The simple reason Woodstock 1969 came perilously close to “the world’s largest riot”
There’s a seismic disparity between the Woodstock Music and Art Fair’s countercultural stature and the reality on the ground, for both attendees and performers.
On the one hand, the free festival congregation that overtook Max Yasgur’s New York dairy farm for three days in August 1969 radiates an enviable level of freelove, rock and roll abandon, plenty of LSD, and the warming sense of generational solidarity that feels like ancient history in today’s corporate endtimes. Yet, Woodstock was no slick operation.
Bad weather, perennially changing show times, the less edifying charges for initial tickets, and the vast gaggle of stoned and acid-fried hippies strung out across the muddy vista flashed a sloppier reality to pop culture’s eternal fascination with Woodstock’s peace and love idyll.
Mishap was all part of its ramshackle charm, some would say. One disaster after another certainly kept co-creator and honcho Michael Lang on his toes, frantically trying to get the show on the road after as much as nine hours had passed without a single set. It was starting to get dire. 20 miles of surrounding traffic had clogged up all transport links, and the first day’s acts were stuck in hotels with no way of arriving on the Woodstock site.
With festival opener Sweetwater losing hope of arriving at Yasgur’s farm in any real time, Lang looked to one of the day’s prominent folk artists to pacify a simmering and restless crowd.
Lang had tried twisting singer-songwriter Tim Hardin’s arm, but stage fright and a drug and alcohol fug caught the better of him and refused to take the stage. The team needed someone with a light setup and fast. The only other realistic option was folk bluesman, Richie Havens. He and two of his bandmates were holed up in a nearby Holiday Inn when an urgently scheduled bubble helicopter whizzed over to the hotel to escort the trio over as the hastily arranged festival opener, never mind that his bass player, Eric Oxendine, was lost in the road jams and unable to join them.
“I was supposed to go on fifth, and there was no way to get anyone there,” Havens confessed on 2010’s Back to the Garden. “There wasn’t gonna be a Woodstock, to tell you the truth. It was gonna be the world’s largest riot, because seven miles away were all the musicians in two hotels, and they couldn’t get to the site at all – no road to get there. And no one could carry tons of amps and equipment down to the stage from seven miles away.”
Still, shortly after 5.00 pm on Friday, Havens and his band took the stage and officially kicked off Woodstock with a 50-minute set in front of as many as half a million music-hungry revellers, stretching out final numbers largely due to needing to stall time for later acts, and virtually dreaming up his defining ‘Freedom’ piece in the midst of his improvised time killing. Once guru Swami Satchidananda took over to treat the audience to an invocation, Havens knew he’d pulled off the last-minute live scrabble, and the rest of the festival, relatively, fell into place.
Havens went down a storm, and a riot was averted, a fear that would be realised 30 years later when Lang mismanaged 1999’s corporatised disaster.
