Why did Ian Anderson turn down Woodstock?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of love, it was the age of folly, it was Woodstock 1969. It was the high point of the counterculture movement in every which way. The famed festival marked the fuzzy peak of spring’s hopeful intoxication and forecasted the despair of winter’s comedown. For three days in August ’69, just north of New York City, in a small town in the Catskill Mountains, the great unwashed came together, and the world has been reeling from the miasma kicked up ever since.
As Jimi Hendrix poeticised: “500,000 halos outshined the mud and history. We washed and drank in God’s tears of joy, and for once, and for everyone, the truth was not a mystery. Love called to all; music is magic.” While Hendrix’s highfalutin recollection of utopian liberation might uphold one side of the Woodstock coin, the obverse was equally apparent. Cue Pete Townshend of The Who’s appraisal: “Well, it changed me. I hated it.”
Good times and bad times all happened there, but one thing is for certain: the festival was a pivotal moment in culture. “You watched that high of the hippie thing descend into drug depression,” Joni Mitchell recalled. “Right after Woodstock, then we went through a decade of basic apathy where my generation sucked its thumb and then just decided to be greedy and pornographic.”
That may be so, but was the festival itself beset by greed? In many ways, this is a very pertinent question to ask. There is a rose-tinted reminiscence to supposed the zenith of Woodstock. But was it just a really big festival that retrospect has imbued with a sense of momentous reverence, or was it really the last hurrah of a golden revolution? Well, perhaps Ian Anderson’s refusal to perform can tell us a little bit about the feelings towards the frenzy at the time.
Why did Jethro Tull refuse to play at Woodstock?
Ian Anderson’s band offered a novel injection of something fresh into the zeitgeist of the era. They were prog rock before the genre had been given a name, and the organisers at Woodstock were keen to have them there to ensure this new offshoot of guitar music was accounted for. So, why did they turn down the biggest show on the planet?
Well, Anderson was pretty clear-eyed about the whole thing from the start, upholding the cynic’s view of the event before it had even occurred. “I knew it was going to be a big deal,” he told Songfacts. “The reason I didn’t want to play Woodstock is because I asked our manager, Terry Ellis, ‘Well, who else is going to be there?’ And he listed a large number of groups who were reputedly going to play, and that it was going to be a hippie festival.”
He was right on both counts. Without the Hog Farm Family, a hippie commune, and Ken Kesey, the hippie king, the event may well have never gone ahead. Moreover, with names like Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Jefferson Airplane and everyone else in between all playing, there was no questioning the monumental draw of the event from the offset.
So, Anderson asked, “‘Will there be lots of naked ladies? And will there be taking drugs and drinking lots of beer, and fooling around in the mud?’ Because rain was forecast.” When his manager said that would most certainly be the case, the famed flautist replied, “Right. I don’t want to go.”
Later, explaining, “I don’t like hippies, and I’m usually rather put off by naked ladies unless the time is right.”
He further admitted that money was a factor, too. Interestingly, despite being the biggest show in history, arriving at a point when the industry was flush with cash, the acts didn’t actually receive all that much. For instance, Hendrix’s headline slot rewarded the band with $18,000 (the equivalent of $143,536 / £116,514 as of 2023), and the Grateful Dead only got $2,250 ($17,942 / £16,190). So, it was perhaps a little easier for Anderson to hold his virtues as paramount this time around.
