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BETHEL, N.Y. (AP) — Woodstock didn’t even happen in Woodstock.
The legendary music festival, considered one of the seminal cultural events of the 1960s, took place 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) away. in Bethel, New York, a town even smaller than Woodstock. It’s a misnomer for an event that has become as much legend as fact, and it has less to do with the location than the memories it evokes about the mental state of a society at the end of a confusing decade.
An estimated 450,000 people gathered on a strip of land owned by dairy farmer Max Yasgur to attend an “Aquarian Exposition” that promised “three days of peace, love and music” from August 15 to 17, 1969. Most were teenagers or young adults. people now approaching the twilight of their lives in an era in which only a small portion of the population has vivid memories of the 1960s.
That clock is why the Bethel Woods Museum, located on the festival site, is immersed in a five-year project to separate fact from legend and collect firsthand memories of Woodstock before they fade. It’s a quest that has taken museum curators on a cross-country pilgrimage to record and preserve the memories of those who were there.
“You need to capture the story from the people who had the direct experience,” says music journalist Rona Elliot, 77, who has been working as one of the museum’s “community connectors.” Elliot has her own stories about the festival; She was there, working with organizers like Michael Lang, who entrusted her with his archives. before his death in 2022.
Woodstock, Elliot says, is “like a puzzle: a panoply of everything that happened in the ’60s.”
FILE – Hundreds of rock music fans get stuck on the highway out of Bethel, New York, on Aug. 16, 1969, as they try to leave the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival. (AP Photo, file)
A SEARCH FOR ORAL HISTORIES
Woodstock attendees have conducted hundreds of interviews over the decades, particularly on major festival anniversaries. But the Bethel Woods museum is diving deeper with a project it began in 2020, drawing on techniques similar to those of the late historian Studs Terkel, who produced hundreds of oral histories about what it was like to live through the Great Depression and World War II. .
“There’s a difference between interviewing someone for an article or documentary and having an oral history cataloged and preserved in a museum,” says Neal Hitch, senior curator and director of the Bethel Woods Museum. “We had to meet people where they are. “If you just call someone on the phone, they won’t be quite sure what to say when we ask you to tell us these personal, private memories of a festival when I was maybe 18 or 19.”
To find and meet people willing to tell their Woodstock stories, the museum received grants totaling more than $235,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, enough money to pay curators and community connectors like Elliot to travel around the country and record the stories.
The odyssey began in Santa Fe, New Mexico, home of the Hog Farm that provided hippie volunteers like Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney and Lisa Law to help feed the Woodstock crowd. Museum curators traveled to Florida, boarded a Flower Power cruise and visited Columbus, Ohio, before making a visit to California earlier this year that included a community center in San Francisco located near the former homes of festival artists Jefferson Airplane and Grateful. Dead.
Richard Schoellhorn, now 77, made the trip from his home in Sebastopol, California, to San Francisco to talk about his experience at Woodstock. He was initially hired to be a security guard at the box office when the festival was supposed to be held in Wallkill, New York, before a community backlash caused a late move to the Bethel site.
Akinyele Sadiq analyzes photographs taken of the crowd near the stage of the Woodstock festival in August 1969, May 9, 2023, in San Francisco, before being interviewed by curators at the Bethel Woods Museum as part of an effort to collect oral histories from people who were there. (AP Photo/Michael Liedtke)
Schoellhorn still showed up for work at Bethel, only to quickly discover that his services were not going to be needed because the festival was so overwhelmed that the organizers stopped selling tickets.
“I was walking through Woodstock and Hugh Romney came up to me and said, ‘Are you working?’” Schoellhorn recalled to The Associated Press before sitting down to have his oral history recorded. “And I said, ‘No, they just fired me!’ He says, ‘Well, would you like to volunteer?’”
Schoellhorn ended up working in a tent set up to help people who had bad experiences with the hallucinogenic drugs they had taken. He ended up getting high while enjoying the first concert he attended.
“It felt like everyone was in the same boat,” Schoellhorn said. “There wasn’t a single section where people were rich. Nobody was special there, from the beginning.”
Before attending Woodstock, Schoellhorn said he was a loner trying to pursue a career in marketing. After Woodstock, he became so outgoing that he ended up living on a Colorado commune for several years before spending 35 years as a dialysis technician.
MEMORIES OF UP-CLOSE EXPERIENCES
Another Woodstock attendee, Akinyele Sadiq, also came to see the curators in San Francisco to unearth his memories of watching the festival from 25 feet (7.6 meters) away from the stage.
Although the festival was not supposed to begin until Friday, Sadiq left on a bus bound for Bethel on a Wednesday. When the bus broke down, he arranged a shuttle to take him to the festival site at noon on Thursday, allowing him to claim a spot so close to the stage that it is visible in photographs taken during the performances.
When he left Bethel a few days later, in a hearse that a fellow festival-goer had converted into a van, Sadiq had changed.
“Before Woodstock, I had no real direction. Basically I didn’t have many friends, but I knew I was looking for peace and justice and I wanted to be with creative people who were looking to make the world a better place,” Sadiq, now 72, told the AP before having his oral history recorded. “Before Woodstock, if you lived in a small town, you thought there might be a dozen people you could get along with. But then you realized there were at least half a million of us. “It just gave me hope.”
Hitch says the curators have heard many life-changing experiences while collecting more than 500 oral histories so far and they are convinced will accumulate even more over the next year. Community Connectors arrived in Florida last month and will head to Boston in March and New York City in early April. This will be followed by return trips to New Mexico and Southern California.
The museum aims to focus on finding and interviewing festival-goers spread across New York state, where Hitch estimates about half of the Woodstock crowd still lives.
The museum will spend 2025 analyzing oral histories before turning to special projects, such as bringing together friends who attended the festival together but now live in different parts of the country.
Elliot is convinced – “both karmically and cosmically” – that the oral history project is something she was meant to do.
“I want this to be a teaching tool,” he says. “I don’t want historians to tell the story of a spiritual event that simply appeared to be a musical event.”