Sex, Drugs, Rock 'N Roll in Redneck Country
[This post is by my mother, Ethel Grodzins Romm, bio below.]
We started early on Thursday, barreling up the outside lane on Rt 17. passing the amazing vehicles in the right lane, VW's painted all over in merry Crayola colors, vans covered with chaotic designs lately called psychedelic, never seen in rural upstate New York, every window open, young drivers and passengers with Jesus-length hair blowing in the wind.
A ridiculous sight for 25 bucolic miles. What were they doing here in redneck country?
We must be doing 80 to whiz past them like that, or maybe 90. "Honey! Slow down." I scolded my husband, Al Romm, editor of the local daily paper out of Middletown. "We're in no hurry."
The Woodstock concert was not scheduled to start until late the next day, 4 pm Friday afternoon, August 15. But Al wanted to check his plans for covering this event, a simple rock concert, which was turning into a peculiar happening no one quite grasped. He was worried about the motorcycle courier.
"I'm not going even 60." He pointed to the speedometer. It read 53 mph. !?! So they must all be driving only 40 in a 65-mph-speed zone. Hippies, loaded with hippie drugs, they didn't want to be stopped for speeding. But we don't know that yet.
We don't know a lot of things. Neither one of us had ever smoked pot, and didn't even recognize the heavy, sweet smell of it that night wafting all over Max Yasgur's farm until one of the kids, rolling his eyes at a 44-year-old's ignorance, identified it.
He introduced his girlfriend as "my old lady." She was maybe 17. They were both stripped to the waist, lying in a zipped-open sleeping bag, like hundreds, thousands, of couples around them, soon to be soaked by the rains. (Has anyone tried to track births nine months later?)
Nor had we ever dropped acid, but at least we had heard a lot about LSD. But not mescaline or psilocybin or STP or all the other stuff I was soon to see laid out for sale "at bargain prices" on long tables up in the woods, under a big sign, DRUG STORE, sometimes handed out with a smile to 5-year-olds, their palms up, begging, "Free dope, anyone?"
Al had hired a courier to bring exposed film and hard copy back to the newsroom in Orange County -- no laptops in 1969. That motorcycle spent 3 days snaking through the miles of stalled, sometimes gas-less parked vehicles that were jammed ditch to ditch. It was the reason that the Times Herald-Record was the only paper in the world to publish daily stories, witnessed from the ground.
No other journalists got closer than helicopter windows. With traffic impassable for miles in every direction, we were soon to learn that most of our own reporters never made it in, either.
Our station wagon had a blow-up mattress in the back, and a hamper full of food, juices, and ice. "Don't drink anything you haven't opened yourself," warned our Middletown doctor, Ed Thaler, who happened to be Bob Dylan's doctor. "Don't accept food, either."
Dylan, a closet heroin addict at the time, although invited, never made it to Woodstock.
We were barreling up Rt. 17, the famous road off the NY Thruway to the Catskill Mountains, always sleepy mid-week, now clogged in the right lane with this alien, crawling traffic.
At Monticello, on the advice of the State Troopers I had called the night before, we did not turn West on 17B like everyone else headed for the farm of Max Yasgur. He was the pro-Vietnam War, conservative Republican libertarian who thought everyone could do their thing. So he had given the festival a home after a town down the road cancelled it four weeks before it was to open.
Al had written a nicely reasoned editorial condemning the last-minute withdrawal of the town permit. Readers from everywhere criticized him mercilessly. He couldn't walk down the street without hearing how wrong-headed he was.
"Dirty, immoral, lazy, unpatriotic longhairs"... those were about the nicest things they wrote and hollered.
Most everyone who had correctly headed West towards Yasgur's place was piling up along the road, in the ditches and across all the lanes, never to retrieve their cars for days. Instead, we drove North two more exits and curled around a narrow dirt road until we came to the farm. The troupers said we were the last car to make it in.
We parked behind the high, huge stage and enormous speaker and lighting towers, and began to wander around. Abbie Hoffman, the founder of the Yippies (Youth International Party), was also wandering, never sober, never smiling. He used to repeat their anthem, "Don't trust anyone over 30." He was now 32.
Now Abbie's greeting to us: "Welcome to Dante's Inferno."
Only the few reporters who had taken their days off and come early were on site. By Friday, the start of the concert, not one of any paper's scheduled reporters, music critics, or photographers, including ours, could drive closer than many miles, and because of the heavy rains, they didn't want to hike in, either.
Everyone who was there had the sense to gather at the Press Trailer, empty except for the five of us -- or was it six? -- from the TH-R. The copy we wrote almost won us a 1969 Pulitzer, we were told later by someone who was on the selection panel. "You missed by one vote."
