Hi Sheila, here's a Woodstock memory:

Monday Morning, 5 am, 1969 at Yazgur’s Farm
By Meredith Pond

Silence. Sweet silence for a little while.

Then the thrum of strings . . . electric, sharp, crimson . . . a red bolt aflame in the center of damp chaos. “It's him,” I whisper to the old guy with the red bandana sleeping in the beach chair. Then to no one in particular, “It's Hendrix.”

Nobody’s tired anymore. Jimi the sorcerer can raise the dead, stop the rain, set the world to music. Stoned ones rise in bewilderment, clutching their ponchos, waking their mud mates, listening, listening . . .

He will make us believers, true believers. He will.

Almost sunrise. Somebody turns out the spotlights that circle the stage. The sky is purple on cue, because the master calls the elements, soothes the ghosts, polishes the sun before it rises.

He is the alchemist making gold from steel strings, released from the tower, his anthem’s chords sing loud and wild and off center like taffy pulled across this field, like a Dali painting dripping time and space and sound over this red white and blue morning we are born to, we never asked for. Birthright. White light. Born tonight.

Sorcery prevails, our anthem sails out into the universe, there and back again on a smoky, sultry reverb. “Hendrix is god.” Master of instrument, body in motion, elemental dream, circling back, north, south, east, and west, marking our place in time, our desire to be. Jimi is the purple dome, the firestarter, the rampart we watch.

Oh say, we see, the twilight gleaming, streaming, out of our minds again to the edge of morning. This anthem careens through the blood, stops the hemhoraging, cleans the bandages, marches through the orange smoke, finds our way home. Alive.

Dawn’s early light. Dawn’s early fight. Amerika imperfect, limping home, land on the brink of evil, pulling names out of a fishbowl to die in a jungle, or fly home half dead and screaming, lost in the night sweats. Homeland, boneland. Ubermad.

Jimi electric. A single note comes all over us, ignites the sky, and calls the morning home from somewhere we could never imagine until now.

He stretches that one chord to the edge of the universe and back then bursts out again, rescues the song we love from this raging river where we stand shivering, alone again, but not scared. Hey, Joe. No guns here. Peace, man.

Peace.

My brother (who was 16 at the time) went to Woodstock. Amazingly, the only obvious fatality (besides the overdoses) was one death because a young man was 'run over by a tractor while in his sleeping bag.......' Needless to say, when my mother heard that, she automatically assumed it was my brother! (out of a half-million people!) A few days later, my brother came home.....smelly, tired and rumpled, but with sleeping bag in tow!

Meredith, Hendrix was amazing. Since he played Monday morning, enough people had left that I was able to get really close. I was standing in front of him as played that amazing Star Spangled Banner.

When I was reporting all this for the 20th anniversary, I found that Hendrix gave me a question I could use to see who was really there and who was making it up.

I'd ask people early on when they arrived at Woodstock, and when they left. I remember distinctly one man who said he left Sunday night to get back to work, then gave me a vivid description of his reaction to Hendrix. It cast suspicion on everything he told me, and I didn't use him in the story at all.

Christine, there were stories at the time that one or two babies was born there as well, but no one had ever come forward with a birth certificate that would verify that.

In addition to the sleeping man who was run over by the farmer's tractor (he had tried to get in out of the rain), there was one heroin overdose and one death from a ruptured appendix.

Sheila, did you buy a ticket? I remember my friends and I feeling pretty dumb about that because most people told us they got in for free after everything turned to chaos at the "gate." As the story goes, four of us drove all night to get there by Thursday afternoon (I think :) only to be met by police in front of a sawhorse barricade. I remember showing our tickets, but he still tried to wave us on! Can you believe that? Squooshed in a VW bug for hours and hours and hours, collectively out almost a hundred dollars? And go home? Miss the festival? My memory replays it like this . . . I revved the engine, waved to the guy, zoomed around him and the barricade, and disappeared into the crowd that parted like the Red Sea to let us in. Meredith

They didn't get the ticket booths in place in time, and when they were deciding whether to make everybody go out the gates and come in again, Wavy Gravy asked, "Do you want a bad movie or a good movie?" Yes, I had tickets, but we left Friday morning and got there by 2 or 3. (Walked a long, long way from where we parked the car.) Maybe you're thinking of Friday? There weren't big traffic jams till then.

Two aging hippies trying to recall something that happened 36 years ago and being competitive over it. What did you have for dinner last night ??????

Sheila,
36 years ago, sitting on that scaffold on Friday afternoon.
I finally went back recently for the first time, and checked out the field as well as the Church yard off 17B where we parked and set up our canvas lean-to. The place still has a special feel to it. It might sound corny, but to me the ghosts of the crowd & the music seem to still hang in the air. In the Church of Rock and Roll, it's the main cathedral, and the hill is the temple. Is it really that important? Nah, 'cause it's only Rock & Roll but...
For one brief, wonderful moment, we created a "state of mind" that a lot of us can still go back to anytime. They say if you can remember the 60's, you weren't there. But for me, so much is still vivid, from the toll booths along the Connecticut Turnpike getting crazier & crazier as we neared NY Thursday night, to the ride home Monday with 7 people crashing from the weekend in a cramped Ford Falcon trying to make it back to Bristol.
In my travels over the years, anybody from the Northeast between the ages of 50 & 60 has a Woodstock story. It's about either when they went or why they didn't.
P.S. I still have my ticket.