Andre Diehl

Andre Diehl is a third year PhD candidate in American Studies and Culture and an instructor in Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University in Pullman. Andre originally hails from western Massachusetts, where he studied music at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. He moved to Boston in 2011 where he completed a master’s program in American Studies at UMass – Boston. After completing his degree, he began working in the service and academic-gig industries for such luminaries as Trader Joe’s and WGBH’s American Experience. His research contends with the relationship between American music culture and memory. He is a proud cat dad and amateur baker. 

We Can’t “Get Ourselves Back to the Garden”:
Failure in the Embodied Woodstock Narrative

Introduction

On July 31, 2023, I took advantage of some dissertation research funds and made my way to the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in the village of White Lake, town of Bethel, New York. Nestled in the Catskill Mountains, the acreage of the Center contains part of the former Yasgur dairy farm which, in August of 1969, was occupied by an Aquarian Exposition, presented by the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. Known commonly as the Woodstock Festival or, more simply, Woodstock, the festival lasted for four days (August 15-18), featured between thirty-two and thirty-four acts (depending on who you ask), and was attended by upwards of 400,000 people. Woodstock made an immediate and long-lasting impact on the landscape of American popular culture and stands in public memory as an aesthetic and politic peak of the 1960s.

One could walk around the Woodstock site as it exists today and visit the Museum at Bethel Woods, without ever knowing that there were two attempts to reproduce Woodstock, one in 1994 and the other in 1999. The museum lives up to its stated purpose of “…telling the story of the ‘60s and the making of the festival and its lasting legacy.”[1] It begins with a survey of domestic politics and popular culture leading up to 1969 and contains festival artifacts as well as infographics and short videos that give visitors more detailed accountings of the planning, execution, and legacy of the event and its location. The museum progresses linearly and ends with a short (roughly 20 minute) video that highlights the music and performers that made the 1969 Woodstock festival a cultural touchstone.

In the basement of the Center’s main building, next to the special exhibition area and across from a utility hallway, is the only evidence that Woodstock ’94 and ’99 happened. On a wall there, encased in acrylic, a plaque asks visitors “Could there be another Woodstock?” and provides them with the following answer:

Michael Lang [festival promoter and figure head] thought so. In pursuit of this goal, Michael helped organize two major reunion events – Woodstock ’94 in Saugerties, NY and Woodstock ’99 in Rome, NY. Each featured incredible music in innovative settings, but neither quite captured the magic of ’69.

In the hundreds of oral histories the Museum has collected, almost every person believes that the original Woodstock could never be replicated. Each attendee has their own theory of what made the event so special, but the fact remains – for three days in August, 1969, Michael Lang and the Woodstock team organized a miracle.

The plaque essentially answers its own question twice. On the one hand, it answers affirmatively; materially two more Woodstock festivals were planned and executed. On the other hand, the plaque answers negatively. According to the popular understanding of what Woodstock was and what it means in the history of American culture, reproduction is impossible. Diplomatically, the museum does not take responsibility for this definition itself but throws that responsibility back to the inheritors of what political activist Abbie Hoffman referred to as “Woodstock Nation.” Through an amorphous form of democracy, Woodstock Nation decided that replication is impossible and, thus, Lang’s miracle stands as just that, a miraculous success. Working this logic out through the transitive property, if Woodstock ’94 and ’99 were not miraculous successes, then they did not live up to the established memory of Woodstock ’69 and were, in effect, failures. No matter how many times Joni Mitchell’s lyrics were extracted to describe the Woodstock moment, we could not get “back to the Garden.”

