“We are somebody”: Neil Young on the good and bad of Woodstock
For any great artist, the music should come before anything else. The job title is musician for a reason, and the real measure of what an artist is worth is when they can strip away all of the press and ego to ensure that they are in tune with their audience whenever they get on that stage to play. Neil Young was never going to settle for anything less than that kind of connection, but when he played Woodstock for the first time, he ended up having some mixed feelings.
Looking back, there’s a good chance that anyone would have given their all to say that they were at those gigs in New York in 1969. While the Woodstock Festival debatably didn’t lead to the greatest shows of all time for every one of the acts, it did leave us with the best snapshots of what the hippie generation was like, including Jimi Hendrix’s now-iconic version of the American national anthem.
For Young, this kind of gig is everything any musician could have dreamed of. As much as rock and roll was becoming a commodity in the eyes of labels, this was the one chance for people to come together and make it seem like that mentality of peace and love might actually be possible in this little field.
When speaking to Charlie Rose, Young said that the feeling he got from the audience was unlike anything he’d ever felt, saying, “When it happened for the first time, it was something special because there you were, and there were half a million people and we’re just realising, ‘We are somebody’. We’re making a difference, and everybody is with us”.
Any milestone of that magnitude has to be documented, and that meant filming many of the shows from those few nights. Although the footage of people like Hendrix and Santana has been the stuff of rock legend, there’s a good reason why you weren’t going to see Young in any of the footage from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s set.
According to Young, having those camera crews in the way severely limited what he wanted to do that night, recalling, “I thought these guys with their cameras on the stage were in the way of the music. They were a distraction. So I told them, ‘Don’t come near me. I have a heavy guitar. If you come near me, I’m going to hit you with it’”.
Young wasn’t the only one who thought that the curse of the cameras got in the way of making music. Although many fans are happy to see the footage today, there are moments during The Beatles’ Get Back documentary where even Paul McCartney talks about whether or not the cameras are going to disrupt the band’s creative streak as they try to make their new album.
Regardless of the camera’s involvement, CSNY did think enough of the event to cover Joni Mitchell’s iconic ‘Woodstock’ on their next album, Deja Vu. After all of the camerawork impeding on everything, they could still recognise that playing at that kind of show was something that their generation was probably never going to see again.