What disappointed Al about our coverage was our B-minus critiquing of the incredible music. The paper's music reviewers never made it in.
On Thursday, the day before the music started, Al sent us out to scout the place. I found the Hog Farm camp, a large collection of good guys wisely hired by the producers to keep the peace, run by Wavy Gravy, the sweet saint who herded the motley crew, the only ones who knew how to handle bad drug experiences.
At one time there were 300 kids strung out, semi-conscious. The Hog Farmers laid them out on trestle tables, fed them granola and other whole grains, and talked to them, and talked and talked.
Whenever you saw a Hogger outside their campsite, he was slowly walking someone, sometimes holding them up, soft assuring chatter in their ear.
Every now and then Wavy Gravy would take the mike on stage and warn everyone of "bad brown acid." No one at Woodstock died of an overdose of anything, probably thanks to them.
My first photo in the paper, page 1, was of a girl on a stretcher being carried into the the First Aid tent. The Hog Farm was probably there within 10 minutes, comforting her, which would have made a truer picture of how bad drug reactions were handled.
On Friday, Al gave us all assignments. Mine: "Go back up to the entrance gate on Rte 17B. We hear there's a mob crashing in."
That gate was nowhere to be seen when I got there, nor were long stretches of the fence that had been installed. The ticket booths had never gone up. It had become a free concert.
The 350 New York cops that producer Michael Lang had hired to stop this kind of thing had been forbidden by their chief to work at Woodstock, but many showed up anyway, signing in with names like "Mickey Mouse," says Lang. Even with the local police, there were not enough.
No tickets were ever sold or collected there. The huge amount of money that was lost at Woodstock was lost right there.
Later, it was reported that the promoters even had to refund thousands of tickets to people who claimed they couldn't get there. I never met any of the producers -- nor the famous or infamous singers -- my beat was far away from the stage.
On Friday an entirely different crowd was pouring through that gate. The day before, anyone coming through had asked, conspiratorially, "How's the dope? Expensive? Where do I get it?" Having stumbled upon the Drug Store in the woods, I could direct them.
On Friday the only questions were, "How's the sound system? Can you hear the music OK?" This horde had come for the concert. More or less.
I'm not sure they enjoyed the music much. On the first night, Joan Baez, pregnant, was the last act, starting well after midnight, her perfect voice wafting in the dark together with the marijuana across embracing bodies. After she finished a song, there was little applaus -- only a few pathetic claps here and there.
A bit unsettled, she asked, "Is anyone out there?" Well, yes, they were, in the thousands -- stoned, zapped, laid out on the pasture turf, soon to be mud, grinning, sappy, asleep. (The film has wild applause after all songs. Was it dubbed in?)
Yet, no one died of a drug overdose. Or of blood poisoning either, which easily could have done them in. That was thanks to Ed Silvers, the local Professional Engineer hired by the promoters to turn 600 farm acres into a festival venue. He had 2 weeks to do it all -- water, sewers, emergency hospital, toilets, telephones.
Max's farm had certain deficiencies as the new Eden. For starters, there was no water on site. Should they bring in tankers? Ed ended up drilling six wells -- that's right, six, with endless temporary piping, and faucets every few feet for people to drink from and wash up with.
"But, Ed, why did the water stink of chlorine all the time? It tasted awful. Did you tap into a swimming pool?"
"It started raining the first night. The fields got muddy. I was watching those kids running barefoot through a cow pasture full of manure-that's pure poison, with lots of broken glass from soda pop bottles buried in the mud. I was very worried. I added more chlorine to the water so that every time you washed your feet and hands, you disinfected yourself."
Everyone complained about the taste and odor, but with all the scratches and cuts, some of them deep, requiring stitches, not a single case of infection was reported at Woodstock. We were in the hands of a Master Engineer.
And in the hands of experienced electricians. No one got electrocuted in the rain by the miles of hot wires strung up the speaker towers and laying on and under and around the stage. Not that the kids didn't try -- they kept climbing up and into everything.
The sound and infrastructure engineers knew all too well that at a rainy rock concert in Scotland, a singer had died horribly. She had stepped up to the wet mike and sweetly kissed it. Shocked by 120 volts and 10 milli-amps, she dropped. Not at Woodstock.
The entire steel skeletal under-structure of the vast stage was well-grounded, everyone's eagle eyes on it through all the rain.
We were also in the hands of professional police officers. "Considering that the State Troupers were all rednecks," Ed remarked, "They did very well keeping the peace."