The purpose of this paper is to assemble a radical historical narrative of the Woodstock festivals. Borrowing from the work of cultural theorist Jack Halberstam, as opposed to traditional histories, which cast off “the failed” in service of developing hagiographic narrative, radical histories center failure to produce a thicker reading of history that allows for interpretation around possibility.[2] In the context of the Woodstock narrative, defining ’94 and ’99 as failures speaks to a perceived impossibility in reproduction. Centering these failures in service of connecting the three events works to investigate this sense of impossibility in critiquing what the original Woodstock was, how it was remembered, and how that memory has been embodied. It is my contention that no one “Woodstock” was more or less of a “Woodstock” than the others, but rather shifts in popular culture and the role of youth therein, between the late 1960s and 1990s, rendered it such that those producing the festivals had trouble contextualizing the events within their ideological landscape of what a “Woodstock” should be and look like. There’s a cliché often trotted out when referring to Woodstock or the 1960s more broadly, “If you remember, you weren’t really there.” This project, through renarrating the archive, renders this construction impotent because, in the context of the larger narrative, nobody was “really there” because the “there” had yet to be defined.

The day that I visited Bethel Woods was beautiful. White puffy clouds moved swiftly across the cerulean sky of (barely) upstate New York. The air was warm but was augmented by a cool breeze that seemed to come from the wooded hills. It smelled nice. The peace I felt was juxtaposed with the knowledge that, so long ago it doesn’t really matter, glacial progression and recession violently flattened the Catskill Mountains and carved the hills and valleys that stood before me. The field on which Woodstock was held, in the context of these geological processes, was entirely arbitrary. Hundreds of thousands or millions of years later, the likewise violent process of indigenous elimination would complete rendering the landscape into the form I saw. While the field itself is arbitrary, its use is anything but.

As it stands today, the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts has two uses: musical performance and education. The performance space, completed in 2006, has a shed and lawn on which viewers can observe any one of a wide variety of popular acts that make their way through the region during amicable outdoor summer performance season. [3] When I first walked past the main building of the Center, which houses their museum, I sauntered my way by a collection of permanent and semi-permanent tents emblazoned with sponsorship logos and a small but imposing stage intended to feature local or up-and-coming artists. On the other side of this area, I was met with a long, gradual, grassy slope that turned into a bowl at the bottom. Behind the bowl was a local road and, to its right, looking down the hill, was a split-rail fence painted brown. In the bowl, outlined with river rock, was a slightly raised rectangle of earth. It reminded me of the Nazca lines or the top of a not-yet-excavated Mesoamerican pyramid. This rectangle, I thought, identified the footprint of the original Woodstock stage.

Later that day I was treated to a “Behind the Scenes” tour hosted by an amazing gentleman named Ernie. The tour was attended by me and six Boomer tourists that Ernie had to keep in check. The night before, the new performance space had hosted the Hollywood Vampires. Most of the people I saw at the Center that day were sporting Hollywood Vampires merchandise and discussing whether the band’s lineup, which includes Johnny Depp, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, and Alice Cooper, had trod where they had. Ernie first brought us to the stage of the performance space, where I saw one of my fellow tour attendees act out Depp “rocking” on stage. After that embarrassing ordeal had concluded, Ernie took us to an overlook of the festival site that had a large photograph orienting visitors to where they were standing vis-à-vis the festival. It was here that I learned that my Mesoamerican rectangle was not actually an outline of the original stage, but rather a piece of construction from the late 1990s in service of assessing whether the site was fit to hold another large event in the future. According to Ernie, while they decided not to have another large-scale festival on the Yasgur property, the three-day Woodstock reunion event, the Day in the Garden festival was held in 1998 and, in 1999, Britney Spears headlined a show there. The original stage had been near the raised rectangle, but closer to the brown split-rail fence. It was hard to say specifically because during the festival, rainwater, lured by the siren song of gravity, streamed toward the stage, causing it to slip in the mud.

After our tour had concluded, I had a brief conversation with Ernie. I learned about his life, what brought him to work at the Center, and his thoughts around Woodstock. During our conversation, I asked him what people were most excited to learn when they come to the Woodstock site. Ernie looked down for a second and responded in a way that made me think he asks himself this same question often. He responded, paraphrasing, that what people are most excited to learn when they come to the Woodstock site is that what they think about Woodstock is accurate. Visitors to the site were not interested in learning new information to expand their knowledge of Woodstock. Ernie had subtextually admitted to me that his role, which I believe he genuinely enjoys, appreciates, and is exceptional at, largely in service of validating their established ideas.

What is “Woodstock”?

