Woodstock did not even occur in Woodstock.
The fabled music pageant, seen as one of many seminal cultural occasions of the Nineteen Sixties, happened 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) away in Bethel, New York, a good smaller village than Woodstock. It’s a becoming misnomer for an occasion that has grow to be as a lot legend as actuality — and has much less to do with location than the recollections it evokes a couple of society’s frame of mind on the shut of a jumbled decade.
An estimated 450,000 folks converged on a swath of land owned by dairy farmer Max Yasgur to attend an “Aquarian Exposition” promising “three days of peace, love and music” from Aug. 15 to 17, 1969. Most have been youngsters or younger adults — folks now approaching the twilight of their lives in an period the place solely a small portion of the inhabitants has dwelling recollections of the Nineteen Sixties.
That ticking clock is why the Museum at Bethel Woods, situated on the location of the pageant, is immersed in a five-year challenge to sift information from the legends and acquire firsthand Woodstock recollections earlier than they fade away. It’s a quest that has taken museum curators on a cross-country pilgrimage to report and protect the recollections of those that have been there.
“You need to capture the history from the mouths of the people who had the direct experience,” says music journalist Rona Elliot, 77, who has been working as one of the museum’s “community connectors.” Elliot has her personal tales concerning the pageant; she was there, working with organizers like Michael Lang, who entrusted her together with his archives earlier than his demise in 2022.
Woodstock, says Elliot, is “like a jigsaw puzzle — a panoply of all the things that occurred within the ’60s.”
Woodstock attendees have completed tons of of interviews by means of the a long time, significantly on main pageant anniversaries. But the Bethel Woods museum is plunging deeper with a challenge that started in 2020, counting on methods much like these of the late historian Studs Terkel, who produced tons of of oral histories about what it was wish to reside by means of the Great Depression and World War II.
“There is a difference between someone being interviewed for a paper or a documentary and having an oral history catalogued and preserved in a museum,” says Neal Hitch, senior curator and director of the Museum At Bethel Woods. “We had to go to people where they are. If you just call someone on the phone, they aren’t quite sure what to say when we ask you to tell us about these personal, private memories from a festival when they may have been 18 or 19.”
To discover and meet folks keen to inform their Woodstock tales, the museum obtained grants totaling greater than $235,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services — sufficient cash to pay for curators and neighborhood connectors similar to Elliot to journey the nation and report the tales.
The odyssey started in Santa Fe, New Mexico — house to the Hog Farm that supplied hippie volunteers similar to Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney and Lisa Law to assist feed the Woodstock crowd. Museum curators have traveled to Florida, hopped on a “Flower Power” cruise ship and visited Columbus, Ohio, earlier than making a California swing earlier this yr that included a San Francisco neighborhood middle situated close to the previous properties of pageant performers Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead.
Richard Schoellhorn, now 77, made the journey from his Sebastopol, California, house to San Francisco to debate his expertise at Woodstock. He was initially employed to be a safety guard on the ticketing sales space when the pageant was imagined to happen in Wallkill, New York, earlier than a neighborhood backlash prompted a late change to the Bethel website.
Schoellhorn nonetheless reported for work in Bethel, solely to promptly uncover his companies weren’t going to be wanted as a result of the pageant grew to become so overwhelmed that organizers stopped promoting tickets.
“I was walking around at Woodstock and Hugh Romney comes up to me and says, ‘Are you working?’” Schoellhorn recalled to The Associated Press before sitting down to have his oral history recorded. ”And I am going, ‘No, I just got fired!’ He goes, ’Well, would you wish to volunteer?’”
Schoellhorn wound up working in a tent set as much as help folks having unhealthy experiences on hallucinogenic medication that they had taken. He wound up getting stoned himself whereas reveling within the first live performance he’d ever attended.
“It felt like everyone was in the same freaking boat,” Schoellhorn stated. “There wasn’t like one section where people were rich. Nobody was special there, right from the get-go.”
Before attending Woodstock, Schoellhorn stated he was a loner intent on pursuing a profession in advertising and marketing. After Woodstock, he grew to become so extroverted that he wound up dwelling in a Colorado commune for a number of years earlier than spending 35 years as a dialysis technician.
Another Woodstock attendee, Akinyele Sadiq, additionally got here to see the curators in San Francisco to excavate his recollections of watching the pageant from 25 ft (7.6 meters) away from the stage.
Although the pageant wasn’t supposed to start till a Friday, Sadiq departed on a Bethel-bound bus on a Wednesday. When the bus broke down, he hitched a experience that delivered him to the pageant website by midday Thursday, permitting him to say a spot so close to the stage that he’s seen in images taken throughout the performances.
By the time he left Bethel just a few days later, in a hearse {that a} fellow festival-goer had transformed right into a van, Sadiq had modified.
“Before Woodstock, I didn’t have real direction. I basically didn’t have a lot of friends, but I knew I was looking for peace and justice and wanted to be with creative people who were looking to make the world a better place,” Sadiq, now 72, instructed the AP earlier than having his oral historical past recorded. “Before Woodstock, if you were living in a little town, you thought there might be a dozen people out there you might be able to get along with. But then you realized there was at least a half a million of us. It just gave me hope.”
Hitch says curators have heard many life-changing experiences whereas gathering greater than 500 oral histories up to now and are satisfied they are going to amass much more throughout the subsequent yr. Community connectors hit Florida final month and are heading to Boston in March and New York City in early April. That shall be adopted by return journeys to New Mexico and Southern California.
The museum intends to give attention to discovering and interviewing pageant attendees scattered throughout New York state, the place Hitch estimates roughly half the Woodstock crowd nonetheless lives.
The museum will spend 2025 combing by means of the oral histories earlier than turning to particular initiatives similar to reuniting buddies who attended the pageant collectively however now reside in several elements of the nation.
Elliot is satisfied — “both karmically and cosmically” — that the oral historical past challenge is one thing she was meant to do.
“I need this to be a educating software,” she says. “I don’t want historians telling the story of a spiritual event that just appeared to be a musical event.”
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