Messed up things at Woodstock
(cont.)
Okay, there was a little violence
Woodstock mostly was peaceful,
even though there were plenty of reasons for it not to be. No one fought anyone
over the last outrageously overpriced $1 hot dog. No one got punched for trying
to buy their way to the front of the porta-potty line. But there was one
notable instance of violence involving a guitar and someone's head. According
to the Huffington Post, during The Who's performance, a political activist
named Abbie Hoffman got on stage and took the microphone, and started ranting
about brothers and sisters and persecution and blah, blah, blah, or at least
that's what The Who's Pete Townshend was thinking because he only tolerated a
few seconds of insolence before he hit Hoffman in the head with his guitar. In
one version, Hoffman looked at his assailant and then jumped off the stage and
walked away; in another version, Townshend actually hit him hard enough to
knock him off the stage. But really, if you add that little incident in with
the burned down concession stands and maybe an argument or two about who could
stare at the Sun the longest, there just wasn't a lot of violence anywhere in
that throng of 500,000 people, which is perhaps one of Woodstock's most
remarkable legacies.
Put some shoes on, hippie
Meanwhile, the medical teams were
super busy. According to the Journal of Emergency Medical Services, the local
practitioner who'd been hired to oversee them declared the event had the
potential to become "the greatest medical tragedy of our times." That
wasn't just because the medical team was only set up for a crowd of roughly
50,000 people and 500,000 showed up, but also because the clogged roads meant
they wouldn't be able to get any ambulances to or from the site if all the
peace and love ran out and people started rioting. Fortunately, the
"greatest medical tragedy of our times" didn't materialize that
weekend, but that doesn't mean that bad things didn't happen. By the end of the
festival, medical staff reported they had treated 797 bad trips, 23 epileptic
seizures, 57 cases of heat exposure, and 176 asthma attacks. There were also
938 foot lacerations, 135 foot punctures, and 346 random other foot injuries,
all of which basically just served to prove that hippies really ought to wear
shoes. CNN reported that a woman also fell from stage scaffolding and broke her
back. Remarkably, only two people died — the 17-year-old who was killed by the
sewage-toting tractor and a Marine who died from a heroin overdose. Of course
by today's standards, even one preventable death at a festival would be
considered outrageous, but for a team that got 10 times more than they'd
planned for, two dead out of half a million really isn't that terrible.
Trip tents
Because lacerated feet, heat
exhaustion, and people getting run over by tractors just wasn't enough to keep
them all busy, the medical team also had to set up separate tents just to treat
people who were having bad trips. According to the Journal of Emergency Medical
Services, one newspaper estimated there were around "25 freakouts each
hour," and since freakouts could last several hours, these patients
started filling up the tents pretty quickly. Unfortunately the Woodstock
medical team wasn't really that experienced with LSD "freakouts," so
they enlisted the help of the Hog Farm, yes, the same people who passed out all
the granola. The Hog Farm provided 85 people who were all experienced in running
"trip tents" at similar festivals. The Hog Farmers had developed a
technique for talking down bad trips, which was remarkably successful and also
saved them from having to use Thorazine, a seriously hard-core tranquilizer and
anti-psychotic drug commonly used to treat bad trips in emergency rooms. In
hindsight, most people fail to recognize just how important the medical
services were, and how equally important it was for doctors and nurses to
remain non-judgmental in the face of so much recreational drug use. Because of
that, people experiencing drug-related side effects weren't afraid to seek
help, which meant they would get the care they needed, but also helped prevent
any widespread panic that would have definitely gotten in the way of all the
mud-soaked peace and music.
The documentary was the dividing
line between legendary and forgotten
Everyone remembers Joan Baez, the
Who, Jimi Hendrix, Keef Hartley Band, and Quill. Wait, you mean you don't
remember those last two? Maybe it's because those bands — although they did
indeed play at Woodstock — did not get featured in the documentary film
Woodstock. That means that they braved the mud and the electrically-charged
sound equipment and ended up with very little name recognition for their
troubles. According to Huffington Post, the four-hour, Oscar-winning
documentary, which was released the year after the festival, gave a publicity
bump to the bands we now think of the big-name performers of the era. Bands who
were left out of the film were largely forgotten. And some of the artists who
gave kind of patchy performances — like the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin —
got excluded from the original film but were acknowledged in later releases,
which gave them a sort of belated publicity bump. So really, it wasn't
Woodstock itself that turned those already-big names into legends, it was the
documentary film about Woodstock. After all, the memories of 500,000 stoned
hippies may fade, but film is forever.
A midnight loan saved the
festival
The Woodstock festival was a
generation-defining, epic historical moment, which became enshrined in musical
history and the collective consciousness of America. But for organizers, it
pretty much sucked. It's probably safe to say that the four guys who put the
festival together really had no idea what they were getting themselves into.