Before moving forward, I think it is important to provide a sketch of how the 1969 Woodstock festival was developed and executed. As mentioned above, the festival’s original title, which can be viewed on pre-festival promotional posters, is an Aquarian Exposition, one of many during the “Age of Aquarius” spiritual explosion, presented by the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. The process through which this event became memorialized as “Woodstock” was intentional, tactical, and represents the first attempt by producers to situate the event as a hallmark of the 1960s, its counterculture, and its music.

According to the 1974 oral history, Young Men with Unlimited Capital, the first germ of an idea that would become Woodstock appeared as an ad run in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal which read, “Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions.”[4] The men who had taken out the ad, and who would become the principal financiers of the festival, Joel Rosenman and John Roberts, had access to family money and were looking for ways to invest it creatively. They were connected to Michael Lang, who had been running a poster and paraphernalia store in Miami and helped to organize the 1968 Miami Pop and Jazz Festival.[5] Rosenmann and Roberts, who had recently finished financing the building of Mediasound Studios in New York City, initially intended their investment to be in the form of a recording studio in the small town of Woodstock, New York. Woodstock had a history of radical arts movements and, through the 1960s, became the rural home of folk music impresario Albert Grossman, who in turn brought some of the acts he managed to the area, most notably Bob Dylan. After Dylan’s motorcycle accident in 1966, members of the Hawks, who would later become the Band, joined Dylan in Woodstock, eventually producing the underground album The Basement Tapes in a house in neighboring Saugerties.[6] Rosenman and Roberts wanted to give these wayward artists a recording studio.

After connecting with Michael Lang, Roseman and Roberts’ studio building project became a benefit concert for a studio building project. Lang brought Artie Kornfeld, songwriter and Capitol Records executive, on board to recruit talent. As the idea developed, the benefit concert took precedence over the recording studio. The four came together to form the Woodstock Ventures corporation, named partially in recognition of the organization’s initial intentionality and partially to connect it to the town’s radical history of arts, theater, and music.[7] Lang, who grew up in New York City, had visited the region as a youth when it was the premier rural vacation destination for middle-class (sub)urban families (think the Dirty Dancing resort). As a young adult, Lang returned as he became exhausted from the city in the wake of his Miami Jazz and Pop festival success and was enamored with the potential he saw. At the time of his reemergence on the Woodstock scene, the town was engaged in a series of informal concert performances, usually staged on the back of a flatbed truck, featuring local artists, called Sound Outs.[8] Lang wanted to develop that idea in a larger setting.

It was determined that there was not enough space in the town of Woodstock proper to accommodate the size of a festival Lang was planning. He eventually found a disused industrial park in Wallkill, New York, went about getting permission and permits, then started developing the land. Within a month of when the festival was supposed to begin, the mayor of Wallkill, reportedly influenced by Governor Nelson Rockefeller and his distaste for countercultural types, pulled their permits. Lang went out to look for alternative accommodations and came across a Sullivan County man named Max Yasgur. Yasgur, a socially conservative Jewish farmer, was the largest landowner in Sullivan County, one of its wealthiest residents, and was in ill health. After some negotiation, he agreed to lease part of his land to Woodstock Ventures in exchange for a fee, repayment for lost crops, and a promise to return his land to its original condition.[9]

Yasgur, rightfully identified as the savior of the festival, had his own reasons for allowing his land to be leased outside of monetary compensation. Yasgur’s brand of American conservatism scaffolded the Woodstock heterotopia through his interpretation that Wallkill’s decision to pull the festival’s permits as against the spirit of American individualism and democracy.[10] For Yasgur, Rockefeller and Wallkill’s decision was done to silence an emerging cohort of politically aware young people. Despite whatever disagreements Yasgur had with these people on an individual level, their silencing was against the idea of America that he had developed and labored towards on his farm. For Joel Rosenman and John Roberts, the “…generation whose political and social awareness dated from the assassination of John F. Kennedy…whose refuge from a world gone mindlessly malevolent lay in drugs, naïve mysticism, primal rhythm…and each other…” was “…ready to move the world…” and given “…a place to stand,”[11] by Yasgur. In less than a month, and at great expense, the festival was relocated from Wallkill to Bethel. As youths from around the country, but mostly the Northeast, began travelling to the Bethel site, the Aquarian Exposition became Woodstock and Woodstock became a nation.

