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August 11, 2009

Stephanie Salter: We were stardust, we were golden, we were very, very wet

By Stephanie Salter

Forty years ago Sunday, I was trying really, really hard to get the hell out of Woodstock, N.Y.

That fact has always provided me with a classic good news/bad news story to tell. Or maybe it’s an impress/deflate story.

“I was at Woodstock,” I say, when the subject of the near-mythological 1969 rock festival comes up.

“Wow! Really??” people always respond, until I add:

“But I left after the first day.”

Ordinarily, being a member of a group of a half-million people brings little distinction to an individual. Like, “Guess what? I live in McAllen, Texas!”

But to have been among the half-million people who descended on Max Yasgur’s farm near Woodstock between July 15 and 18 in 1969 — well, that still carries the sort of cachet that was earned from being in the crowd at the Polo Grounds in 1951 to see Bobby Thomson’s shot heard ’round the world.

(The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!)

The truth is, I am most grateful I went to Woodstock and got to be a little part of that historic “three days of nothing but peace and music,” to quote farmer Max.

At the same time, I’m not at all sorry I left. I may have looked like a hippie that summer — with Indian-style headband, bellbottom jeans and my fingers in a perpetual peace sign — but just beneath the ensemble was a Midwestern, middle-class princess who never cared for camping, outdoor toilets or watching live music while sitting in mud.

Actually, if there had been enough outdoor W.C.s at Woodstock, I and my two companions might have chosen to hang in there for the entire festival. But there weren’t (not by a long stretch), so the three of us, standing miserable and exhausted in the Saturday morning drizzle outside my boyfriend’s car, took a vote.

It was unanimous. As soon as the New York State Police managed to clear one lane of the paralyzed state highway on which we were parked, we were out of there, headed back to Manhattan to drop off our friend, Larry, then to Washington, D.C., where Bill and I were living.

The festival organizers’ critically low crowd estimates were no one’s fault. About 186,000 tickets had been sold in the weeks leading up to the “Aquarian Exposition in White Lake, N.Y.” The producers figured maybe 200,000 people, at most, would schlep up to the Woodstock-Bethel area for a dynamite, but eclectic, array of contemporary musicians.

Bill and I didn’t even have sleeping bags. I think we thought we’d all get a motel room. Free rice kitchens had been promised. Plenty of port-a-johns. And no one had expected that endless deluge of rain.

We three had bought tickets for $18 each, which was a lot of money back then. No one ever took the tickets from us because, by the time we arrived Friday afternoon, fences had been cut and trampled, and the hillside rising above the stage was jammed with humanity. We thought it was cool when the official announcement came that “it’s a free concert.”

I still think it’s cool. I think everything about Woodstock is cool. Each time I watch the Oscar-winning documentary on the festival (I have the 1994 director’s cut), I am blown away all over again by the profound beauty of the gathering and, especially, by the music.

In my brief time on the hillside, I saw and heard Richie Havens open the first night and Joan Baez close it. In between were seven other acts, including Ravi Shankar, Melanie and Arlo Guthrie, and an invocation by Swami Satchidananda.

(His prayer must have worked. In the three-plus days of borderline chaos, only two people died: one from a heroin overdose and another poor kid whose muddy sleeping bag was run over accidentally by a tractor.)

Yeah, we missed all the rest. Jimi. Janis. Country Joe. Santana. Canned Heat. The Dead. Creedence. Sly. The Who. Jefferson Airplane. Joe Cocker. The Band. BS&T.; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Paul Butterfield. Et al.

It’s OK.

Perhaps if there were no film, or if it hadn’t been edited so expertly by Martin Scorsese and his ace A.C.E., Thelma Schoonmaker, I would feel I’d lost something by leaving early. But there is a movie, 225 glorious minutes of it, and the mother of all soundtracks. Forever.

Not long ago someone asked me if I planned to attend any of the 40th anniversary Woodstock festivals. “Not even tempted a little to go back to New York?” he said of the events planned on the old site.

Not for a minute. I was 19 years old when I bailed on Woodstock. The princess has only gotten more sensitive to peas under the mattress in the ensuing four decades.

Instead, I plan to commemorate one of the most extraordinary U.S. gatherings in modern times in the comfort of my own living room, watching every second of director Michael Wadleigh’s documentary. As a nod to the significance of the event, I am splurging on some really good champagne.

If I should happen to drink it all over the course of the 3-hour-45-minute film, I needn’t worry. I can hit “pause” whenever I want, and there’s a nice, clean bathroom very close by.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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