Sunday, August 7, 1994
Taking Stock of Woodstock
Participants remember 3 days of peace, love, music … And
communal chaos.
By Peter B. King, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Arts & Entertainment
Kenn Howard remembers his heart pounding like Keith Moon’s
drums when a young woman, her breasts unrestrained by a bra
or tight clothing, leaned into his car and asked him, in
Anglo-Saxon language unprintable here, if he wanted to have
sex.
The date was Aug. 15, 1969, and the place was a few miles
outside of Bethel, N.Y., where Howard and his buddy were
stuck in an epic traffic jam. The occasion, of course, was
the Woodstock Music and Art Fair — the original Woodstock
Music and Art Fair, thank you.
But even at that fabled (and fabled and fabled) flowering
of both the spiritual and the profane, casual sex wasn’t
that casual. The young woman shoved a flier into Howard’s
shaky, 18-year-old virgin’s hands and blithely moved on to
the next vehicle.
Howard (who still has the flier) read about an “underground
dating service — the one for beautiful free people who dig
living, loving and getting high.” And while he realized he
was not going to suddenly and effortlessly lose his
virginity, he remembers: “I got the feeling that anything
was possible.”
Twenty-five years later, Howard and other Pittsburghers who
were among the 400,000 or so revelers at Woodstock recall
the event with a kind of amused tolerance for being young
in an extraordinary time and place. Despite indulgence and
delusion, they say, more was unfolding than just the
world’s biggest rock concert. If all that stuff about the
Age of Aquarius and the Greening of America sounds silly
now, don’t forget that back then the world seemed like a
cocoon about to burst.
“I think people who look back at it now, there’s no way
they could get it, unless they were there,” says KDKA-TV
reporter Dave Crawley. “It was a feeling of comradeship
among all the people there.”
“There was a spiritual aspect to it,” says Marc Reisman, a
lawyer and ex- Iron City Houserocker living in Squirrel
Hill. “It was a tremendous groovy vibe. Everybody was
overwhelmed by all the people.”
And there was a city full of people, as the emcees liked to
say. David ‘‘Ace” Kenney of Mount Washington remembers
humanity walking “three deep on either side of the road. A
constant line — it never broke. Coming and going, all three
days.”
George Heid, a Swissvale audio consultant and jazz drummer,
says all the trudging through the mud reminded him of a
refugee camp or the Bataan death march.
Well, just a bit more festive. People wore feathers,
ribbons and body paint. A few wore nothing at all.
“Everything we saw was fascinating to us,” says Howard. “We
were looking at all this, trying not to let our mouths hang
open.”
Now 43, Howard owns a recording studio, does massage
therapy and coaches community volleyball.
Strangers engaged Heid in a loopy conversation about
numerology. Heid also met a group of Hare Krishnas sitting
on the roof of a VW van. They chanted while Heid intoned
lines from an episode of “Outer Limits”: “People of Earth,
we come in peace. Put down your primitive weapons. We’ve
been monitoring your broadcasts for years.” This went on
for an hour and a half.
The co-mingling of souls took place amid a degree of
physical squalor. ‘‘The whole place smelled like dung,”
remembers Heid, now 47. He attributes the stench to a huge
hill of compost that flowed down the slope of the concert
area when the rain began.
Reisman, now 43, says the odor came “from the rain and all
the people and all the garbage. The place got really funky.
But we had a great time.”
It was Friday night’s rain, says KDKA reporter Mary Robb
Jackson, that gave Woodstock its unique character. “It was
a swamp. It was a heavy, relentless downpour. I still
remember them saying, ‘Please stay off the towers,’ ‘cause
there was thunder and lightning and we were in an open
field. It was like somebody was watching over us, ‘cause we
were a big target.”
Some people were lucky enough to have tents. Heid didn’t —
he slept under a tree and caught a cold and fever. Kenney
bedded down on the tarp that guarded the cameras near the
stage. Crawley and his buddy sought shelter in their car
one night. “After awhile,” he remembers, “you’d just lie
around in the mud.”
Food got scarce. “You were happy to get a piece of
watermelon,” says Bill Shapiro of Squirrel Hill. “Somebody
brought in trucks of watermelon. And that soon ran out,
too.”