To provide an answer to the question proposed at the top of this section, I believe that a “Woodstock,” described most broadly, is an intentionally developed heterotopic space in service of enacting a millenarian cultural politics. For Michel Foucault, who defined the term “heterotopia” in his 1967 article “Of Other Spaces,” heterotopias exist in concert with, but challenge, utopias. According to Foucault, “Utopias are sites with no real place…[and are] fundamentally unreal spaces,”[12] that attempt to represent an ideal form of society and its structure. Heterotopias, however, exist as spaces outside of the dominant culture that actively reflect that culture back upon itself. “There are also…real places…which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can found within a culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”[13] The Woodstock festival, in service of defining itself as a site for counter-cultural engagement, becomes a heterotopia in how it, as opposed to existing outside of the dominant system, reproduces the tensions and politics of the dominant system in an effort to critique and, potentially, heal it.

Historically, music festivals consistently provide evidence toward their being defined collectively as heterotopias. In his research, American folk music historian Ronald D. Cohen notes that the first of these festivals emerged as ways for immigrant communities to present themselves as simultaneously a unique community and part of the larger American “melting pot” ideal. According to Cohen, while ethnic music festivals began increasing in popularity through the mid to late 19^th century, “…[By] 1918 and 1919, mass ethnic festivals featured an array of ethnic costumes as well as folk songs and dances. The idea was to promote patriotism among…diverse nationalities and celebrate their colorful traditions.”[14] These festivals became spaces in which performers and attendees would reflect their ideas of Americanness and immigrant inclusion back upon each other and, in so doing, “…represented, contested, and inverted,” the dominant culture.

Where I will intervene in Foucault’s definition is in adding that, for those who occupy heterotopic spaces, their experiences are read and remembered as being utopic. The practice of remembrance becomes the practice of believing that the affective resonances of “being” in a utopia outweigh the material realities that led to the production of heterotopic space. In the context of Woodstock, this utopic feeling is most often articulated as an attempt to get “back to the Garden.” As mentioned above, this turn of phrase was developed by Joni Mitchell when she, who could not perform at Woodstock owed to preexisting commitments, penned her elegy “Woodstock” and released it on her 1970 album, Ladies of the Canyon. Mitchell’s song describes the thoughts and feelings of a pilgrim traveling to Bethel for the festival. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, the character’s description as a “Child of God,” and their quest to “Get [themselves] back to the garden,” speaks to the original meaning of the village’s name. Translated from Hebrew, Bethel means “House of God.” It is already defined as a utopic space in its naming, but this definition is doubled down on by Mitchell, who turns it into a contemporary Eden.[15]  Read, and heard, as a description of utopic space and feeling, Mitchell’s definition speaks to the relationship between utopias and heterotopias. In describing Woodstock as an Edenic utopia, Mitchell proves the saliency and importance of defining it as heterotopia.

The millenarian cultural politics that were enacted at Woodstock point to this heterotopic definition. According to cultural theorist Dominic Pettman, while the idea of the millennium carries with it a connotation of destruction and rebirth, the original use of the term aligns it more closely with a process of orgiastic fusion. “…[S]ociety always displays a fusional impulse. Before sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll there was wine, women, and song…the orgiastic is not a rational fantasy of reducing the Many to the One. Instead, it ‘allows to be the different passions that animate everyday life in all their diversity.’”[16]Michael Lang, writing in 2009, echoes this impulse towards fusion when he describes the festival as “…a gathering of the tribes, a haven for like-minded people, where experimental new lifestyles would be respected and accommodated.”[17] For Lang, who insisted on the festival’s nonpolitical nature through its organization and after, this fusion, “…would be our political statement – proving that peace and understand were possible and creating a testament to the value of the counterculture.”[18] Lang’s idea of how radical politics would exist within the Woodstock heterotopia was less about doing something together and more about being together, performing millenarian fusion.