Those troupers had started off bewildered, shaking their heads at the nudity, the long hair, the funny jewelry, the weird clothes, the open sex, the skinny dipping in the pond. But after a few hours on Day One, they were ready to legalize pot.
"If this crowd was drinking beer," several said to me, "They'd be violent. This pot stuff quiets down everyone. There's thousands here. We couldn't have handled it."
Exactly how many thousands were at Woodstock? By Sunday, the state police figure of 450,000 was rounded up by everyone to half a million, which anniversary stories relentlessly report.
At the time, Editor Al Romm looked around and said, "100,000 to 150,000." He was very good at numbers.
You can check that out. Next time you see a shot of a sports stadium crowd, say, 41,007 packed into the Met's new ballpark, Citi Field, compare it with the air photos of Woodstock. There were not 10 times as many in Bethel. Not even 5 times.
Only a few weeks after we land a man on the moon, we have 3 Days of Peace and Music, plus dysentery, diarrhea, food poisoning, and bad drug trips. And everyone wishes they had been there, or lies about being there.
Sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll -- the "Politics of Ecstasy," LSD guru Timothy Leary called it. At Woodstock it was the Ecstasy of Politics.
For this was all about politics, the politics of peace, hardly mentioned except by some lonely New Leftists up in the woods, yet the engine for all that went on. These kids did not want to fight in the Vietnam War. There was a draft call the very week-end of Woodstock.
But, unlike their politically active brothers and sisters, the hippies (what a quaint term 40 years later) did nothing to shorten the war they passionately opposed. On the contrary, what would President Nixon like better than to have them go off to the mountains, get zonked, and leave him alone?
In time-tested American fashion, they were strengthening what they professed to detest.
Ethel Grodzins Romm covered Woodstock by accident when the reporters for the local daily paper of which her husband was editor couldn't make it onto the site.
She is the author of several books, wrote the writing column for Editor & Publisher and ABA Journal (American Bar Assn.). She has written for Esquire, N.Y. Times Op-Ed page, Penthouse, cover story for New York Magazine, among others. She is currently at work on a book on business management.
Romm has been running drafting, engineering, constructions groups and companies since World War II, when she was civilian Drafting Supervisor at Westover Army Air Base, MA. She was President and CEO of Niton Corp when it was a start-up. It is now part of Thermo Scientific.
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give me an f!!!!!
I've read the comments on here about the differences between the Boomers and what came after. I;d just like to say that, for my generation, when it came time for us to go to war, we didn't have to be drafted. We volunteered even though we knew the risks because it was the right thing to do. How many boomers can say the same thing? At least how many who don't have PTSD or are homeless vietnam vets can say the same thing? When our country asked us to go to war, we went, just like the Boomers parents went in WW2, Korea, and WW1. We went and we weren't a bunch of babies about it.
your brain has been washed. go get it dirty.
Did you go to Iraq or Afghanistan or are you using the collective "we"?
My generation had its share of people that thought the same way you did, that it was the right thing to do. George Bush was one of them, but he hid in the safety of the National Guard and did his drugs in the safety of Texas.
Those that believe imperialism of the type demonstrated in Iraq is the right thing to do are lacking in morality or are ignorant. Your generation didn't have 50,000 killed in the deserts of Iraq, or a lot fewer would be willing to go. Even so, military recruiters have a suicide problem today, and are lowering standards to take felons because it is getting harder to get the "generation of the willing" to volunteer to go. The national guard is being deployed in unprecedented tours of duty to cover for the lack of regular service troops available to due duty.
Rambo was fiction, intentionally designed to get the hopelessly stupid to believe that killing massive numbers of people in the name of patriotism is warranted. It is not.
My grandfathers generation went to the first and the second world war. Most of them in my family never came back including 6 brothers. The ones that did told me under no circumstances to go if anything like that happened again.
And no offense Boomers, but it looks like Generation X is going to have to pick up the check and clean up the mess of the last 40 years, although true to our nature, it will be done in a more tough-minded way. If we're successful, maybe the generation of teh 2060s will again be enjoying the privileged indulgence in all kinds of fuzzy-minded Utopianism--most of which just doesn't seem to quite pan out for some reason.
At age six, I got caught in that very same traffic jam on Route 17, with my aunt and her husband heading home from New York City. It was not a pleasant memory for a budding Generation X-er like me, since my aunt's husband was in a bad mood even before we started. He had tried out for "Jeopardy" and failed because he wasn't telegenic enough. His mood was made worse by all the heavy traffic and my backseat driving. It took us about 10-12 hours to make a trip that normally took two.
