The What If Woodstock

Hard to believe that Woodstock II, as it came to be known, was 50 years ago this month, August 1974. All the news magazines back then, back when their word meant something, were tripping over themselves trying to describe it.

Time, going a bit overboard, called the festival goers "running dogs of capitalism,” picturing us as willing servants to the event’s many corporate sponsors including RJ Reynolds, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola and several record companies (and not to mention a few high-profile drug dealers who funneled cash into the event). William Buckley’s National Review called it the “last gasp of hippie idealism.” Newsweek seemed more optimistic, noting that with Richard Nixon leaving the White House that month, Vietnam in the rear-view mirror and the military draft all but over, Woodstock II was a “national redemption.”

For those of us who attended, we look back with fading memory at the little things, totally mismanaged at the original festival, but in 1974 planned and handled correctly: fences that kept everyone without a ticket at bay, food stations, showers, jitneys that took us to and from the festival site, camping grounds with toilets. Luxury.

But it was the movie and the record box set that made Woodstock II a cultural touchstone (a phrase the media somehow missed in 1974). There was nothing dodgy about any of the acts at Woodstock II, grouped here into handy categories.

The usual suspects: Allman Brothers; J. Geils Band; The Band; Eagles; Grateful Dead; Eric Clapton; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Stills, Crosby, Nash and Young

Oddballs not normally associated with festivals: Steely Dan, Harry Chapin, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Traffic, War, Renaissance 

Anointed forefathers: Muddy Waters, B.B. King

Perennial opening acts: Joe Walsh, America, Blue Oyster Cult, David Bromberg, Garland Jeffries

Game-changers (and here’s where Woodstock II out us into some sort of fugue state): Pink Floyd playing Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety as the moon rose from behind the stage on Saturday night. The unannounced appearance of an obviously drunk John Lennon, backed by several of his Lost Weekend buddies, including Ringo Starr, doing a messy set of 1950s oldies. The brave idea of ending the festival with the funk of James Brown and Stevie Wonder, plus icon-in-the-making Bob Marley. Some didn’t dig the thought of three black acts in a row, but tough shit. Roll over Beethoven.

Nick Drake

Life-changers: Bruce Springsteen, with only two albums to his name, onstage at 9 a.m. Saturday and afterwards vowing to never play another festival or open for anyone else ever again. Friends of Nick Drake convinced him that playing the festival might help lift him out from under the blanket of depression that threatened to swallow him. He later wrote in his memoir that at some point during his performance he underwent “a mystic epiphany” and didn’t look back from there, with more than a dozen critically acclaimed albums over the next two decades.

From the list of Woodstock II acts, the music was clearly beginning to splinter off into different areas, some unforetold in 1969. Try as hard as we might, the sixties were over, man.