The music festival that eclipsed Woodstock, according to Grace Slick
It’s hard to separate the fact from the fiction surrounding 1969’s Woodstock Music and Art Fair’s totemic stature in the countercultural memory.
Still commanding an unrivalled rock gravitas nearly 60 years later, Woodstock’s romantic mythos is hard to be cynical about. A congregation of peace and love at Max Yasgur’s 600-acre Bethel dairy farm in New York state, pulling 500,000 hippy revellers to the free festival and witnessing some of the most lauded live acts of the era, scoring the essential soundtrack in stirring solidarity against the conservative establishment’s authoritarian pummel at home and the US imperial machine’s bloody assault in Vietnam.
There’s truth to all this. Something beautiful radiates from any still or footage of the Woodstock documentary, a moment of communal joy and creative togetherness that feels grimly impossible in today’s corporatised, atomised hellscape.
Yet, such a misty-eyed glow belies some of the festival’s chaotic organising and less idyllic reality on the ground. From bad weather, initial charges for tickets, ever-changing performance times, technical disasters, and the Boschian landscape of drugged-out stragglers and acid casualties all marked a less rosy three days to the artists and attendees actually there.
Grace Slick certainly knew what was up. Fronting the three evolving states of ‘The Jefferson Family’ from the good (Jefferson Airplane), the bad (Jefferson Starship), and the downright ugly (Starship), the original pillar of West Coast psychedelic rock never hid her mixed feelings about Jefferson Airplane’s slot at the mythic Woodstock.
“I love Joni, but I didn’t have quite the same take on it,” she confessed to Rolling Stone in 2014, reflecting on Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ song dropped after the festival. “I thought, ‘This is big, but it’s real sloppy.’”
She wasn’t wrong. According to Slick, helicopters came and picked the band from their hotel due to the crushing gridlock and vehicle abandonment across the surrounding Sullivan County roads. Scheduled for a nine in the evening start, hours were spent smoking weed and glugging wine behind the stage til dawn broke, eventually taking the stage around seven in the morning.
It was a far cry from the Monterey International Pop Festival two years earlier. Helping cement the festival template Woodstock would take notes from, the three-day music event in California’s Monterey County Fairgrounds boasted just as unforgettable moments as anything from Woodstock’s iconic rock carousel, from Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire, Janis Joplin’s breakthrough live performance, and Stax’s Otis Redding delivering one of the most celebrated shows in soul history.
“We were glad to play it,” Slick furthered. “Monterey was so well run, and everything pretty much that was offered in the booths was handmade, and you could get to a bathroom within less than nine hours. The entire area in back of the stage was people wandering around. There were drinks and marijuana and blow and whatever else everyone was interested in. Everything worked.”
What more could you want? Some functioning infrastructure and a drug-free for all goes a long way for any talent during the 1960s’ heady tail-end, a lesson Woodstock only seemed to heed one half of. Still, Slick counts herself with a unique credential of the day, Jefferson Airplane being the only act to play Woodstock, Monterey, and The Rolling Stones’ disastrous Altamont Free Concert, blues noodlers Grateful Dead backing out of the latter last minute due to the engulfing violence.