The Role of Success and Failure in the Woodstock Narrative

As the Woodstock narrative travelled through time, the ways in which success or failure was identified was rooted in a critique of the same process, reproduction. In the moment of the festival itself, as an investment designed to make money, the 1969 Woodstock festival was a failure. Focusing on this ur-failure allows a radical renarration of Woodstock insofar as decisions made in the context of this failure can be understood as moments of possibility. The decision by producers to declare that entry was free at the start of the festival destroyed their chances of making money back on what were turning out to be massive attendance numbers.[19] On Monday, after the Butterfield Blues Band, Sha Na Na and Jimi Hendrix closed the festival, helicopters were sent from White Lake to New York City where Rosenman, Roberts, Lang, and Kornfeld (now divided into two factions: the squares and the hippies), met formally to figure out the weekend’s receipts. John Roberts, whose family money had started the Woodstock Ventures project, was forced to guarantee one million dollars to the bank in exchange for them not forcing bankruptcy on the corporation.[20] Lang and Kornfeld, in this meeting, were flanked by Albert Grossman and music executive Artie Ripp, who believe that the only assets any of the members of Woodstock Ventures had to bargain with were the corporate name and the audio/video recordings of the event. While history would prove them to be correct, collecting those profits was impossible at the time and the Lang/Kornfeld/Grossman/Ripp contingent failed to buy Rosenman and Roberts out of their shares in the corporation.[21] The Age of Aquarius indeed.

In developing the Woodstock event into a narrative, this original sin of failure is often forgotten as anything but a fun anecdote that points out the frivolity of youth and the idea that the festival “really wasn’t about the money.” In renarrating a radical history of Woodstock and highlighting this failure as central to the narrative, my goal is to point out the moment at which the abstract concept of “Woodstock” was identified, defined, and transformed into commodity form. I contend that the development of Woodstock into commodity manufactured a sense of catharsis for white, middle-class, leftists and a tooling through which this catharsis could be delivered to subsequent generational cohorts. This ideology is most visibly distilled in the production approach and success of the Woodstock film and the personal transformation of one of the most important countercultural figures of the late 1960s, Abbie Hoffman.

The idea to film the Woodstock festival was hatched by Lang and Kornfeld. Lang had filmed some of his Miami festival the year before and, influenced by the creative work of D.A. Pennebaker, who had directed Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back (1967) and Monterey Pop (1968), wanted to capture as much of Woodstock as possible. He eventually hired the team of Michael Wadleigh (director) and Bob Maurice (producer), who had been experimenting with new approaches to recording live video and sound, using multiple cameras, and synching them up through editing. Their assistant director and editor, Martin Scorsese, was an NYU film school friend of Wadleigh’s.

Wadleigh’s approach was rooted in earlier forms of documentary filmmaking and intended to immerse the viewer in as much of the Woodstock experience as possible. The idea to overwhelm the viewer in this experience validates the director’s observation, in 1994, that Woodstock is a “…left-wing version of Triumph of the Will.”[22] Organizing and cobbling together over 160 hours of footage and sound in the editing process was directed by Scorsese and Thelma Shoonmaker. According to Shoonmaker, the decision to include or exclude particular artists from the film, and later the soundtrack album, came down to the quality of their recordings, which varied wildly throughout the festival. “The footage determined for us which numbers should be multiple-image. It was obvious that the Ten Years After footage lent itself to flashy multiple-image manipulation…And of course, if there was no light on the performer…there was no footage at all in the film.”[23] At the same time, Shoonmaker, guided by sound effects editor Ed Sheid, added recorded foley sound and non-live music to the film.[24] This process of inclusion and exclusion translated into the memories of the viewing audience and embedded in these memories the visual language through which Woodstock was read. The film itself, released in 1970, was a resounding success to the point where, according to associate producer Dale Bell, it “…finance[d] the rebirth of the once-mighty Warner Brothers Studio [and] revolutionize[d] the music business at the same time.”[25] In the 1971 Warner Brothers film Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston, the opening scenes find the main character driving and fighting his way through a smoldering dystopia. He makes his way to an abandoned movie theater where he watches Woodstock, holds his weapon, and smiles. Even in the apocalypse, Woodstock is cathartic.

