The comical drug announcements at Woodstock: “Stay off the towers”
Commanding such a pop-cultural presence and shrouded in mythos, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair that took place across three days in New York’s Bethel in August 1969 can often prove tricky to separate fact from fiction. Pulling 400,000 music fans and revellers to Max Yasgur’s Upstate dairy farm, some of the era’s biggest names all graced its canvas-topped main stage: The Who, Ravi Shankar, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix, just some of the illustrious bill that bookended the 1960s’ countercultural apex.
Its ramshackle operation and organisational near-disasters all added to its impromptu charm. The ‘free festival’ tag was applied after the fact that an excess of hundreds of thousands was anticipated to arrive after having to choose a robust stage over any security facilities. Rain and problematic weather delayed acts well into the night, and lightning manager Chip Monck fell into the master of ceremonies role when festival co-creator Michael Lang simply forgot they needed one.
Monck’s calming authority from then on served as the voice of Woodstock, typically issuing banal announcements from polite requests to the front row to move back and for the daring to “stay off the towers”.
On the second day, Monck unwittingly entered himself into 1960s lore when rumour had it that a batch of bad LSD on brown blotting paper was passing around, causing people to freak out and have a ‘bad trip’. That’s not how acid works, but following its federal ban the year before, it’s likely that dosage couldn’t be verified, and so eager hedonists gobbled up insane amounts of LSD and let anxiety get the better of them.
Whatever the case, Monck was at hand to offer his immortal advice: “To get back to the warning that I’ve received, you might take it with however many grains of salt you wish that the brown acid that is circulating around us is not specifically too good. It’s suggested that you do stay away from that. Of course, it’s your own trip, so be my guest. But be advised that there is a warning on that, OK?”.
It’s the brown acid that has ingrained itself in popular legend, but other announcements were made concerning other coloured acid tabs, too. Medical tents were directed to should anybody have taken their fancy with the green LSD, and the blue acid was declared to be poison, a reassuring statement for those already having a bad trip.
While Monck’s warnings were in good faith, the deadly blues and greens are said with a note of mirth, and someone even laughs in the background on one of the archived recordings.
Despite the moral hysteria that shrouds LSD, which still stubbornly affects drug laws to this day, Woodstock Festival only reported two deaths: an 18-year-old who died from inflammation of the heart and another teenager run over by a tractor after falling asleep under some hay. It’s passed as a fun relic of that heady era and nothing more, so if you’re offered the brown acid, go ahead and take it.
