We chose the Blue Ray edition of the movie Woodstock. Thankfully, we rented it from the library so we could give it back.
After viewing the first few minutes of the film, we fast-forwarded through the rest. Yes, we can see there are a lot of people (400,000+) flocking to the festival at Yasgur's Farm. Here are a bunch of people climbing over the fence because they don't want to pay. There are the Port-O-Potties, and look, someone left their cane in one of them. Mostly, the film shows lots and lots of 20-somethings milling around, stoned or inebriated. But, for the most part, behaving themselves, mostly happy and enjoying the event. (No guns, imagine that today.)
Some of the participants are bathing in a lake. Oh, look, many of them are naked. See how the camera zooms in on one naked young woman with a nice bod. "Just think," observed Mr. Ginley. "She is probably someone's grandma now."
Also in the lake is a blonde woman, whose body remains underwater, as she talks to the camera about peace, love, etc., while several young men follow her like sharks, hoping to get a look-see at whatever is below the water level.
Fast forwarding to the end of the film, we move on to the acts.
The performances are chopped up and feature lots of annoying special effects. I'm sure they were swell at the time, but now they are just distracting. Weird split screens, zoom zooming in and out and lots of orange lighting. It did help that the disc featured the individual acts under the "special features" section, so you didn't have to sit through Melanie, for example, if you just wanted to see Crosby, Stills & Nash.
We managed to see the performers we were most interested in. I got to watch Janis Joplin, Mr. Ginley got The Who. And we partook of Jimi Hendrix, including his famous rendering of the Star Spangled Banner.
The weirdest was Sha Na Na, doing their usual shtick of 1950s hits. I wondered who thought that was a good idea. Not that they weren't entertaining. It just struck me that it was like Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees. (That wasn't a winning idea, either, and it also really happened.)
All in all, I couldn't help but feel sad. So many of the performers would be gone in a few short years. Janis, Jimi, Keith Moon. And when they panned across the hundreds of thousands of fans, I wondered aloud how many of those young men had served and died in Viet Nam, which hadn't yet reached its deadly peak.
In retrospect, the whole thing was quite a feat. Here are some of the numbers:
3 days
32 acts
2 deaths (one insulin usage. the other a tractor ran over a guy who was sleeping in a field)
2 births (one of them in traffic)
4 miscarriages
400,000+ attendees
600-acre venue (dairy farm)
2 hours - duration of Hendrix's performance
And, of course, there were those who were invited but did not participate. Bob Dylan, who lived in Woodstock. Roy Rogers, who was asked to perform Happy Trails at the end of the festival. The Moody Blues because they were performing in Paris.
And Frank Zappa who declined, saying, "A lot of mud at Woodstock."
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