The story of Abbie Hoffman’s relationship to the Woodstock festival points to the second space in which the Woodstock commodity proves its utility as catharsis. Hoffman, who released the first monographic accounting of the festival in his 1969 “talk-rock album” Woodstock Nation, began his relationship to the festival’s organizers as an antagonist. Hoffman, at the time of the Woodstock festival, was getting ready to stand trial for his participation in the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago and devotes space in his book to discussing and comparing the events. Two weeks before the festival was due to start, Hoffman and “…twelve [representatives of various New York City-based New Left groups] barged into the Woodstock Ventures offices…looking for some bread clear and simple.”[26] The group accused Woodstock Ventures of selling out the counterculture and, in a performative style that would characterize much New Left activism, threatened to cause all kinds of problems for the event. These threats worked and Hoffman was given $10,000 and was allowed, during the festival, to help coordinate the distribution of medical supplies and care to attendees.[27]

During the festival, Hoffman voiced his frustration around the event’s feigned apoliticality and attempted to inject political content wherever he could. According to Hoffman, “There was a revolutionary community that felt the music had grown out of its bowels and that it was in conflict with mainstream society…It’s not that we were against the festival – we wanted the festival to be seen…in a context not removed from the politics.”[28] The most noteworthy episode of Hoffman voicing his frustration occurred during the Who’s performance in the early morning of Sunday, August 17. Hoffman, high on LSD, was backstage with Mike Lang and arguing that they should do something to promote the cause of their mutual friend, John Sinclair, who was imprisoned for marijuana possession.[29] Between songs, Hoffman “…lunged forward, grabbed the mike and shouted out ‘FREE JOHN SIN…’ (CRASH).”[30] Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who had kicked one of Wadleigh’s film crew earlier in their set, clobbered Hoffman in the head with his guitar. Remarking on the moment years later, Townshend acknowledges that, “My response was reflexive rather than considered. What Abbie was saying was politically correct in many ways. The people at Woodstock really were a bunch of hypocrites claiming a cosmic revolution simply because they took over a field…”[31] Hoffman was facing the reality of imposing politics in a space intentionally designed to eschew it.

Regardless, Hoffman emerged from the festival convinced of its efficacy. In Woodstock Nation he begins by admitting that, “I realized that I had badly misjudged the event.”[32] He notes that while various issues during the festival may have led individuals to think poorly on the event, Hoffman’s focus on “…the sheer number of beautiful people struggling…[turning] the festival into a Nation dedicated to victory…”[33] leads him to conclude that the event itself was noble. Hoffman ascribed so deeply to this idea of Woodstock Nation that, when he was on trial later that year, he entered his residence into court records as Woodstock Nation. When asked by the Court if he could locate Woodstock Nation he responded, “It is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind in the same way the Sioux Indians carried the Sioux nation around with them.”[34] The equation of alienated young people and indigenous peoples of the plains notwithstanding, Hoffman’s cathartic invocation of Woodstock renders it as a place where he found home, a community, and a shared set of experiences. If Woodstock could temper the attitude of Abbie Hoffman, its value was limitless.

As mentioned above, the transformation of Woodstock from an event into a commodity foregrounds the formation of a tooling through which that commodity can be reproduced, and its application tested. Here, we find the most visible evidence of Woodstock as failure. As late as 1979, in his recollection essay, “Woodstock: Putting it Together,” Mike Lang argues that the impossibility of recreating the Woodstock moment means that another Woodstock could not happen.[35] As time went on, and he reconnected with John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, they decided to do a twenty-fifth anniversary festival. Lang’s plan, explained in the documentary Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage (2021), was to do a Woodstock festival every five years, so that every graduating cohort of high school students could have their own formative musical experience. Spin Magazine writer Maureen Callahan notes, in the same documentary, that “No one was asking for another Woodstock.” For Lang, the youth culture of the 1990s needed their Woodstock to break free from the bad vibes caused by history ending and emergent neoliberalism, both of which were products of Lang’s generational cohort. The tooling of the Woodstock commodity was being applied to a generation with little reference, or reverence, for what that meant.

