cannabisnews.com: The World Remembers Three Days of Peace & Love!





The World Remembers Three Days of Peace & Love!
Posted by FoM on July 24, 1999 at 16:04:43 PT
1969's stars look back with Woodstock.com 
Source: Wood Stock.com
The World remembers three days of peace, love and music. And mud. But the musicians who played at the first Woodstock festival in 1969 have broader recollections. They remember the rains, the swarms of people and roads plugged with abandoned cards, harrowing helicopter rides, a backstage area with no amenities or protection from the elements, and a stage that almost fell apart.
"The thing I remember most is people behind the amps running around and going 'The stage is collapsing! The stage is collapsing!'" the late Jerry Garcia remembered about the Grateful Dead's set in the wee hours of Sunday, August 17. "That didn't make for such a good time.'' "It was chaos, wasn't it?" says The Who's Pete Townshend. "I mean, what was going on off the stage was just beyond comprehension -- stretchers and dead bodies and people throwing up and people having bad trips.   "And all they could say was 'Isn't this fantastic? Isn't this beautiful?' I thought the whole of America had gone mad at that moment." It was a concert like nothing they'd ever experienced before -- or that most would encounter afterwards. While the crowd, estimated at between 400,000 and 600,000, wallowed in and celebrated the muck that was Woodstock, the musicians collected their own tales of wonder and woe. They certainly had some advantages; most of the performers stayed at hotels in and around Bethel, N.Y., where the festival was held, and enjoyed warm, dry accommodations their fans could only dream about during that rain-soaked weekend. But the overcrowded, under-prepared festival site also provided the stars with experiences they'd remember throughout their careers. Like the simple act of getting to Bethel. With the New York Thruway jammed by the cars of thousands of people who would never make it to Woodstock, performers had to devise alternate methods of getting to the show. For guitarist Leslie West and his band Mountain, that meant taking a helicopter from Manhattan. "The pilot had to take two trips," West says. "I was a lot heavier then (about 250 pounds) and he wouldn't take all of us in one trip. It was sort of embarrassing." The transportation hassles affected Richie Havens' Woodstock experience -- and his career. Slated to be the fifth act to perform on Friday, Havens found festival organizers begging him to go on first because the truck carrying equipment for the scheduled opener, Sweetwater, was stuck in traffic. "I thought, 'God, three hours late. They're gonna throw beer cans at me. They're gonna kill me,'" says Havens, whose bass player was also caught in the traffic and didn't arrive until after his set."Fortunately, the reaction was 'Thank God somebody's finally going to do something.' They were happy." Don York of Sha Na Na says the crowd "looked like some production set for a Cecil B. De Mille movie.'' David Clayton-Thomas of Blood, Sweat & Tears describes it as "a city," while Jefferson Airplane's Jorma Kaukonen called it "a mass." And blues guitarist Johnny Winter says "I would say it was wall-to-wall people, but there weren't any walls." Like many of the performers, Carlos Santana -- whose band was unknown when it played its mix of rock and Latin styles at Woodstock -- was unnerved by the size of the audience. "It was like witnessing an ocean of hair, teeth, eyes and hands," Santana says. "If you closed your eyes, you could forget the impact of seeing a moving ocean of flesh. Then you could just feel the sound, which had a different kind of reverberation when it bounced off the people and came back at you." Some performers even elected to venture into the crowd -- including Who bassist John Entwistle, who took more of a "trip" than he desired when told that the group would go on at least 12 hours late. "You couldn't sit in the dressing rooms 'cause they were being shuffled between the bands, so I walked around the whole of the audience," says Entwistle, who met up with some friends from New York and shared his bourbon and Coca-Colas with them. "Unfortunately, the ice had been stolen from backstage and had acid in it, so I spent a little while taking a trip. I figured I had enough time, so I drank the rest of the bourbon and passed out.   "When I came around I was pretty groggy but just about fit enough to play. I don't remember what adventures the rest of the Who had, but we finally went on and the most amazing part of it was when we sang 'I'm Free', the sunrise came up, so it was pretty amazing." Joan Baez, who calls Woodstock "a once in a lifetime thing for me," gave some special memories to a few of the concert goers as well. She was the only one of the festival's big names to play on the free stage, an impromptu set during the first night's rain storm. "That was a riot," Baez recalls. "Whoever was officiously taking names and putting people in order didn't recognize me. I was just one of the lineup. I think I just gave my name as Joan.   ""I went out on the stage, and I'm not sure what I sang but I remember this guy at the top of the hill, in the back ... with no clothes on and flowers in his hair and a long beard. And he started to dance through the crowd towards the stage. So I just cut off the song so I could bow politely to him and leave before he made it to the stage and got up with me.'' After the Sunday afternoon rainstorm, which delayed Ten Years After's set, Alvin Lee decided to leave the backstage area and take a walk. "I joined in the whole vibe of the thing," he says. "It was just great. I experienced it from the other side of the stage." So did singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie, who spent a good portion of his set admittedly "freaked out" by the number of people present. "I walked out in the crowd and went way up to the back of the hill," Guthrie says. "I was overwhelmed just being in the crowd. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do except be there." There was backstage -- kind of. The elaborately designed performers' pavilion, where a New York chef was to prepare steaks for the stars all weekend, was turned over to the medical personnel early in the weekend, leaving the musicians without their usual backstage space. "Backstage became just some big thing on tour poles stuck on a hillside," says Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner. Fellowship prevailed, however. The performers sat together behind the stage, talking, playing music and watching each other perform. Despite the Dead's "plagued" gig, drummer Mickey Hart remembers Woodstock as "a great hang." "Everybody was imbibing in their choice of delicacy, and rubbing shoulders with all your peers -- Hendrix and Crosby, Stills & Nash and Grace (Slick) and Carlos and all the people." says Hart, who is the only 1969 performer on the Woodstock '99 bill - this year he'll play with his own band, Planet Drum. "It was just a big hang. It was very friendly and we were just happy to see each other.   "Some of us had only heard of each other, too. We had heard the records, but we never really got to play with anybody except the people from San Francisco that we knew -- Carlos and the Airplane and Crosby and those guys. They were our buddies. But people from England and a lot of the other groups, we hadn't really ever played with or heard live." Souls were nourished more than bodies, though. Mountain's West groused that Janis Joplin "finished the last bagel before I got to the stage." Still, Santana carries with him an image of the Dead's Garcia; "As soon as we landed, he was already playing his guitar on the hill, with this beautiful, blissful smile on his face." Ten Years After's Lee remembered a tobacco crisis. "We ran out of cigarettes backstage," he says. "So somebody said 'I'll go out and get some from the crowd.' He came back with 20 joints; Nobody had any cigarettes." David Crosby, meanwhile, says the proximity of other performers only spiked the nervousness of the neophyte Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, whose Woodstock engagement was only its second public performance. "Everybody we knew or cared about in the music industry was there," Crosby says. "They were heroes to us -- the Band and Hendrix and the Who ... They were all standing behind us in a circle, like, 'O.K., you're the new kids on the block. Show us.'" Thirty years later, the performers harbor mostly good memories about the first Woodstock. It was a boost for many of their careers, particularly for lesser-known artists such as Santana, Joe Cocker, Melanie and Ten Years After, whose 10-minute version of "Goin' Home" became one of the festival's enduring anthems. Even established acts like the Who benefited from its appearance. "It made us rich," Townshend acknowledged, explaining that Woodstock stoked sales for the group's rock opera, Tommy. "Tommy was finished; it had sold maybe a million and a half copies. Woodstock put it back on the charts, and then the film came out and Tommy sold another four million copies." All told, that's not a bad dividend for a few hours in "chaos." By Gary Graffhttp://www.woodstock.com/html/nsiw0108.shtml Gimme Swelter: A Happening That's Almost Too Hot - 7/24http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread2187.shtml
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Comment #1 posted by FoM on July 26, 1999 at 21:55:01 PT:
Road Diaries Of Our Two Reporters!
Whizstockhttp://www.thewhiz.com/An era has ended, a century is closing, and Woodstock is over. Elizabeth Wilson is the proud owner of the Grand Prize autographed Aerosmith guitar. Thanks to all who entered Whizstock, our groovy tribute to Woodstock and financial whizdom. Take a peek at our Woodstock spin on celebrities, entertainment and finances. And be sure to read the road diaries of our two reporters, who volunteered for the difficult task of attending the festival of peace, love and mud.Click the link to read the road diaries of Woodstock.
Road Diaries Of Our Two Reporters!
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