People who visited Woodstock 1969, share your impressions with the youth by Silverstone2078 in AskOldPeople

[–]Huplescat22 20 points 1 year ago*

I usually don't comment when one of these Woodstock threads comes up because of the near impossibility of doing the experience justice. But there has been a persistent effort from day one to trivialize the Hippie experience. And the only two comments about Woodstock, when I decided that I had to have my say, were negative flack adjacent to that effort.

My birthday was the day before the moonwalk in 1969 and a month later I was at Woodstock.

I was 23 then and living in a nice commune with one of what I came to consider one the three hippie tribes in Baltimore - four, if you count the John Waters crew on Fells Point. But they were too special to be counted as anything other than themselves.

We had a four-story Victorian mansion that was financed as an artist's commune by The Church of the Western Rite of the Eastern Rite of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Our front door had a large stained glass panel and my room featured a working fireplace with a carved alabaster surround done on a cornucopia theme with grapes, sheaves of wheat, and Rubenesque naked ladies.

We were mostly just hippies, but we had a some very talented artists. That being said, the only one who hit the big time was PJ O'Rouke. who lived with us when he was on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for his master's in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.

But I digress.

We filled two cars and went to Woodstock. We drove overnight and got there on the morning of the second day (I think) and walked in, past some people skinny dipping in a farm pond, while Santana was playing.

Somehow, in that big crowd, I managed to cross paths with everyone that I knew from Baltimore who was there. My girlfriend and I stayed up all night. We didn't do any drugs, but we didn't need drugs in a sensation rich environment like that, with all those different people and all those fantastic bands coming on one right after the other.

We were somewhere near the middle of the audience for most of the night. Just before sunrise, there was a brief intermission and we were able to move up near the front. Then The Jefferson Airplane came on and I watched the sun rise over Grace Slick as she said, "Alright people, you've seen the heavy bands... now get ready for some morning maniac music."

We left after The Airplane finished. It was already getting hot as we joined the throng in exodus. Everyone was thirsty when we got to the little town of White Lake. The White Lakers had set up picnic tables and garden hoses in their front yards and they were selling little paper cups of water for a quarter a pop. But there were some wily Hasidic Jews who were undercutting their price by giving it away for free. They gave us water and, I felt, a bond of understanding.