The plaque described towards the top of this paper defines both Woodstock ’94 and ’99 as “reunion events.” I contend that this classification is intentionally misleading in the service of directing visitors to imagine those events as failures. Woodstock ’94 was, in many ways, pulling directly from the visual and sonic memory of the ’69 event. Promotional posters riffed on the “Three days of peace and music,” tagline and advertised “Two more days of peace and music.” The bird icon, which had come to characterize Woodstock visual culture, was doubled on posters. Lang managed to lease a plot of land in Saugerties, New York, where the original festival had initially been imagined and recruited performers who had played in 1969 (The Band, Joe Cocker, Santana, etc.) or were connected to artists who had (apparently Green Day’s manager had been in Sha Na Na). Quote Lang, “In true Woodstock style, the communal spirit lived, it rained like hell…and Woodstock ’94 made money for everyone but us.”[36] Regardless of this compelling connective tissue, the festival’s commercial sponsorship telegraphed to attendees who had seen the Woodstock film, and those analyzing the event in the archive, that there were at a different festival designed for a different time. The choice to have the festival sponsored was widely criticized but defended by Lang who argued that the changing landscape of concert promotion required sponsorships to control the cost of tickets.[37] As with the original Woodstock festival, Lang was developing an apolitical space for people to be together. Whatever made this possible was noble.

Participants in Woodstock ’94 and ’99 have identified the problem with applying the Woodstock tooling in the 1990s. According to Jewel, who performed at the ’99 festival, “Gen X’ers and the next generation weren’t fighting anything except that they don’t have a purpose.”[38] For Jewel, Generation X, who comprised the bulk of attendees at both the ‘94 and ‘99 festivals, did not have the same sense of social unity that Lang believed his generation had in the 1960s. Whether or not it is possible to define sweeping generational thinking, the ideological struggle between younger attendees/participants and older organizers/producers led to tensions. The euphoria of reliving Woodstock largely tempered these issues in 1994 but, by 1999, they came to the surface.

Woodstock ’99 is the second most widely discussed of the three festivals for many reasons. The festival occurred on Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, which was chosen by Lang and others because “…should it rain…the logistics were fantastic: hundreds of buildings to house our crews and staff…and easy access to the site.”[39] The above-described lack of generational purpose, combined with the violent/misogynistic tone of many of the most popular acts at the festival, led to an event that became increasingly violent and ended with mass arson, rioting, and looting. By the end of the festival’s three day run, there had been reports of sexual assault/violence (some of which had been broadcast live through the festival’s pay-per-view feed) and illness/death related to festival conditions. Unlike the previous two Woodstocks, it did not rain for Woodstock ’99 and the heat allowed water purveyors to increase prices to unaffordable levels.

Often in discussions of Woodstock ’99, alluded to above, blame for the event’s failure falls on a group of more aggressive performing artists including Limp Bizkit, Korn, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, Kid Rock, and others. Fred Durst’s crowd surfing on a piece of plywood during Limp Bizkit’s cover of George Michael’s “Faith” is blamed for giving attendees permission to dismantle festival infrastructure while Red Hot Chili Peppers choosing to cover Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” is blamed for starting mass arson. I contend that this argument is reductive, denies individual attendees agency, and limits the responsibility of festival organizers. The most irresponsible thing about Woodstock ’99 was the foundational decision that the year 1999 needed its own Woodstock.

Woodstock ’99 stands as the last Woodstock. A festival was planned for 2019 but failed to materialize. Whereas the hegemonic Woodstock narrative uses the ’69 event to read ’94 and ’99 as failures in the context of the ur-event, a radical history of Woodstock can view ’99 as a failure that, productively, proved the impotence of Lang’s retooling of Woodstock. As opposed to viewing Woodstock ’99 as the end of the four-decade “Long Woodstock Era,” I contend that the event’s failure ushered in an age of thinking around the possibilities of new musical forms and ways that youth experience and express rebellion. The Platonic ideal of youthful insurgence, hippies at Woodstock, was finally being questioned.

