavy American rock from Mountain, funk from Sly and the Family Stone, and many more. It was an event where art and politics, life and death collided: the Vietnam War was certainly on the minds of everyone in attendance. The atmosphere was charged with utopian visions in a backdrop of flames in Vietnam, and accentuated by the duality between generosity and greed; the sacred and the profane. This may have been the biggest cosmic accident ever recorded.

The whole festival should have been a disaster from the beginning. Legally barred from the original location a month before the opening song, the promoters were forced to relocate to another town. To make matters worse, there was little time for the accruement of the correct number of sanitary facilities, and this when they thought that only one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand people would attend. The fences and gates were never finished – not that it mattered; when the tidal wave of humanity finally arrived, they walked over and through it like butter, causing the concert once and for all to be a labeled a “free” concert. If that was not enough to send any sane person running for cover, traffic jams paralyzed highways causing Arlo Guthrie to comment from the stage, “The New York State Freeway’s closed, man. Far out!” This would eventually require emergency measures as to the means of bringing in food, medicine, supplies, and the evacuation of the sick, thus causing the government to declare a national disaster. The National Guard and the Army would soon be involved with the help in managing the crowd.

Then it rained. And it rained hard, threatening the electrical, sewage, and water infrastructure. Needless to say, a half a million people sitting on a hill were not adequately prepared for camping in a sweltering mud hole. Add into the mix the drugs, and God knows what else that could have aided in their discomfort, and you have a situation that would make me scamper to the nearest Red Roof Inn.

The miracle of Woodstock is that it was not a disaster. The creative vision by those who created the festival (they were in their mid-twenties and early thirties) would soon be swept away by an event ten times larger than what they could possibly have imagined. Even more astounding was the absence of violence with a crowd of this magnitude. There was a minimal security force of retired police officers, veterans, and even hippies (google Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm), who kept the peace over the weekend. Food ran out close to the end of the first day on Friday. Well, almost all of it. They subsisted on granola and apples for the rest of the weekend, but even the lack of food had no effect in dampening the enthusiastic crowd. Against the backdrop of these seemingly insurmountable odds, it almost makes the music a mere footnote in the canon of the History of Rock and Roll.

Woodstock was, if anything, a cultural phenomenon, and would go on to define a generation. It seems fitting the festival took place in 1969, at the end of the decade. By then, the Flower Power hippie movement was on the wane. A new decade was about to dawn and new shifts and trends were on the move. The peace and love generation would soon be enticed back into the realms of materialism, falling victim to the “Me Generation” axiom of self-gratification and the pursuit of financial gain. But this is not my tale to tell…

The things I always found fascinating about Woodstock are the small, behind-the-scene happenings that, when added together, form a bigger picture as to why Woodstock has become such a legendary event. These stories, which are far too numerous to report here (if you are interested, check out Pete Fornatale’s Back to the Garden and Joel Makower’s Woodstock: The Oral History) are a fun ride through the some of the best anecdotal snippets the festival had to offer, and gives the reader a sense of just what a monumental event Woodstock really turned out to be.

I’m going to relate only one story that happened on Friday afternoon before the first act was scheduled to perform. The group Sweetwater was scheduled to be the opening act. The group agreed to play with the understanding they would go on first, because their keyboard player Alex Del Zoppo was enlisted in the Air Force Reserves and was supposed to attend training the following day in California – fearing that if he missed the training, he would immediately be shipped off to Vietnam. It turned out, due to the snarling traffic jams leading to the festival, Sweetwater arrived late at the Bethel site and ended up performing as the third act.

With Sweetwater tied up in traffic, the promoters were anxious about how they could fill the spot left vacant by the group. Sensing that the crowd getting anxious for the concert to begin, they began scrambling for a replacement act to fill the void. After some intense deliberation, they came to the conclusion that whomever they could get would have to be a group that could set up their equipment in a timely fashion. It would be easier to install a solo performer with a few acoustic instruments instead of a large rock group with weighty gear.

