THE ICONIC, ground-breaking gig which, if you believe every man in the pub, seems to have been attended by half the world's population, is a constant of pop mythology. Only a few dozen people saw the Sex Pistols at St Martin's College in 1975, but several thousand now claim to have been among the pogo-ing throng, writes DONALD CLARKE
The entire population of Manchester – plus large parts of Yorkshire and the English midlands – maintain they saw Bob Dylan anger folk purists at the Free Trade Hall in 1966. You know how these things go.
Yet something very different has occurred in relation to Woodstock.
Official records (and a song by Joni Mitchell) suggest that nearly half a million people endured the likes of Sha Na Na and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at that open-air concert in 1969, but you almost never hear anybody boast about being there. Why would they? A few decent solos by Jimi Hendrix aside, the music really was pretty unremarkable. Crosby, Stills and Nash were at their weediest. Country Joe The Fish were as unexceptional as ever. Who else do you fancy? John Sebastian? Ten Years After? Heck, we invented punk to rid the world of these people.
Next week, Ang Lee, the director of Brokeback Mountainand Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, releases a charming, good-natured drama entitled Taking Woodstock. The picture tells how one Eliot Tiber, author of the source book, brought the festival to the outskirts of a small town in New York State named Bethel. Starring comedian Demetri Martin as Tiber, Taking Woodstockis happy to celebrate the positive vibe (I believe that is the word) that flowed about the fields during those three muddy days.
There is little doubt that Lee and his collaborators view the event as a good thing. But, for all that, their approach serves only to emphasise how uninteresting the sounds were. Indeed, the music is souninteresting it barely features in the film at all. In one blissful moment, Tiber, whose parents ran a nearby hotel, stumbles upon a van parked at the outer penumbra of the natural auditorium and, after taking some LSD, catches the faintest wafting traces of a song by, heaven help us, Mr Arlo Guthrie. It's little wonder that Tiber, following that gruesome experience, ventured no closer to the action.
“People say to me: ‘Why did you not show the stage?’” Lee says with a relaxed laugh. “That was not what Woodstock was about for me. So many of the most important bands were not there. The Stones were not there. And the acts that were there will often say it was the worst gig they ever played. When Hendrix played, half the audience had gone home.
“Also, the soundtrack album features a lot of music that was not actually from the concert. So, that is misleading too.”
THE FILM ALLOWSus a glimpse at the naked greed that would undermine the counter-culture and ultimately lead to its cynical commodification. At the time of the notorious Woodstock 1999 gig, where attendees rioted to the unlovely sounds of Limp Bizkit, many pontificators pointed to the expensive pizza slices and complex pay-per-view deals and bemoaned the debasement of a pure ideal. In Taking Woodstock, however, we see Michael Lang, the organiser of the original festival, taking vulgar relish in the distribution of wadded banknotes. Forty years later, Lee was forced to pay Lang a substantial sum simply to use the word "Woodstock" in the title of his film.
“Michael was a businessman,” Lee notes. “He was a very charismatic businessman, but that’s what he was. So we had to buy the name from him.”
Elsewhere, men in suits arrive by helicopter and, as events wind down, Lang looks forward to the culmination of the counter-cultural experience at the Rolling Stones’s (ultimately disastrous) concert at Altamont Speedway.
Cynics can, if they look hard enough, find evidence of the ultimate worthlessness of the hippie aesthetic in Taking Woodstock. Any perusal of contemporaneous memoirs confirms that there were no fights quite so savage as those that ultimately developed in once-idyllic communes.
Just one week before Woodstock, hyper-hippie Charles Manson had butchered Sharon Tate and two friends in the Hollywood Hills. At Altamont, Hells Angels, employed as security, stabbed a Stones fan to death.
Then the hucksters moved in. Within months of Woodstock breaking on to mainstream media, advertisers and marketing wonks had grasped the commercial potential of the new thinking. This peace and love stuff was all well and good, but the constant call to “be yourself” was much more interesting. Self-expression in the form of different coloured Volkswagens, variously flavoured colas and faux-subversive T-shirts was something industry knew how to provide.
Yet Lee is not contemptuous towards the original event. However much the concert may have been exploited and misrepresented, he believes that those attending were involved in a collective embrace that, for a moment at least, offered genuine promise of worthwhile change.
“There are things to be cynical about,” he says. “But I am not cynical about the concept of three days of peace. Half a million gathered in the belief there was nothing they could not do. There was a lack of food. It was chilly. It literally smelt of shit. But there was no violence. Now I think that is miraculous and I think it will never happen again.”
Lee is, in some ways, an unexpected choice for such a project. Now 55, he was a little too young to be fully drawn into the hippie mindset and, anyway, he spent those years in distant, culturally conservative Taiwan. It seems unlikely that the citizens of that island were writhing to the sounds of Country Joe as far back as 1969. Michael Wadleigh’s cunningly edited documentary on the festival, a mainstay at midnight screenings in Europe and the US throughout the 1970s, had little currency in Asia.
“It was a very conservative place to be,” he agrees. “The police used to have these mobile barber’s shops. If they saw someone with long hair they’d pull over and cut your hair. If you had too much material in your trouser bottoms they’d cut that off and throw it away too. That’s all changed now, of course. The country is probably more free than America.”
INDEED, LEE REMEMBERShaving very little contact with American popular culture of any sort. He and his pals would have known the Billboardtop 10 hits, but "nothing that got any higher than that". He saw bits of Woodstock on television in black and white and couldn't quite see what the fuss was all about.
It wasn’t until the early 1980s, when he was studying film at New York University (NYU), that he caught a screening of the Wadleigh documentary – partly edited by fellow NYU graduate Martin Scorsese – and gained an understanding of the event’s supposed significance.
“My children told me recently that I should drop acid and listen to the album to get the full feeling. I’m afraid I couldn’t do that,” he says. “I did create a trip in the film, though, and people tell me it’s quite convincing.”
After all this time, it has become difficult to corroborate the various myths and legends surrounding Woodstock. Just days after the final feedback died down, a plethora of fantastic stories began to emerge from the rubbish. Indeed, the central premise of Taking Woodstockis still in dispute. The film argues that it was Tiber who realised Max Yasgur's farm could provide a perfect natural stage for the concert. Michael Lang remembers things differently. Lee, who read a dozen books and talked to all the living participants while planning the film, has a third theory that he is reluctant to see printed in a national newspaper.
"Yeah, you'd better not write that," he laughs. "Look everyone says something different about who found this wonderful amphitheatre. Wavy Gravy [legendary hippie] has a different theory. It's like trying to disentangle a very complex oral history. Did Michael Lang arrive in a helicopter or a limo? It's like Rashomon." Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, in which a story is told from several very different perspectives, does, indeed, seem like a reasonable reference point. We have the documentary. We have the sprawling triple album with its dubious provenance. We have hundreds of books. Now we have Lee's charming film. Each points us in a slightly different direction.
Those who were there are, for obvious pharmaceutical reasons, a little unclear as to what exactly took place. But the facts hardly matter.
For some from the punk generation, Woodstock stands as a symbol of the indulgence and self-delusion that characterised much of hippie thinking. For many people a decade older, the event offered visible manifestation of important, highly desirable cultural recalibrations.
Lee remains proudly in the latter camp. “I think they were pretty brilliant,” he says. “There are many myths about what happened on stage at Woodstock. But I think offstage there really was a kind of Utopia for a while. That isn’t a myth. That Utopia was briefly real.” Fair enough. It’s just a shame the music wasn’t a little better.
Taking Woodstockgoes on limited release next Friday
