Today marks the 53rd anniversary of the beginning of the legendary Woodstock Music and Arts Festival. It was far more than a mere music concert. Indeed, there were brilliant musical performances. But there was also incredible creativity off the stage. And there was the feeling that this was largely a very successful example of the improbable: hundreds of thousands of young people coming to a farm in upstate New York to gather together peacefully and enjoy music.
That is not to say that this was necessarily expected. Many people thought it would fail. Governor Rockefeller gave serious consideration to bringing in the National Guard to break it up.
Indeed, Woodstock largely endures - and I believe rightly so - as a glowing example of the best that the "peace and love" generation had to offer.
Still, some have tried to detract from the glowing reports to try and suggest that maybe it was not so great. Rock author Joel Selvin, for example, reminded everyone that a hot dog stand was burned down because it was suspected of charging too much, of trying to take advantage of concert goers. And Roger Daltrey, the frontman for one of the most legendary bands to take the stage at Woodstock, actually went so far as to suggest that it was extremely poorly organized, and that “the worst sides of our nature had come out.”
What were some of the aspects that he did not like about it?
Well, the waiting around to play was probably the thing he best remembers:
Waited [laughs]. That’s all you could do. Waiting, waiting, waiting. We were young, and life is a lot easier when you’re young. I wouldn’t do that show now. Sod that. I’d walk away from it. I’m joking. No, I’d walk away and come back 10 hours later.
And the Who, he feels, were not the kind of band who should be left waiting around. They were too anarchic, too powerful and energetic for that.
Then, the actual performance by The Who that night did not meet the lofty expectations. In fact, Daltrey has claimed in the past that it was the worst show that the band had ever played:
It was a particularly hard one for me, because of the state of the equipment. It was all breaking down. I’m standing in the middle of the stage with enormous Marshall 100 watt amps blasting my ears behind me. Moon on the drums in the middle. I could barely hear what I was singing.
One of the most famous - or perhaps arguably infamous, depending on who you ask - incidents at Woodstock happened while The Who was onstage. Activist Abbie Hoffman took the stage and got to Pete Townsend's microphone. But what happened after that has been debated ever since. There was speculation that Townsend told him to "Get the Fuck Off My Stage!" and then hit Hoffman on the head with his guitar. That, however, is not how Daltrey remembers it. While regretting that there evidently is no video image that captured that iconic moment, Daltrey nevertheless remembered it quite differently:
I saw some geezer shouting into Pete’s microphone, saying we were a load of crap, which got up all our noses. Then I saw Pete come up — I’m not sure whether he hit Abbie Hoffman with the guitar, I think he pretended to hit him. Pete yelled, “Do it again and I’ll kill you.” He wouldn’t have recovered if Pete had hit him on the head with a Gibson guitar. And Pete was never tried for murder, so I gather he didn’t actually do it. It was a kind of a stunt move.
So it was a chaotic performance. Yet, according to Daltrey, far from epitomizing "peace and love," Woodstock was just chaos and yelling:
Woodstock wasn’t peace and love. There was an awful lot of shouting and screaming going on. By the time it all ended, the worst sides of our nature had come out. People were screaming at the promoters, people were screaming to get paid. We had to get paid, or we couldn’t get back home.
What did The Who do after their set at Woodstock ended, just as day was breaking?
Went back to the motel — Camp Tranquillity, laughingly called. The roadies were sleeping in the corridors and it was chaos.
Not everything that Daltrey recalls about Woodstock is bad. He remembers Creedence Clearwater Revival playing a fantastic set, just before The Who came on. Also, he remember that Woodstock was crucial towards his realizing that his band had finally made it in the United States:
That summer our audiences went from 5,000 to 100,000, in a six-month period. It was a ridiculous, rapid elevation in status.
And he does not entirely disparage the legacy of Woodstock. He suggested that it might not be the peace and love festival that everyone wants to credit it for being. However, Woodstock was huge, and did have an enormous impact, according to him. It was the beginning of the end of American involvement in a very unpopular conflict. But that, he says, was more about the people who were not on the stage during that historical weekend:
I don’t think the bands were the stars of Woodstock. In my mind, it’s the audience. They were the stars, that half a million people that put up with that crap [laughs] for three days. That coming together of that community was, I think, the key to getting America out of Vietnam. That’s when politicians actually started to take notice.
Below is the link to the New York Times article that I used in writing this particular blog entry about Roger Daltrey and his recollections of Woodstock:
The Who’s Roger Daltrey Is Not Nostalgic for Woodstock by Rob Tannenbaum Aug. 7, 2019
The Who’s Roger Daltrey Is Not Nostalgic for Woodstock The singer remembers the endless waiting and how “the worst sides of our nature had come out.” (But also how great Creedence Clearwater Revival was.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/arts/music/roger-daltrey-who-woodstock.html
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