Like many in the crowd, Crawley dined courtesy of the Hog
Farm, Wavy Gravy’s commune. Crawley, now 47, can still see
himself walking down a path in the woods past a sign
reading “Groovy Way” to the chow. The lines were long and
the food was “mush. It was the early vegetarian movement, I
guess. The stuff looked like slop, but I was very grateful
for it.”
To make a strange gathering stranger, Woodstock was a
thoroughly post- modern, media-saturated event. No Greek
had to sprint from Marathon with the news; the cameras were
rolling from the time the stage started going up, and the
festival hit the front page from day one. (“Traffic Uptight
at Hippiefest,” ran the famous headline in the the New York
Daily News.)
Kenney achieved an immortality of sorts by virtue of his
sitting close to the stage. That’s him in the movie
“Woodstock” — a 14-year-old kid with a leather headband and
shoulder-length hair, chewing gum and flashing a
mischievous smile. He’s singing along with Country Joe:
“And it’s one-two- three, what are we fightin’ for/Don’t
ask me I don’t give a damn/Next stop is Vietnam.”
Now 39, Kenney has raced motorcycles and worked as a bell
captain. His hair is slicked back and thinning and his
mischievous eyes now peer from behind thick-rimmed glasses.
The media still wants him, and not just the Post- Gazette.
He recently received a questionnaire from a company in
California making a CD-ROM about Woodstock. “Are you
stardust?” it asks. “Are you golden?” “Do you have to get
yourself back to the garden?”
Jackson, then 21, ran up against the media when she went to
the now-famous pond for a swim.
“When I got down to the edge, there was a photographer from
Life Magazine. ‘‘He said, ‘You’re not going in like that,
are you?’ I said, ‘There’s no way I’m taking off my
clothes. My clothes are dirtier than I am right now. And
besides that, my father’s a Republican! I can’t have
everybody in the country seeing me with no clothes on.’”
Lest we forget — and perhaps some fortysomethings would
want us to — there were kilos of drugs consumed at
Woodstock. Heid says the smell of pot was almost as
prevalent as the smell of compost. Howard had no sooner sat
himself down than someone tapped him on the shoulder and
offered him a joint. But all seven people interviewed for
this article denied using drugs at the event.
When Woodstock ended, the crowd made its exit in character.
“There were 25 people who jumped on our car,” says Shapiro.
“We had a Chevy Impala; it was pretty big. They were just
laid out all over the car, and they were hitching a ride. I
mean it was fun. We had our Bob Dylan tape on, and we were
on our way.”
Crawley and two buddies jumped the hood of a car “going
about 40 miles an hour. We were all laughing, but I was
worried that we were going to slide off.”
In the months and years after Woodstock, the Aquarian Age
dawned cloudy, of course, and the three days of peace and
music turned out to be merely that. But the memory of
Woodstock still carries weight for many of the
participants.
“I’ll never let it go,” says Shapiro, now 45. He has a
wife, two children and a business selling uniforms to
police departments and other organizations. “I still try to
do things in my own way. Even though I’m a businessman. And
I’m nice to people. And I’m not ruthless, which is unusual
sometimes, especially in my business.”
For Jackson, whose spacious Mt. Lebanon home, a few blocks
from where she grew up, sports an American flag, Woodstock
was “a tremendous example of cooperation. It embodied what
people are capable of doing. It was a potential disaster,
and I think it always brings out the best in people when
they’re hard- pressed. Actually, we would have liked to
have thought at that time that we were special. But I’m not
sure that was true.”
When Jackson’s 8-year-old daughter wanders in, mom adds
with self-conscious irony: “I’m so glad she’s not of age to
go to Woodstock II.”
Five years ago, Crawley and Jackson flew to Bethel with a
cameraman to do 20th anniversary stories on Woodstock.
“I rememembered all the people walking down that road,”
says Crawley, “and it was empty except for the three of us.
It seemed odd. I was surprised at how small the field was
that we sat on. I remember it being bigger. I was trying to
figure out where Groovy Way was, and I couldn’t find it.”
Peter B. King attended the Atlantic City Pop Festival
in July 1969, which no one much cares about. He was not at
Woodstock.
Copyright © 1994, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