Conclusion

Failure plays two crucial roles in the Woodstock narrative. Woodstock ‘69’s failure was financial. It put its producers in a series of complicated positions but enabled the success of the Woodstock film and album. The process through which Woodstock was transformed from an event into a commodity manufactured a catharsis that mitigated the concerns of (largely) white, middle-class, leftists. The failures of Woodstock ’94 and ’99 are fundamentally failures of implementation. Lang and his co-producers attempted to give a new generation something that they were not asking for and did not understand the relevance of. The result is two festivals which, while impressive in their own right and containing impressive performances, are written into the narrative as proof that the idea that the original Woodstock festival was a miracle. To return to Halberstam, a radical history of Woodstock works to center these failures as statements of possibility. It matters less that each festival succeeded and failed and more that the festival stand as material residues of choices made by historical actors. The dramatic difference between Woodstock ’94 and ’99 suggests that the Woodstock commodity tooling was degrading quickly. Lang and others had planned for a 50^th anniversary festival in 2019, but it never materialized. Mike Lang passed away in 2022 having never managed to make it back to the garden. It’s not his fault. It was always impossible. And that’s radical.

[1] Ibid

[2] Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2.

[3] “About Us,” Bethel Woods Center of the Arts, accessed September 28, 2023, https://bethelwoodscenter.org/about

[4] Joel Rosenman, John Roberts, and Robert Pilpel, Young Men with Unlimited Capital (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 8. Note: At time of writing, the author has not been able to locate a version of this ad in publication, outside of the 1974 book by the same name. The “young men with unlimited capital” tagline is used prodigiously in Woodstock sources and at the Museum at Bethel Woods, but it is entirely possible that it never existed.

[5] Michael Lang and Holly George-Warren, The Road to Woodstock (Ecco, 2010), 24.

[6] Ibid., 36-37

[7] Ibid., 48.

[8] Weston Blelock and Julia Blelock, Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to “Woodstock” (Woodstock, NY: WoodstockArts, 2009), 47.

[9] Michael Lang and Holly George-Warren, The Road to Woodstock (Ecco, 2010), 119

[10] Ibid., 124

[11] Joel Rosenman, John Roberts, and Robert Pilpel, Young Men with Unlimited Capital (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 150.

[12] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Achitecture/Mouvement/Continuite, October 1984, 3.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ronald D. Cohen, A History of Folk Music Festivals in the United States: Feasts of Musical Celebration (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008), 1.

[15] Crucially, but outside of the scope of the present paper, the “garden” metaphor, redeployed here, has been used throughout the history of North American settler-colonialism to justify viewing inhabited lands as empty in service of indigenous extraction and the development of land into exchangeable private property.

[16] Dominic Pettman, After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 123.

[17] Michael Lang and Holly George-Warren, The Road to Woodstock (Ecco, 2010), 52.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid., 176.

[20] Ibid., 247.

[21] Ibid., 246-247.

[22] Dale Bell, ed., Woodstock: An Inside Look at the Movie That Shook up the World and Defined a Generation (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Publications, 1999), 12.

[23] Ibid., 155.

[24] Ibid., 157.

[25] Ibid., 3.

[26] Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album (Random House, 1969), 128-129.

[27] Michael Lang and Holly George-Warren, The Road to Woodstock (Ecco, 2010),

94

[28] Ibid.

[29] Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album (Random House, 1969), 142.

[30] Ibid., 143

[31] Michael Lang and Holly George-Warren, The Road to Woodstock (Ecco, 2010), 221.

[32] Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album (Random House, 1969), 4.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Mark L Levine, George C McNamee, and Daniel L Greenberg, eds., The Trial of the Chicago 7: The Official Transcript (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 167.

[35] Jean Young and Michael Lang, Woodstock Festival Remembered (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1979), 32.

[36] Michael Lang and Holly George-Warren, The Road to Woodstock (Ecco, 2010), 262.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage (United States: HBO Documentary Films, 2021).

[39] Michael Lang and Holly George-Warren, The Road to Woodstock (Ecco, 2010), 263.