“That wasn’t about anything”: Bob Dylan believed Woodstock represented society’s downfall
Nothing represented the power of the hippie counterculture movement quite like Woodstock.
With a plethora of utterly iconic artists playing to thousands of acid-riddled hippies, the festival was a definitive moment within American history, but Bob Dylan was never convinced of its credentials.
The 1960s were a revolutionary period in the United States, both politically and culturally. With the civil rights movement marching on, the war in Vietnam heating up, and discontent among the nation’s youth growing day by day, these issues inevitably bled over into the cultural landscape. With a widespread intensity never seen before, artists and musicians began to reflect and confront these socio-political issues within their work, and Bob Dylan was undoubtedly at the forefront of that scene.
From the moment that Dylan first emerged from the folk clubs of Greenwich Village during the early 1960s, his unparalleled ability to reflect the world around him was clear. Although his first records, at the insistence of the record label, were largely composed of cover songs and folk standards, it was within the songwriter’s original material that he shone brightest. Towards the end of the decade, in particular, Dylan’s songwriting typified the attitudes and protest of the blossoming counterculture movement.
Although the folk devotee was never going to grow out those curled locks or don hemp trousers, Dylan played a colossal role in influencing the hippie movement. His words spoke to an entire generation of young people, reflecting the protests, anger, and fear of that period in time. It has always seemed strange, therefore, that Dylan did not take to the stage at Woodstock Festival in 1969, along with all the other artists and musicians who encapsulated the hippie age.
As it turns out, Dylan wasn’t even invited to play at the festival, despite living in the area of the festival at the time it took place. The reasons for his snubbing are myriad, from the songwriter’s scheduling conflicts to the infamously poor organisation of the festival itself. Even if Dylan had been invited to play the festival, though, it seems unlikely that he would have done so. In the years and decades that followed, the songwriter has spoken routinely about Woodstock and his distrust of its reputation.
Speaking to the Sunday Times in 1984, Dylan denounced any rose-tinted views of the 1960s, sharing, “America is not like that anymore. But what happened, happened so fast that people are still trying to figure it out. The TV media wasn’t so big then.”
He explained, “It’s like the only thing people knew was what they knew; then suddenly people were being told what to think, how to behave, there’s too much information.”
“It just got suffocated,” Dylan continued. “Like Woodstock – that wasn’t about anything. It was just a whole new market for tie-dyed T-shirts. It was about clothes. All those people are in computers now.”
In other words, Woodstock wasn’t the hippie celebration it claimed to be; there was a sense of phoniness to it, as was reflected by the fact that many counterculture hippies later betrayed the revolution to become bankers, politicians, or, as Dylan states, computer scientists.
Still, Dylan’s disgust over Woodstock must have mellowed in the years after he gave that interview, as he agreed to perform at the doomed Woodstock ‘94 festival the following decade. While not quite as disastrous as Woodstock ‘99, the 1994 edition – typified by lakes of mud, overcrowding, and unhappiness – was a perfect encapsulation of just how far removed American society had become from the peace and love era of the 1960s.
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