The high point of Woodstock, according to the man behind it all: “You could hear the bombs”
As the surge of the 1960s swelled to a head, Woodstock was like petrol being thrown into the fire. It was truly the melting pot of the beast that counterculture had grown to be – but God knows how anyone made it out alive.
The irony of Woodstock being billed as a festival for peace was that it verged on the very teetering edge of descending into total manic chaos the entire time, a feeling that never really dissipated until they were sure that the last attendee had left the site.
It was a weekend of carnage, of hedonism, and of true rock and roll – and although it just about pushed them to the absolute brink, the organisers would have it no other way.
To have created something that would go on to be as culturally seismic as Woodstock was something that was never lost on its original founder, Michael Lang, who was tasked with the unenviable responsibility for not only spearheading the countercultural event of the century, but even getting anyone to turn up to it at all.
Of course, he hardly failed in this mission – 450,000 people flocked to the festival site, and they managed to lure in some of the biggest names from Joe Cocker to Sly and the Family Stone to The Who – but nevertheless, over the course of a weekend marked by bedlam and rain delays, only around 40,000 passionate stragglers remained by the time Jimi Hendrix took to the stage at 8.30am on the Monday morning. But any fear of a sleepy disposition was instantly blasted away in the second he strummed those first notes, creating, as we all know, one of the most iconic sets of all time.
For Lang, every disaster and near-death experience had been leading to this point, where the whole thing fell into place. “Hendrix playing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ was the high point,” he recalled to The Guardian in 2012. “I saw it as a comment on Vietnam and it summed up why we were there. You could hear the bombs exploding in his guitar sounds.”
In that moment, with the bombs exploding, hearts stirring, and history made, music would never be the same again. Nothing else mattered.
This was, of course, a major consolation to Lang in the aftermath of the festival, when he owed a loss of $1.4million to the bank. “I was exhausted and we were in big trouble,” he understated. But these woes ultimately paled into insignificance when the legacy of Hendrix’s set, and his world-changing psychedelic vision of the national anthem, made such an imprint on music as a whole.
“I still meet people who say it changed their lives”, Lang noted.
Through the whirlwind of chaos and disarray that Woodstock brought in its midst, the high point of Hendrix was pivotal in the realisation that every second of it was all worthwhile. They had spawned something that would not only live on in the hearts and minds of all who were there but would transcend the generations as the epitome of everything music should be. Of course, not every replica was set to be as successful, but that didn’t matter as Hendrix blitzed out the notes of his psychedelic American dream.
