OutTakes
by Edd Merritt

Just a Walk in the Mud

As we approach the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, we’re hearing a lot of funky nostalgia about the happening. Sometimes it’s based on selective rather than complete memory. Periodically, I fall into that trap, too, when I listen to some of the artists and tunes I heard there. But, in a locally familiar phrase expressed by our recent Senator Jeffords, “Jeezum Crow!” Get a grip, Merritt! At the time that place – which was miles in fact from its namesake, Woodstock, New York – didn’t groove for me. And the worst part was that I had paid $50 to learn it. Yeah, I actually bought tickets for Beth and me. Sucker.
So, rather than wax melodramatic, I’m gong to tell it like it was for my brief visit to the scene – brief by choice, mind you. It was not this man’s meat – but I was cool nonetheless. I was there while Country Joe yelled the F word across the green rolling Catskills. Thinking it was the greatest expression of freedom ever, we yelled it back at him. And I remember Carlos Santana making his guitar sing as though he truly believed that we half a million bodies on the hillside were there mainly for the music. And of course my recently minted hippie roommate from the City, nary a draft card to burn, stretched and grooved beside his luscious Jamaican sweetheart who swore against bras (we all supported her in the belief). And then there was Max – not the festival’s farm owner, mind you – but my laid-back pal who left the Gulf of Tonkin for Greenwich Village where he monitored the trials of treating drug addiction through this newly developed magic potion called methadone. Max strode the muddy fields and wet pastures of Woodstock wearing a constant silly grin that could only have come from his patients.
All in fun, but these things, too, pass.
However, lest they pass unreflected upon – and without proper obeisance – bear with me while we return to those days of yesteryear when hair was hair and Max Yasgur threw a mean party. The bus to Bethel leaves immediately.
Well, immediately for my then-soon-to-be-wife and me actually meant a rather lengthy detour through Maine and the White Mountains of New Hampshire before hitting Woodstock.
The fact that we didn’t drive there directly may have explained a bit of our discouragement at what we found once we did arrive. We came from the wilderness. True green countryside with sparsely populated mountain campgrounds, clear streams and woodland trails were what we had left farther north in favor of gynormous traffic jams on the road heading toward the festival.
We had paid for tickets and were being turned away? That’s nonsense. We will partake of this cultural cataclysm come hell or high water.
Oddly enough, water eventually proved to be our ticket. While everyone else in a vehicle – and some on foot – were asked to turn around and head back, we noticed a truck, its tank spelling out WATER, driving up a side road toward the festival. We took off after it, the only other car on that road. Worried that we might be re-directed if we followed too closely, we wound around the countryside and eventually ended in an unfilled parking lot only half a mile from the stage. We parked near one of Ken Kesey’s magic school buses – day-glow flowers painted all over it with brilliant sets of tie-died T-shirts covering each window. No Wavy Gravy in sight, though. He must have been peddling his wares. We hiked through some mud, past bathers trying to awake from the previous night’s activities – mostly just skinny dipping, though, because they could do that here and not on upper Broadway.
Woodstock was a country fest for the city bound. Beth and I, on the other hand, were returning from the wilds of northern New England and, frankly, were missing it after only a few hours. We weren’t drugged up and did not plan to imbibe to excess. What the hell were we doing in sin city, anyway?
We had already experienced some life changes and endured a few political maelstroms beginning in the upper Midwest and culminating in New York. Many in attendance were just moving into those phases of their lives. Like Santana, we came for the music and got circus instead.
We stayed the day, and, I must admit, heard some groovy groups from Country Joe through the Dead and John Fogarty, Janis Joplin, Sly and his Family to Grace Slick and her Airplane.
We decided to leave before things drew to a close and missed the live version of Jimi Hendrix’s majestic national anthem.
Driving back to the city, we picked up a hitchhiker who had been on the grounds for a week helping to set up the stage and lighting. He’d done it for a free pass but said he could stand the scene no longer. The whacked-out thousands, the mud and filth, the trash everywhere – he needed the calm of the East Village to restore his energy and probably his sanity.
No, Joni Mitchell, we weren’t stardust, and we certainly weren’t golden, but we were there, and it probably was a time of man. Joni, you hit it on the head, though, “life is for learning,” so “Keep on Chooglin’.”