Woodstock at 50

It seems apt that the attempt to create a music event to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock music festival ended in shambolic disorder: the venue being changed to a different state, the musicians withdrawing, the tickets then being advertised free of charge, and the whole event then being cancelled.

The 1969 festival was also marked by chaotic disorder and ended as a scene of mud and rubbish.

The Woodstock festival still seems to many a defining moment in Twentieth Century culture, a rejection of tradition and convention and the assertion of complete individual freedom.

Except it wasn’t like that, I never thought it was. The festival was running late, so late that, rather than coming on at the culmination of the event late on a Sunday night,  Jimi Hendrix and his band played at 9 o’clock on a Monday morning. There were not hundreds of thousands, there were a few thousand who had remained amidst the mud and the rubbish, and their numbers grew progressively smaller as the band played. By the time of the encore, the footage of the performance shows people streaming away, and even the festival crew, standing on the stage behind the performers, are looking bored.

The programme concluded and there was a flat feeling. The only conclusions one seemed able to draw from Woodstock were that, after a party, there was a mess to clear up, and that weekends are followed by Monday mornings, when it is time to get on with the real business of life. It was hardly the stuff of dreams 50 years ago.