That's my Gen X view of Woodstock. It was a product of a society with a very large middle class--larger than ever before or sense--and a lot of middle class young people enjoying the all the consumer products the empire was producing at its height. Naturally, they could not understand why the empire was so determined to hold on to a far away outpost in Vietnam, and that has even mystified a historian like me.
Maybe it just was a case that the empire at its apex was used to getting its way most of the time, in most places, and so were a lot of the middle class young it produced. That created a big contradiction.
This is awesome, and this is what we need more of. Think about how much was accomplished in the sixties with peace movements and equality rights etc. If we can put ourselves into another era similar to that, we will move everything forward at a faster rate then we currently are.
There's nothing wrong with moving the world into a better place, especially if we have a good time doing it.
I'm sorry. You WANT the youth of this time to be put through the kind of turmoil that Boomers went through in the 1960s? I though the whole point of having kids was so that they might have a better chance than their parents. Seriously, any parent who wants their kids to go through the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s isn't really a parent at all.
The odds were that most children wouldn't live as long as their parents before the twentieth century.
I'm posting from the Taos, NM area and not all that very far from where the Rainbow Gathering occured last month in the Sanata Fe National Forest here in northern New Mexico. I liked the article, which was one of the better first hand Woodstock experience posts I've read, but have to disagree with one of the author's last phrases. She calls the term "hippie" "a quaint tern 40 years later". Around this part of the country, it's still alive and very much applicable. And no, I did not go to Woodstock (too young), but I did do Columbia University and the mountains of New Mexico in the early and mid-70's and stayed here in NM where solar power and water use consciousness are very much ahead of the rest of the USA.
To even us older folk (49) who were too young to be there, hearing about Woodstock all just seemed a bit strange when it happened, back in the day. Why would somebody go so far in the rain and mud? Okay, free music, but ??? After reading this, it sounds like it was mostly about drugs. Now it kinda makes sense....thanks for the article.
"In time-tested American fashion, they were strengthening what they professed to detest. "
BS, the hippies galvanized the young and the protesters, and that ended the war.
Nixon and J Edgar Hoover was so afraid of these people love in's they conspired to kill the hippies by attacked the pot use.
My great moment of the 60 were the wonderful people, marches and protests. Even more was the whole atmosphere back then of welcoming, openness and concern for one another. Even the "conservatives" who were mostly libertarians.
"BS, the hippies galvanized the young and the protesters, and ended that war."
I have to agree. Without strong protesting, we'd probably still be fighting in Viet Nam.
Don't believe me? Then explain why we're still in Iraq, and escalating in Afghanistan. Two wars that have gone on without much anti-war protesting to speak of.
Kids in the 60s were drafted and forced to go to Viet Nam. Today, unfortunately, kids go to Iraq and Afghanistan looking for employment.
Fun post, and very atmospheric.... but it does demonstrate the tricks that memory can play: who was the singer who died at the rainy rock concert in Scotland because she kissed the wet mike? Perhaps a mix-up: the most notorious accident of that type in the UK happened in Wales (not Scotland), when Les Harvey (brother of the "Sensational" Alex) of Stone the Crows (a band FROM Scotland) was electrocuted by clutching a badly earthed/grounded microphone with wet hands. But it wasn't at a rainy concert: it was at some ballroom in Swansea...... and it happened in 1972. WAS there another similar electrocution death, of a woman singer, in Scotland and BEFORE Woodstock?
The Grateful Dead, who performed one of their not-finest shows in the middle of the night at Woodstock, complained that the rain on the stage meant that they were getting shocks when they touched some of the equipment. Nobody got killed by the electricity there, but it was relatively scary stuff.
I didn't go to Woodstock (too far away). I grew up in the most interesting transforming time in the history of America. I grew up in San Francisco in the 60's/70's.
We marched against war, hundreds of thousands strong and we ended it. We exposed the bankrupcy of the ruling class, the anti freedom and anti liberty right wing and the McArthy period which preceded us. It was an explosion of creativity and freedom of expression, debate and political activism. We marched with the civil rights movement against racism. There was no profit motive in our music and art. We created to share. There were the 'Diggers" who provided free food and medical help, we had a free clinic on Haight st. I remember it as the golden age of America. We were hated and attacked, the press invented the name "hippies". We were just young people pushing back against ignorance and fear in America. Ever since the establishment media and the right wing has tried to discredit us and revise the history of our beliefs and actions. The capitalist class was threatened more than any time since the 1930's. . I know the truth and no matter what you say it is still the truth.
I must admit I am jealous.
I wish people my age today were more involved the way your generation was.
No offense - I appreciate what you guys did and all but
1) The war was ended by Ho Chi Minh.
