Woodstock is canceled. That’s probably a good thing.
Though the main issue reportedly involved permitting, the investors behind the Woodstock 50th anniversary concert put out a statement saying they “don’t believe the production of the festival can be executed as an event worthy of the Woodstock Brand name while also ensuring the health and safety of the artists, partners and attendees. … As difficult as it is, we believe this is the most prudent decision for all parties involved.”
Woodstock has long been known for many things, among them great music, mud, and drugs, but prudence was never on that list. In all of its incarnations, Woodstock had been a fun, chaotic disaster of an event. It wasn’t the Fyre Festival, a music festival so corruptly mismanaged it spawned two separate documentaries about the shenanigans, but it operated at a high level of dysfunction. In a world of security concerns, social media complaining, and 24/7 news, Woodstock simply doesn’t fit anymore.
I was at Woodstock ’94. The price was steep, $135, and a New York Times article about the event at the time made sure to note that organizers were going to sell the tickets by telephone.
When my friends and I, 17 years old and still trusting of authority, arrived Upstate on Friday evening, it was pandemonium. The security guard laughed as I showed him my parking pass and asked for directions to the parking lot to which I was assigned. He pointed to where I could leave my car, not so much a parking lot as a pile of dirt, miles from the campground. We were promised shuttle buses. None arrived.
[Opinion: Lessons from Fyre Fest]
We grabbed our sleeping bags and began the walk in the darkness. About halfway there, a local in a pickup truck took pity on us, loaded us into the bed, and drove us the rest of the way.
When we reached the grounds, the gates had already been overrun. No one took our tickets, and in the pre-9/11 days, no security was there to check any bags.
The next two days were a delirious chaos. People openly wheeled around nitrous tanks and held signs advertising drugs for sale. The port-a-potties overflowed by Saturday. It was scorching hot weather, and there were no free water options. The music was amazing and memorable. It rained, and we all got very dirty.
I imagine the scene playing out today, with cellphones and social media. The influencer “Instagirls” would be pitching a fit while simultaneously posing for pictures and flashing peace signs. Everyone would instantly get on the phone to dispute the charges with their credit card companies. On the plus side, we’d have Amazon deliver over some toilets. There would be a thousand think pieces on what went wrong and what it all meant.
Instead, we Woodstockers in ’94 survived the weekend without ever really realizing we got scammed. Fun was had, so what if it wasn’t exactly as advertised? Plus, back in the days before ubiquitous cellphones and social media, you could enjoy yourself unselfconsciously. It may have been chaos, but it was our chaos.
The other Woodstock festivals were just as poorly executed. The original one in 1969 cost only $7 to $8 a day, but the organizers didn’t account for thousands of people showing up without a ticket. The legendary traffic had the rural local roads at a standstill. They also failed to plan adequate food options for thousands of people spending three days together.
And the one in 1999 became infamous for violence, including sexual assault and fires. Riot police had to be brought in for crowd control, and MTV pulled its staff due to safety concerns.
So, it’s amusing the organizers didn’t think they could live up to the Woodstock name. The truth is that Woodstock is a relic of a different time when expectations were lower and inhibitions were freer. It wasn’t made for a world of photo filters and hashtags, where everything is an experience to be compartmentalized and shared. Woodstock’s 50th anniversary finds the world in a very different place. Baby boomers are out and millennials are in, with no place for its free love, loose-organization ethos. That’s a bummer, man.
Karol Markowicz is a columnist for the New York Post.
