BETHEL, N.Y. (AP) — Woodstock didn't even happen in Woodstock.
The storied music festival, considered one of the seminal cultural events of the 1960s, was held 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) away in Bethel, New York, a village even smaller than Woodstock. It's a fitting misnomer for an event that has become as much legend as reality – and has less to do with the location than with the memories it evokes of the state of mind of a society at the end of a confused decade.
An estimated 450,000 people gathered on a plot of land owned by dairy farmer Max Yasgur from August 15 to 17, 1969, to attend an “Aquarius Exhibition” that promised “three days of peace, love and music.” Most were teenagers or young adults – people now approaching the twilight of their lives at a time when only a small proportion of the population still have vivid memories of the 1960s.
That ticking clock is why the museum at Bethel Woods, located on the festival grounds, is immersed in a five-year project to distill facts from the legends and collect firsthand Woodstock memories before they fade. It's a quest that has taken museum curators on a pilgrimage across the country to record and preserve the memories of those who were there.
“You have to capture the story from the mouths of the people who had the direct experience,” says music journalist Rona Elliot, 77, who worked as one of the museum’s “community liaisons.” Elliot has her own stories about the festival; She was there and worked with organizers like Michael Lang, who entrusted her with his archives before his death in 2022.
Woodstock, says Elliot, is “like a puzzle – a collection of everything that happened in the '60s.”
FILE – Hundreds of rock music fans block the highway in Bethel, NY, on August 16, 1969, as they try to leave the Woodstock Music and Art Festival. (AP Photo, File)
A Search for Oral Traditions
Woodstock attendees have conducted hundreds of interviews over the decades, particularly on major festival anniversaries. But the Bethel Woods Museum goes even deeper with a project that began in 2020 and draws on techniques similar to those of the late historian Studs Terkel, who wrote hundreds of oral histories about what it was like to experience the Great Depression and the Living through the Second World War.
“There is a difference between interviewing someone for a work or a documentary and having their oral history cataloged and preserved in a museum,” says Neal Hitch, senior curator and director of the Museum At Bethel Woods. “We had to go to people where they are. If you just call someone on the phone, they’re not quite sure what to say when we ask them to tell us about these personal, private memories of a festival when they were maybe 18 or 19 years old.”
FILE – Visitors to the Bethel Woods Museum view exhibits at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair on June 14, 2018 in Bethel, NY (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
To find and meet people willing to tell their Woodstock stories, the museum received grants totaling more than $235,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services – enough money to hire curators and community liaisons like Elliot, who travel the country and record the stories.
The odyssey began in Santa Fe, New Mexico – home of the Hog Farm, which provided hippie volunteers like Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney and Lisa Law to feed the Woodstock crowd. Museum curators traveled to Florida, boarded a “Flower Power” cruise ship and visited Columbus, Ohio, before a detour to California earlier this year, which included a community center in San Francisco near the former homes of festival artists Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful belonged dead.
Richard Schoellhorn, now 77, traveled from his home in Sebastopol, California, to San Francisco to talk about his experiences at Woodstock. When the festival was scheduled to take place in Wallkill, New York, he was initially hired as a security guard at the ticket booth before community backlash led to a late move to the Bethel site.
Akinyele Sadiq discusses photos taken of the crowd near the stage at the Woodstock festival in August 1969, May 9, 2023, in San Francisco, before being interviewed by curators of the museum at Bethel Woods to provide oral histories to collect people who were there. (AP Photo/Michael Liedtke)
Schoellhorn still reported to work at Bethel, but immediately discovered that his services were not needed because the festival was so crowded that organizers stopped selling tickets.
“I was walking around Woodstock and Hugh Romney comes up to me and says, 'Are you working?'” Schoellhorn recalled to The Associated Press before sitting down to have his oral history recorded. “And I say, 'No, I just got fired!' He asks, 'Would you like to volunteer?'”
Schoellhorn ended up working in a tent set up to help people who had bad experiences with ingesting hallucinogenic drugs. He ended up getting stoned himself while enjoying the first concert he ever attended.
FILE – Music fans listen to the band Blood, Sweat and Tears at a Woodstock 50th anniversary concert in Bethel, NY, August 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
“It felt like everyone was in the same damn boat,” Schoellhorn said. “There wasn’t a single section where people were rich. From the beginning, no one was special there.”
Before attending Woodstock, Schoellhorn said he was a loner who wanted a career in marketing. After Woodstock, he became so extroverted that he lived on a commune in Colorado for several years before working as a dialysis technician for 35 years.
MEMORIES OF CLOSE-UP EXPERIENCES
Another Woodstock attendee, Akinyele Sadiq, also joined the curators in San Francisco to unearth his memories of watching the festival from 25 feet (7.6 meters) from the stage.
Although the festival was not scheduled to begin until a Friday, Sadiq left on a bus for Bethel on a Wednesday. When the bus broke down, he grabbed a ride that took him to the festival site at lunchtime Thursday so he could secure a spot close enough to the stage to appear in photos taken during the performances.
By the time he left Bethel a few days later in a hearse that another festival-goer had converted into a van, Sadiq had changed.
“Before Woodstock I had no real direction. “I didn't really have many friends, but I knew I was looking for peace and justice and wanted to be around creative people who wanted to make the world a better place,” Sadiq, now 72, told the AP before this did his oral tradition recorded. “Before Woodstock, if you lived in a small town you thought there were maybe a dozen people out there you could probably get along with. But then you realized there were at least half a million of us. It just gave me hope.”
Hitch said the curators have heard many life-changing experiences in collecting more than 500 oral histories so far and are confident they will collect even more next year. Community Connectors arrived in Florida last month and are traveling to Boston in March and New York City in early April. This will be followed by return trips to New Mexico and Southern California.
The museum wants to focus on finding and interviewing festival-goers scattered throughout New York state, where Hitch estimates about half of the Woodstock crowd still lives.
The museum will spend 2025 combing through the oral histories before moving on to special projects, such as reuniting friends who attended the festival together but now live in different parts of the country.
Elliot is convinced – “both karmically and cosmically” – that the oral history project is for her.
“I want this to be a teaching tool,” she says. “I don’t want historians to tell the story of a spiritual event that appears to have been just a musical event.”