John Entwistle’s strange reason for hating Woodstock: “14 hours behind”
For a weekend which claimed to be the pinnacle of the ‘peace and love’ age, bringing together a wealth of the greatest artists of the 20th century, the people who actually performed at Woodstock Festival back in 1969 rarely have a good word to say about the event, and The Who, in particular, have always maintained their hatred of it.
While the bulk of the Woodstock line-up was filled out with like-minded hippie outfits and a great deal of then-unknown bands, The Who were already a well-established rock colossus by the time that they arrived at that dairy farm in New York.
Having established themselves as the rebellious young upstarts of London’s swinging sixties explosion, the artistic appetite of Pete Townshend had seen them move into the expansive world of rock opera and a spectacular proto-hard-rock performance style – neither of which, it must be said, seemed to suit the atmosphere of Woodstock.
Aside from anything else, The Who seemed to eclipse everybody else on the billing in terms of sheer experience, having already toured the world on several occasions. It is fair to say, then, that the mod rockers had grown accustomed to a level of streamlined professionalism in their live performances that simply wasn’t present at Woodstock, leading bassist John Entwistle to describe the legendary festival as being “14 hours of hell”.
Famously, the festival was plagued by technical difficulties, production setbacks, on top of an influx of attendees without tickets and the fact that virtually everyone at the festival was battling an acid trip all the while. Inevitably, then, the planned schedule for the weekend quickly went out the window.
“They were running over in time, so by the time we went on, they were 14 hours behind,” Entwistle recalled.
“We also had a four-hour drive to get there to go five miles,” he continued. “We had to drive there because the helicopters that they were using were being used as hospitals.”
So, despite being booked as the penultimate act to go on stage on Saturday, The Who’s planned performance of Tommy didn’t go ahead until 5am on Sunday morning, in between Sly and the Family Stone and Jefferson Airplane.
What’s more, the band had to deal with Abbie Hoffman clambering up onstage partway through their set, as a means of protesting the imprisonment of John Sinclair – one of the weekend’s greatest examples of preaching to the choir. Despite The Who’s set being an undeniable highlight of the festival, then, the band themselves were desperate for it to be over and done with.
The Who weren’t the only band to take issue with Woodstock and its lack of organisation, but they have been among the most vocal in their efforts to prevent the rose-tinted view of the weekend that seemed to arrive after the accompanying film was released back in 1970.
In the years since, Entwistle and the band performed at a countless array of other festivals, including the equally important Isle of Wight festival in 1970, and it seems likely that the band held virtually all of those appearances in a higher regard than their doomed appearance at Woodstock.
