Woodstock 50th anniversary: Event never to be repeated

The planned festival to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Woodstock has been canned — and that’s probably for the best, writes Phil Brown.

MAYBE it’s appropriate that the planned Woodstock 50 festival in the US has been cancelled.

It was scheduled to be held next week, but after being plagued by a series of misfortunes and obstacles, both financial and logistical, it has been canned.

Headline acts cancel from 'Woodstock 50'

Fogerty dumps Woodstock anniversary show

But there will be other celebrations in Australia and in the US celebrating the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, which was held from August 15-18, 1969.

It was the event that defined the counterculture era of hippiedom and featured music superstars including Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, both of whom would die the following year (much like the hippy movement) of drug overdoses.

Jim Hendrix was a headliner at Woodstock...

... as was fellow ‘27 Club’ member-to-be Janis Joplin.

Some people have romantic visions of Woodstock, but whenever I think of it I recall the reports of Joplin shooting up between swigs of bourbon just so she could get on stage.

Woodstock completed what the Summer of Love had begun in San Francisco in 1967, when everyone was wearing flowers in their hair and calling for peace and love while dropping tabs of LSD.

It was a tumultuous and momentous period of extremes. The flower power movement was happening at the same time as the Cold War and the Vietnam War.

But it was also a time of optimism and, the month before Woodstock, the Americans had landed a man on the moon.

The singer Joni Mitchell described Woodstock as “a spark of beauty” where half a million young people “saw that they were part of a greater organism”.

The event was captured in the Academy award-winning 1970 documentary film Woodstock directed by Michael Wadleigh. One of the editors was a young filmmaker by the name of Martin Scorsese.

John Sebastian performs at Woodstock.

The soundtrack featured Mitchell’s song Woodstock, which became a major hit.

Soon after the event, it entered the bloodstream of myth and became a pop-cultural legend and reference point for artists, musicians and even comedians such as Benny Hill. Who can forget his 1972 comedy skit Woodstick featuring the lecherous British comic chasing hippy chicks around the fields with songs including Hill singing The Dustbins of Your Mind.

Woodstock 50 was to celebrate this legend but when stars started pulling out – notably John Fogerty (who had played at the original Woodstock) and Jay-Z – things started going south,.

The plan was for Woodstock 50 to take place the same weekend in August as the original Woodstock, which was held in Bethel, New York. Woodstock 50 changed venues several times, with New York State options eventually scrapped.

Organisers then planned to hold it in Columbia, Maryland, but on July 31 Variety announced the bad news. It had been cancelled.

Mike Lang, the co-creator of the original Woodstock, told Variety that he was “saddened that a series of unforeseen setbacks has made it impossible”.

Carlos Satana and his band perform at Woodstock.

Previous attempts to replicate Woodstock haven’t fared well. Woodstock 1994, celebrating the 25th anniversary, was plagued by terrible weather and overcrowding. It was dubbed Mudstock. Woodstock 1999 was dogged by allegations of sexual assaults and bad behaviour.

Woodstock 50 was, however, supposed to rescue the legacy with its promises of peace, love and music.

Mind you, the original Woodstock was a debacle too. It was held at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm near White Lake in Bethel, New York, which is actually around 70km from the town of Woodstock.

Over one rainy weekend, 32 acts performed, including Hendrix, Joplin, Joan Baez, Ravi Shankar, Santana, Grateful Dead and, among others, Fogerty with his band Creedence Clearwater Revival.

There were half a million people there, although there were originally only supposed to be around 50,000 attending.

In recalling the scene from the stage, Fogerty recalled that “it was sort of like a painting of a Dante scene, just bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud”.

The huge crowd soaks in the once-in-a-lifetime event.

The casualty count was probably low, considering. Only two people died, including one who was run over by a tractor. Babies were born, drug-takers overdosed and yet a sense of social harmony reigned.

Woodstock was the crowning glory of the era but could never be replicated, so why even try?

I was listening to an ABC Radio National interview recently with rock writers Lily Brett, Stuart Coupe and Andrew Stafford chatting about the era and they talked about Woodstock being a landmark, with the next big festival after it, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, being the one that marked the beginning of the end of the era that Woodstock crowned.

Altamont was held on December 6, 1969, just a few months after Woodstock, with the Rolling Stones as the headline act. The organisers attempted to replicate Woodstock and its ethos.

But when the Grateful Dead, who has also played at Woodstock, got the Hells Angels to act as security, disaster ensued and violence wracked the event, with a fatal stabbing right in front of the stage. The episode is captured in the film Gimme Shelter.

Trying to recreate Woodstock didn’t work back then and hasn’t worked for anyone since, although Australia may have had the most success with the Sunbury Music Festival, held for four years from 1972 on a farm on the outskirts of Melbourne.

Fans went au naturale in the summer of love.

Festival-goers shower on-site at Woodstock.

That event was compared to Woodstock and was the forerunner of music festivals that followed, including the Big Day Out and Splendour in the Grass.

We had our own homegrown rock heroes at Sunbury, including Skyhooks, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, Daddy Cool and international guests including Queen and Deep Purple.

Sunbury was, like Woodstock, always a bit of a hippy affair.

And like Woodstock, it has now become mythologised but myths are hard to recreate and really should be left as just that – myths.

So there will be no Woodstock 50 but there will be celebrations of Woodstock’s 50th anniversary. Ours started with the recent Women of Woodstock concert at the Brisbane Powerhouse and there will be gigs around the country next week marking the occasion.

Meanwhile, Aussie rock guru Glenn A. Baker is hosting a Woodstock 50th anniversary tour starting in San Francisco this weekend and finishing with a visit to the Bethel Woods Centre for the Arts – an immersive, captivating multimedia experience that tells the story of the ’60s and Woodstock.

BYO reefers, we presume?

A grandstand seat at Woodstock