BETHEL – As the monumental 50th anniversary of the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival approaches in August, Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is hosting a series of events chronicling the massive cultural significance the festival had on music, art, the social consciousness of the country, the world abroad and its impact on the region being host to an event of its magnitude.
The author of “Woodstock: 50 Years of Music and Peace,” Daniel Bukszpan, joined with a panel of attendees Sunday afternoon, including the book’s featured photographer Amalie Rothschild, to speak about his experience researching and writing the book.
Bukszpan said it wasn’t easy to find attendees and performers willing to talk candidly or at all for that matter. Despite this, over a two-year period, he spoke to approximately 125 people.
Bukszpan said these first-hand accounts depicted both magic and utter chaos. Interview subjects spoke about walking for miles along highways jammed with abandoned cars and lines of people following the music to get to their destination, poor sanitary conditions, lack of food and water, losing shoes, as well as other articles of clothing in the mud, then being resigned to sleep in mud and filth among groups of people acting absurdly on psychedelics.
The 400,000 people there created an atmosphere that could not be controlled.
This, Bukszpan said, was largely the reality of the festival and he felt he owed it to those who he interviewed, or who had been a part of the experience, to relay the story as honestly as possible.
“People have been reading very, sort of, chirpy and chipper accounts of Woodstock for decades now that don’t include any of that stuff. A lot of the accounts get a little ‘Disney-fied’ you might say,” said Bukszpan.
However, despite the hectic conditions experienced by those who attended the festival, he and the other panelists agreed it was also an unbelievable show of human compassion and civility, one they agreed probably could not happen again today with the same volume of people and disorganization.
That’s the legacy those attendees who were at the panel discussion shared: it was crazy, depraved and dirty; but, everyone took care of one another in their own capacities.
Events featuring the impacts of Woodstock ’69 and the anticipation for the 50th anniversary continue at the Bethel Center for the Arts August 3rd with never before seen documentary footage of the creation of the original festival and August 10th with a discussion featuring sound engineer Bill Hanley on recording, as well as producing the live sound, for Woodstock ’69.