They were all in their 20s, and the only real qualifications they had were
green with pictures of presidents on them. When they finally settled on the
idea of putting on a concert (after cycling through other ideas like building a
music studio and filming a sitcom), they decided the best way to get big names
was to offer double the money that those big names usually got. They were
already kind of over their heads even before the festival turned into a
free-for-all. But then, traffic became such a problem that they had to contract
helicopters to fly in food, supplies, and their very expensive performers. According
to History, it got so bad that the festival was nearly canceled, because by
Saturday some of the performers were having temper-tantrums and demanding
upfront pay, in cash. So, organizers convinced a local bank to front them an
emergency midnight loan, using a personal trust fund as collateral. And the
show went on, though it probably was only bittersweet for the organizers, since
the loan wasn't exactly going to help them turn a profit… just prevent 500,000
people from getting really pissed off.
In 1969, hippies weren't really
that into the Earth
Today, we think of hippies as
gentle souls who believe in peace, love, and taking care of Mother Earth. In
the late sixties, hippies were mostly just about the first two items on the
list, and not so much about the third. Unless they maybe just didn't think of
Max Yasgur's dairy farm as "Mother Earth," necessarily. At any rate,
the people who went to Woodstock did not, for the most part, seem to give an
actual crap about the environment at the festival. According to a 1969 article
in The Village Voice, there were still "piles of garbage up and down the
hillside" a month after the festival, one of which was "still
smoldering." There was evidently some effort to keep the site clean during
the festival — trash bags were passed around through the audience at various
points — but it wasn't enough to keep the garbage from inundating the nearby
woods and the shoulders of most roads. Photos of the aftermath show volunteers
filling bags with trash during the last days of the festival, and local people
cleaning up the debris that was left in front of their homes and neighborhoods.
Perhaps organizers should have billed the festival as "three days of
peace, music, and sanitation." That might have at least saved them something
on the cleanup.
Peace and music won't stitch up a
serious laceration
The traffic wasn't just a problem
for people who really, really wanted to get to the festival — it was also a
problem for emergency services. One image from the event shows a young man
sprawled out on the pavement, surrounded by stopped cars and good Samaritans.
According to the image caption, he was "thrown from the trunk of a
car," but an ambulance wasn't able to get to him because there was just no
way through the traffic. Now, let's just ignore the part where he was
"thrown from the trunk of a car," because we're not really sure how
that actually happens unless the trunk latch is broken and you're a bag of
groceries. But the fact that there was no way in for emergency services just
sort of highlights the miracle of Woodstock — that there weren't considerably
more deaths and/or serious injuries. Instead of being remembered as a
generation-defining, epic historical moment, Woodstock could have been
remembered as one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.
Three days of hell... err, peace
and music
It was billed as "three days
of peace and music," but it's probably more accurate to say that it was
"three days of mud, rain, and food shortages." Festival-goers might
have been super enthusiastic on Friday, but on Sunday, a lot of them had pretty
much had it. So, by the time headliner Jimi Hendrix got on stage, the crowd had
dwindled from a peak 500,000 down to around 180,000. It kind of comes down to
the failure of concert organizers to get pretty much anything right — the
schedule was so badly mucked up by Sunday that performers were taking the stage
literally hours after they were scheduled to appear. According to History,
Hendrix had a clause in his contract that virtually guaranteed most fans would
miss his performance. No one was allowed to perform after him, and since
Sunday's schedule was so hideously delayed, he didn't get on stage until Monday
morning… which, incidentally, was the fourth day of the three-day festival.
Although he gave what is widely considered to be a legendary performance, including
his famous rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner," most of the
exhausted, hungry, dirt-covered people who came to see him had already given up
and were on their way home. In fact, it's probably safe to say that a lot of
them weren't even aware of what they were missing.
Three days of peace and music,
one decade of suffocating debt
So, what of the poor, hapless
concert organizers? Did they file for bankruptcy? Did they spend the rest of
their lives lamenting what was the greatest financial blunder in musical
history? Nope. In fact, today, Woodstock Ventures is still a thing. According
to Reuters, the company is still churning out Woodstock merchandise, albums,
books, documentaries, and whatever else they can attach a price tag to. But
the company's prosperity was a very, very long time coming. The total bill for
the original festival was $3.1 million, which is around $15 million in today's
dollars. Income from the festival amounted to just $1.8 million, which is
roughly $1.7 million more than you probably thought it was based on everything
you've read so far. Fortunately, concert promoters had that one financial
windfall that has saved many a young entrepreneur from financial ruin: a rich
daddy. One of the promoters got his family to cover the debt, on condition that
it would eventually be repaid. And it was, but not until the early 1980s — more
than a decade after Hendrix packed up and vacated the stage, leaving nothing
but nostalgic memories and piles of garbage in his wake.
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