Richie Havens was scheduled to perform later in the evening. Back at the Holiday Inn, seven miles from the stage, Havens sat calmly waiting for his performance, which was fifth on the bill. “There was no way to get anyone there,” Havens said to an interviewer years later. “There wasn’t going to be a Woodstock… It was going to be the world’s largest riot, because seven miles away were all the musicians, and no way to get them there. They couldn’t get to the site at all.” Once you remember that the original plan was to expect two hundred or so thousand people, not over a half million (800,000 by some estimates), it becomes apparent the fear the promoters must have experienced in trying to get the festival staged.

All of a sudden, someone came to see Havens and said, “Richie, we’ve got a guy with a helicopter who’s gonna come over. You’ve got the least number of instruments, so you’ll go on first.” So, with the concert already late by three hours a helicopter lands in the hotel parking lot and out runs Havens with his group of two conga drums, two guitar players, and the three climb on board the helicopter and flew them to the site.

“Well, Richie was scared, as I recall. But I think that was a natural reaction to looking at a crowd of that size,” Michael Lang said, one of the festival creators. Havens was indeed frightened by the large crowd and dreaded the idea of having to perform first. “I knew the concert was late and that it might be a little crazy out there. I did not want to be trampled by a billion people,” he said, and pleaded with Lang not to do this to him. “I’m only one guy,” he said. “My bass player isn’t even here yet.” Eric Oxendine, Haven’s bass player was caught in traffic on his way to the concert. It is said that he walked fifteen to twenty miles from where the traffic stalled to the front steps of the wooden bridge that led to the stage. If Havens would have performed in the evening like he was scheduled to do, Oxendine would have made it in time. The bass player made it to the stage as Havens was walking off after the last encore. Oxendine is said to have arrived at the concert with other folks he met along the way, partying all the way down the road to the stage. Good for him! Lang continued to plead for Havens to perform before Havens finally relented and walked on to the stage at 5:07pm on Friday, August 15, 1969.

Havens would go on to give an awe inspiring performance and would do five encores until he said he had nothing else to sing. But the promoters off stage kept pushing him back on stage telling him, “No; no one is here yet. Go back!” After the seventh encore, Havens decided that there was absolutely nothing more he could sing, and still, they pushed him out once again to do an eighth encore. Drained of all possibilities as to what to sing next, Havens had a moment of inspiration that he would forever be remembered. As he looked out over the massive sea of humanity – which he said he could not see the end of from his vantage point on the stage – the word “Freedom” flashed through his mind. “The thing was that I was on stage and I didn’t know what to sing, so I looked out over the crowd and said, ‘Freedom isn’t what they’ve made us even think it is.’ It was the last thing that I could think of to sing. I made it up.” So he started to strum his guitar, thinking and trying to decide what he was going to sing next, and the word “Freedom” kept coming to mind.

As Havens continued to bellow the word “Freedom,” he was trying to decide what other lyrics he could sing to extend the improvisation. He began mixing lyrics form the tune Motherless Child, a song he had not sung in over seven years. In another flash of forced creativity, he added words from a hymn he used to sing in his early teens, “There’s a Telephone in my bosom and I can call him from my heart,” thus making the quick-thinking, improvised song Freedom a transcendent moment in the history of rock and roll after his energizing performance.

For the promoters who were sprinting to get the performances started, they could not have found a better artist. The intensity in his playing style – hard and fast continuous strumming that created a machine gun thumping sound, accentuated by his conga player – would capture the audience, leaving little doubt that this three-piece acoustic outfit was a hard-driving rock band.

Through the years, Havens is said to have wondered why all those people came to Woodstock. He realized that it was not just the usual sex, drugs, and rock and roll, as the mainstream media is often apt to dwell. Havens saw the festival from a vantage point that few ever got the chance to see. He saw people coming together with like-minded problems that everyone was experiencing at the time. Issues that were spawned in the 1950s that were desperately trying to be reconciled in the 1960s: the Vietnam War, civil rights, women’s rights, the sexual revolution, and of course, the music that reflected it all. Those were some heady times. Richie Havens passed away April 23, 2013.