2) The ruling class and corporatism is stronger than ever
Re; "The ruling class and corporatism is stronger than ever."
That's because the ruling class has learned how to turn rebellion into money.
It kills me that the big moment of the Baby Boomers' generation is Woodstock. That just makes me laugh like no tomorrow. And I was heartened to hear a couple teenagers in an electronics store the other day talking about all the hype coming up...laughing about the whole event. Nice to know our younger generations may be made of better stuff than the ones that came before them.
I don't know about you, but this baby boomer's biggest moments do not include Woodstock. We had a three day festival of our own coming up in Milwaukee (Led Zeppelin, Blind Faith, John Mayall, many, many more), so me and my friends didn't go to Woodstock.
My big moments include marching for civil rights (open housing) in the most racist areas of Milwaukee, working for the Milwaukee Organizing Committee against the Vietnam War, being one of the (male) co-founders of Milwaukee's NOW chapter, being a founding member of Outpost Natural Foods Coop, and playing in a number of blues bands.
Now, what was it that your heroes in the "younger generation" are doing about racial discrimination, equal rights, environmentalism, and the two wars we got going these days? I see many people of my generation at rallies protesting the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars since day one every Wednesday in front of the courthouse.
Younger people - not so much. Most of them seem to be satisfied by being cyberspace keyboard commandos mostly, like I am right now. And to much the same effect.
Our biggest moment so far was electing this country's first black president. You boomers may have marched for civil rights, but we're the generations that enabled the biggest step to happen.
Gee Daffey -- too bad you never had a "big moment". How sad for you and your kind. I find it interesting that most young people are trying to recreate what us "boomers" had back then. Except for you, of course.
You bet we're trying to recreate what boomers had back them: the promise of a future where we could possibly do as well as our parents. But, the boomers just won't leave the table to let us prosper.
If I had to pick between no big moment and Woodstock, I would gladly and gleefully take no big moment rather than one that made me appear like a spoiled, self-absorbed brat who care about nothing but myself and my narcissism. But then, that's why I would make such a miserable Boomer.
and what was the big moment for the generations x, y and z?
the youth since the woodstock generation have been almost useless.
I'm sorry, but I resectfully disagree. Many, many young people are activists today ~ their style is much less flashy, and the media are not infatuated with them for it, but it is true nonetheless. I'm sorry you don't really know any of them.
We haven't had one. The Boomers won't get out of the way.
Teenagers always laugh at the older generation's passions. But these teenagers may have the last laugh, after all, since they seem to have no passions other than txting and twittering and playing video games.
If you think that's all teens today have going on, then you're obviously not paying attention. I'm a high school teacher. I interact with teens every day. There's a lot more going on there than anyone gives those kids credit for.
A typical feeling of contempt. I'm shocked at how the older generations now sound just like their parents did all those years ago. I think that, more than anything, is the legacy of the Boomer generation.
Debaters debate the two wars as if Nixon’s civil war on Woodstock Nation didn’t yet run amok. One needn’t travel to China to find indigenous cultures lacking human rights. America leads the world in percentile behind bars, thanks to ongoing persecution of hippies, radicals, and non-whites under banner of the war on drugs. If we’re all about spreading liberty abroad, then why mix the message at home? Peace on the home front would enhance credibility.
The drug czar’s Rx for prison fodder costs dearly, as lives are flushed down expensive tubes. My shaman’s second opinion is that psychoactive plants are God’s gift. In God’s eyes, it’s all good (Gen.1:12). The administration claims it wants to reduce demand for cartel product, but extraditing Canadian seed vendor Marc Emery increases demand. Mr. Emery enables American farmers to steal cartel customers with superior domestic product.
Freedom of speech presupposes freedom of thought. The Constitution doesn’t enumerate any governmental power to embargo diverse states of mind. How and when did government usurp this power to coerce conformity? The Mayflower sailed to escape coerced conformity. Legislators who would limit cognitive liberty lack jurisdiction.
Common-law must hold that adults own their bodies. The Founding Fathers decreed the right to the pursuit of happiness is inalienable. Socrates said to know your self. Lawmakers should not presume to thwart the intelligent design that molecular keys unlock spiritual doors. Persons who appreciate their own free choice of path in life should tolerate seekers’ self-exploration.
Nice post.
: )
Co-sign
Yeah, the Mayflower sailed to escape coerced conformity, and then those Puritans imposed it in New England with a vengeance. And they've been trying to impose it ever since. It's actually VERY American.
I think it might be Garrison Keillor who said "The Puritans came to America searching for greater restriction than was allowed under English law at the time".
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