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.
