BETHEL, N.Y. (AP) — Woodstock did not even occur in Woodstock.
The fabled music pageant, seen as one of many seminal cultural occasions of the Sixties, occurred 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) away in Bethel, New York, an excellent smaller village than Woodstock. It is a becoming misnomer for an occasion that has grow to be as a lot legend as actuality — and has much less to do with location than the recollections it evokes a few society’s way of thinking on the shut of a jumbled decade.
An estimated 450,000 folks converged on a swath of land owned by dairy farmer Max Yasgur to attend an “Aquarian Exposition” promising “three days of peace, love and music” from Aug. 15 to 17, 1969. Most had been youngsters or younger adults — folks now approaching the twilight of their lives in an period the place solely a small portion of the inhabitants has dwelling recollections of the Sixties.
That ticking clock is why the Museum at Bethel Woods, situated on the positioning of the pageant, is immersed in a five-year venture to sift details from the legends and gather firsthand Woodstock recollections earlier than they fade away. It is a quest that has taken museum curators on a cross-country pilgrimage to document and protect the recollections of those that had been there.
“It’s essential to seize the historical past from the mouths of the individuals who had the direct expertise,” says music journalist Rona Elliot, 77, who has been working as one of many museum’s “group connectors.” Elliot has her personal tales in regards to the pageant; she was there, working with organizers like Michael Lang, who entrusted her together with his archives earlier than his loss of life in 2022.
Woodstock, says Elliot, is “like a jigsaw puzzle — a panoply of all the things that occurred within the ’60s.”
A QUEST FOR ORAL HISTORIES
Woodstock attendees have performed tons of of interviews by the a long time, significantly on main pageant anniversaries. However the Bethel Woods museum is plunging deeper with a venture that started in 2020, counting on strategies much like these of the late historian Studs Terkel, who produced tons of of oral histories about what it was prefer to stay by the Nice Despair and World Battle II.
“There’s a distinction between somebody being interviewed for a paper or a documentary and having an oral historical past catalogued and preserved in a museum,” says Neal Hitch, senior curator and director of the Museum At Bethel Woods. “We needed to go to folks the place they’re. For those who simply name somebody on the cellphone, they are not fairly certain what to say after we ask you to inform us about these private, non-public recollections from a pageant when they could have been 18 or 19.”
To search out and meet folks prepared to inform their Woodstock tales, the museum obtained grants totaling greater than $235,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Companies — sufficient cash to pay for curators and group connectors equivalent to Elliot to journey the nation and document the tales.
The odyssey started in Santa Fe, New Mexico — house to the Hog Farm that supplied hippie volunteers equivalent to Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney and Lisa Regulation to assist feed the Woodstock crowd. Museum curators have traveled to Florida, hopped on a “Flower Energy” cruise ship and visited Columbus, Ohio, earlier than making a California swing earlier this 12 months that included a San Francisco group middle situated close to the previous houses of pageant performers Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Lifeless.
Richard Schoellhorn, now 77, made the journey from his Sebastopol, California, house to San Francisco to debate his expertise at Woodstock. He was initially employed to be a safety guard on the ticketing sales space when the pageant was imagined to happen in Wallkill, New York, earlier than a group backlash prompted a late swap to the Bethel web site.
Schoellhorn nonetheless reported for work in Bethel, solely to promptly uncover his providers weren’t going to be wanted as a result of the pageant grew to become so overwhelmed that organizers stopped promoting tickets.
“I used to be strolling round at Woodstock and Hugh Romney comes as much as me and says, ‘Are you working?’” Schoellhorn recalled to The Related Press earlier than sitting all the way down to have his oral historical past recorded. ”And I am going, ‘No, I simply acquired fired!’ He goes, ’Nicely, would you prefer to volunteer?’”
Schoellhorn wound up working in a tent set as much as help folks having dangerous experiences on hallucinogenic medicine they’d taken. He wound up getting stoned himself whereas reveling within the first live performance he’d ever attended.
“It felt like everybody was in the identical freaking boat,” Schoellhorn mentioned. “There wasn’t like one part the place folks had been wealthy. No person was particular there, proper from the get-go.”
Earlier than attending Woodstock, Schoellhorn mentioned he was a loner intent on pursuing a profession in advertising and marketing. After Woodstock, he grew to become so extroverted that he wound up dwelling in a Colorado commune for a number of years earlier than spending 35 years as a dialysis technician.
MEMORIES OF UP-CLOSE EXPERIENCES
One other Woodstock attendee, Akinyele Sadiq, additionally got here to see the curators in San Francisco to excavate his recollections of watching the pageant from 25 ft (7.6 meters) away from the stage.
Though the pageant wasn’t supposed to start till a Friday, Sadiq departed on a Bethel-bound bus on a Wednesday. When the bus broke down, he hitched a experience that delivered him to the pageant web site by midday Thursday, permitting him to assert a spot so close to the stage that he’s seen in images taken in the course of the performances.
By the point he left Bethel a couple of days later, in a hearse {that a} fellow festival-goer had transformed right into a van, Sadiq had modified.
“Earlier than Woodstock, I did not have actual course. I mainly did not have numerous associates, however I knew I used to be searching for peace and justice and needed to be with inventive individuals who had been trying to make the world a greater place,” Sadiq, now 72, advised the AP earlier than having his oral historical past recorded. “Earlier than Woodstock, if you happen to had been dwelling in just a little city, you thought there could be a dozen folks on the market you may be capable of get together with. However you then realized there was not less than a half one million of us. It simply gave me hope.”
Hitch says curators have heard many life-changing experiences whereas gathering greater than 500 oral histories to date and are satisfied they’ll amass much more in the course of the subsequent 12 months. Neighborhood connectors hit Florida final month and are heading to Boston in March and New York Metropolis in early April. That shall be adopted by return journeys to New Mexico and Southern California.
The museum intends to concentrate on discovering and interviewing pageant attendees scattered throughout New York state, the place Hitch estimates roughly half the Woodstock crowd nonetheless lives.
The museum will spend 2025 combing by the oral histories earlier than turning to particular initiatives equivalent to reuniting associates who attended the pageant collectively however now stay in several elements of the nation.
Elliot is satisfied — “each karmically and cosmically” — that the oral historical past venture is one thing she was meant to do.
“I need this to be a instructing software,” she says. “I do not need historians telling the story of a non secular occasion that simply gave the impression to be a musical occasion.”
