Flashbackwards

Love, Peace & Paranoia at Woodstock

Photo by YUNUS EMRE ILICA on Unsplash

I got buttonholed on New Year’s Eve 1969 by the Enquiring Reporter for Buffalo’s now-defunct morning paper. The reporter asked me to name the greatest event of the 1960s.

Next day, I read the news, oh boy. The first four guys said the Moon Walk. The next one said the Nixon Administration. I said Woodstock. I called it a cosmic event.

An entire city got a big laugh out of that one.

Monday afternoon, August 18, 1969

My high school buddy Kenny is at the wheel of his big-ass Galaxie 500. I and another friend named Kester manned the eight-track up front while two young women, Irene and Babe, who have chastely accompanied us on the trip from Bethel back to our hometown of Buffalo sit primly in the back seat. The Galaxie has a big V-8 and Kenny likes to move. We were, as the song says, goin’ home. Wiped out, starving and glad we finally found a bathroom at a gas station.

Then, a flashing red light in the rearview. And a siren.

Kenny pulls over. He’s pissed. He doesn’t know, as I do, that Kester’s holding a lid of grass. (Historical note: People did serious prison time in 1969 for possession of even small amounts of marijuana. And not just the people who were holding.)

The state trooper ambles over to Kenny’s window and informs him he’s been doing 90 in a 65. Kenny nods grimly. The trooper takes Kenny’s license, sticks his head in the window, and casts his steely, sun-glassed gaze across us mud-spattered Woodstock refugees.

The air is redolent of cow.

Kenny and I and Irene are all about-to-be college sophomores and as straight-looking as our high school graduation portraits. Babe, the sister of a friend, is in high school and looks even more innocent, if not straighter. Kester, the only guy in the car with long hair, looks a bit like Alvin Lee, the guitarist for Ten Years After, a British blues band he adores that had torn up the stage at Woodstock on Saturday night.

I’m dizzy with fear and a newfound, desperate sense of love for all humanity. Especially officers of the law.

“You guys did a great job back at the festival, officer.”

The trooper freezes and stares at me. He doesn’t seem eager to claim credit. Kenny, on the other hand, looks ready to throttle me.

The trooper returns to his cruiser and takes a very long time to run Kenny’s plate. We wait. The trooper returns. Without a word, he bends over and peers in at us again. Stands back up. Rips a ticket from his book. Tells Kenny how to fill it out if he chooses to plead guilty. Otherwise, he has a night court date in East Jesus, NY, in about a month.

Then he was gone. No questions. No pat-downs. No arrests. Without so much as a “Hi-Yo, Silver,” the most understanding state trooper in all of New York State patched out in a cloud of dust.

It’s the first day after Woodstock, and already the forces of peace and love have won the day.

Earlier that same morning  . . .

The sun is coming up over the all-but-deserted field in front of the stage. I’m spaced, having eaten only a couple of stuffed green olives and some watermelon since our arrival three days before.

The field looks like the bottom of a drained lake—busted furniture, pieces of lumber, sodden sleeping bags and blankets all plopped in ankle-deep, super-natural-smelling muck. I feel planted to the spot, afraid that if I move I’ll lose my sneakers to the squishy sucking ground beneath me.

Jimi Hendrix is onstage, looking extremely cool, literally above it all. He’s playing a song that’s strangely familiar but whose title escapes my addled brain. Hendrix hardly seems to be moving. He’s not singing, just wringing these fantastic sounds from his guitar. It’s some kind of sonic attack, all vibrato and wah-wah and feedback.

Then it hits me like a mortar shell: “America the Beautiful” He’s playing “America the Beautiful!”

I look around and see a skinny guy in what looks like a toga planted behind me in the mud.

“‘America the Beautiful’!” I scream above the onstage explosions, eager to share my musical discovery. 

The guy is staring at the stage. Sonic bombs are falling everywhere.

The guy mumbles something in my direction.

“What?”

The guy tears his eyes from the stage, cups his hands to his mouth.

“The ‘Star-Spangled Banner,” he shouts. “It’s the fucking ‘Star-Spangled Banner!”

“Right! Right! Holy Shit!”

I stand humbled and bury myself in the rockets’ red and blue and purple and green glare.

Sometime Sunday ...

Who invited Sha-Na-Na to the party?

Saturday afternoon

I score some dope, something I’d never done before ... I’m suddenly paranoid. I stand surrounded by half a million hippies—and I’m scared of getting busted.

So I do the logical, obvious thing. I walk about three miles back to where we’d pitched a little pup tent and climb inside, zipping and snapping the flap closed behind me. I roll an inept joint.

But paranoia strikes deep. Into my tent it did creep. I hear voices or footsteps or cows outside and I panic, ripping the joint up, spreading the dope like fertilizer on the tent floor, flapping my arms at the bit of incriminating smoke I’ve generated. Then I start all over again as soon as things quiet down, which they never really do.

I can’t prove it, but I’m guessing I was the only guy at Woodstock to get stoned by hyperventilating in a pup tent.

Earlier that same day

We arrive. Richie Havens, the opening act, cries for freedom. But problems abound. Kenny and Kester haven’t bought advance tickets.

We ditch the car, pitch our tent and go looking.

Magic happens. We find a guy in a red bandana standing in front of knocked-down snow fencing. He offers to sell us two tickets for twenty bucks each. 

“Far out,” I say.

We make the buy and go looking for the ticket-taker.

55 Years later

Kenny had his license suspended for three months following the trip home. We’re still best friends. Kester got married and disappeared from my life. Likewise the girls.

Kenny and I got involved, two years after Woodstock, in a pair of draft board rip-offs. I got busted but didn’t do time. He was the wheelman in a different action and didn’t get caught. The hood flew off the Galaxie as he made his getaway, but that’s another story. He went on to be an executive in a big insurance company. I became a newspaper reporter.

And what did this “cosmic event” have to do with anything? Well, on New Year’s Day, 1970, I gave the city of Buffalo something to laugh at.

But who, I ask you, has had the last laugh?

Photo by YUNUS EMRE ILICA on Unsplash