Books recall memories of Woodstock
If you think the media saturation around Michael Jackson’s death was outre, prepare for the gates of pop culture to burst in mid-August as the 40th anniversary of Woodstock arrives.
Everyone who was there – or thinks he was – will tell of dropping acid for a ride with the Jefferson Airplane, skinny-dipping in communal baths with 400,000 nubile neighbors and waking up to Jimi Hendrix strangling “The Star Spangled Banner” out of his electric guitar for the finale of the three-day festival of music, mud and bad brown acid.
New Yorker Michael Lang, who in the ‘60s owned a head shop in Coconut Grove, Fla., and who created the Woodstock warmup Miami Pop Festival in May 1968, helped shape the Woodstock Music and Art Fair through persistence, charisma and Herculean organizational savvy.
He proves to be a brilliant, amusing raconteur in “The Road to Woodstock,” in which he recounts how the festival came together.
The book’s detail-laden flashbacks from organizers and performers such as hippie goddess Melanie, a newcomer who had no idea what she was getting into; a cranky Pete Townshend, who blasts “the people at Woodstock” as “a bunch of hypocrites”; and a bemused Grace Slick, who recalls singing “sort of half asleep,” are potent enough to give readers a contact high.
Lang also proves a brisk storyteller in the later chapters, which describe such career-making performances as those by newcomer Santana and Sly & the Family Stone.
“I got to witness the peak of the festival, which was Sly Stone. I don’t think he ever played that good again – steam was literally coming out of his Afro,” guitarist Carlos Santana recalls.
However, the Grateful Dead had problems. “A combination of the weather and hallucinogenics proved their undoing,” Lang writes.
But chunks in the middle of “Road” feel an interminable slog – like the traffic jams that led to the field at Yasgur’s farm – to anyone uninterested in spread sheets and the headaches with which concert promoters deal.
Pete Fornatale’s “Back to the Garden” – titled after a line in Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” – lacks the peaks and valleys, and import, of Lang’s book. After all, Fornatale, a veteran New York radio personality, merely reported on the event.
He relies on about 110 sources – some living (David Crosby, Paul Kantner), others dead (Jerry Garcia, Abbie Hoffman). Fornatale’s belief is that “you didn’t have to be at Woodstock to be at Woodstock,” and his mighty task here is to weave the recollections to prove that paradox.
“Back to the Garden” is a brisker read than “Road to Woodstock,” as it lacks the minutiae that sometimes makes the reader’s eyes glaze in Lang’s book. And Fornatale’s conversational style and the assortment of characters he quotes make for a lively read.
Some have fond stories. Original Sha Na Na guitarist Henry Gross, who later had a ‘70s solo hit about a missing dog (“Shannon”), tells of drinking with Hendrix, who had also performed at Lang’s Miami Pop Festival.
Others were less than enchanted with the shows: Concertgoer Jim Marion tells of leaving the rain-drenched festival early. He would have a considerably better time going back to the garden with these books as guides.