Paul Mulshine shared his Woodstock experience in yesterday's Star Ledger:
By the time I got to Woodstock, it was time to leaveThis weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock concert. Like so many others from my generation who attended that great event, I would like to indulge in some fond memories of it.
Unfortunately, I don't have any.
My journey back to the garden began the day before the festival was to start. I was working on the Seaside Heights boardwalk at a game of chance. Next-door was a marksmanship game. The challenge was to shoot out a small red "B" with three shots from a .22 rifle.
It was a real rifle, by the way, with real bullets. The '60s were a different era. No one thought twice about the wisdom of handing a drunken tourist a loaded gun on a crowded boardwalk. But the kid who ran the stand always made a point of getting the rifle back before telling the tourist he hadn't won the prize.
The kid's name was Bill or something equally forgettable. One day I mentioned that a lot of my friends were going to this Woodstock rock festival. Since we both had Friday off, I suggested, perhaps we ought to go for at least the first day of it. Bill liked the idea.
"Do you think we'll get in fights?" he asked. Bill was clearly excited at the prospect. As I said, the '60s were different. Bill was a clean-cut college student, but even as late as 1969, fighting was still considered a routine form of recreation for many such young males.
I had to disappoint Bill by pointing out that the times they were a-changin'. But he was excited because we had another means of risking our lives needlessly on the trip. Bill and I had motorcycles. We planned to take the four-hour ride north on Friday afternoon, watch music all evening, and then ride home with no sleep so we could be back to work by noon on Saturday.
We were saved from our own stupidity when Bill's Honda wouldn't start. I figured the trip was off, but it turned out Bill also had a car, a big Oldsmobile. There was an empty seat so my old high-school buddy Brian, who worked at the arcade, decided to come along.
We had heard about the legendary traffic jam on the New York Thruway so we went up the back roads past Port Jervis. Once we got into New York state, Brian had a brainstorm.
"Let's stop and get some Ripple," he suggested. I had never heard of Ripple. The drinking age in Jersey was 21 and I was only 18. I had never even been drunk in my short life, let alone high, stoned, smashed or any of those other adjectives.
Brian was a man of the world, however, and he assured me that Ripple wine was the drink of choice among connoisseurs and would help us score with the young women we would no doubt encounter. Alas, we failed to find a liquor store by the time we entered the stream of cars heading to the far-off festival. I was thus spared my first taste of Ripple, in retrospect perhaps the best thing that happened to me all night.
We were far from alone in failing to acquire any intoxicants. Legend has it Woodstock was a bacchanal beyond all reason. We saw little evidence of this among the crowds hiking in from their parking spots miles from the music. If such a concert were to be held today, beer, booze and pot would be everywhere. But the crowd at Woodstock gave no more evidence of that than the crowd at a Methodist camp meeting.
As for the event itself, fate and our cruel masters on the boardwalk had conspired to send us on the wrong evening. Santana's "Soul Sacrifice," the Who's epic performance, Jimi Hendrix playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" -- that would all come later. The first night of Woodstock was for the more mellow performers, though the term "mellow" had not yet entered the lexicon.
As we ascended the final hill to the stage, we heard Ravi Shankar on the sitar playing what I assumed must have been some ancient Indian melody designed to cure insomnia. Soon this earnest woman named Melanie came on with an acoustic guitar. She sang heartfelt songs that evoked in me a strong emotion, the emotion being regret that we hadn't procured that Ripple. I was willing to try anything to dull the din coming from the stage.
It got worse. Someone turned on a dentist's drill and put it in front of the microphone. Either that or Joan Baez had taken the stage. It was hard to tell from way in the back.
By this time Bill had gone off somewhere. Brian decided we should walk around and try to pick up girls. This brings up another important element that, despite the legend to the contrary, was largely missing from Woodstock, girls. The movie that was later released shows women in abundance with clothing in short supply. In fact, males outnumbered females by a large margin, for the obvious reason that few parents would let their daughters loose for the weekend.
As for us, we mainly saw a lot of guys doing what we were doing: walking around aimlessly. According to later reports, that was the way the rest of the weekend went for my friends who attended for the entire festival. Between trying to stay dry and trying to get enough to eat,
Woodstock was something of an endurance event, they said.
As for Brian and me, we eventually trudged back to the car. Bill was waiting. We were back in Jersey by sunrise and back on the boardwalk by high noon.
When news reports began to circulate about this wondrous festival going on at Woodstock, we boasted that we had been there. We failed to mention that we didn't hear any good music, didn't get drunk, didn't get high and didn't do much of anything.
But at least Bill didn't punch anyone. Neither did anyone else, apparently. So we were indeed a part of history.
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Woodstock (Read 2,126 times)
