woodstock 20 years later

Here is a piece I wrote for LIFE magazine 20 years after the fact—20 years ago. My next post will tell what really happened—as best I can recall.

It’s raining—again—and the meadow in Bethel, N.Y., is empty except for what looks like a gravestone marked with the names of the fated (Janis and Jimi), the famous and the forgotten. From the tape deck in our rented Lincoln booms the soundtrack of Woodstock. “The brown acid is not too good, “ echoes Chip Monck’s voice. I heard him say that 20 years ago right here. But the grass has grown up now, and so have I.
Remembrances of things past are as tricky as our President was in that year, 1969. Revisionism about Woodstock is rampant—and not only by all the people who claim to have been there and weren’t. Robin Williams suggested a bumper sticker: “If u can remember Woodstock than u weren’t there.” I called up a college friend to ask if he had been there. He said, “What do you mean was I there—I was with you!”
Well, he wasn’t. I drove up in a Corvair with some high school friends. I have the reality check: An interview I gave my hometown paper dated Monday, August 18, 1969. But I was already editing my recollection. I didn’t tell the reporter (or my mother) about the guy, high on horse tranquilizers, who held out a handful of pills and said, “I feel really bad, man. Should I take one of the yellow ones?”
Most Woodstock alumni mention unity, love and mud. You are not the only one to still treasure your ticket. And I am not the only one to have a lasting distaste for crowds. But there were maybe half a million tales in that naked-to-the-elements city and there is unanimity about only one fact: It did rain.
Down where the stage was, the trees have drawn closer round the waterfall. When I watched the video, I could hear Richie Havens much more clearly than I could when he sat on that stage. As he sang, “Look there’s handsome Johnny with a gun in his hand marchin’ to the Vietnam war,” I found myself crying. I know now how it came out: How we blew our minds and died in Vietnam. How we wed, found success and grew away from our green years. I look at the photographs of those kids—us—and we look so young and joyful, with fringes flying free. But if I learned one thing back then, it was, as Baba Ram Dass says, Be Here Now.