Nearly 55 years after a seismic musical event — which lives on almost as much through myth and legend as it does through actual cultural history — I touch down in New York, aiming my car north toward the Catskills. I’m here to see if any remnants of “peace, love and music” still pulse through the places associated with Woodstock 1969.
The history-making festival, originally an idea to help fund a recording studio, was supposed to be right in the town of Woodstock, which had become home to the likes of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Residents objected to the plans, but my, does the town still trade on the festival’s name and fame. For instance, I’m staying in the Hotel Dylan, where each of its 22 chic rooms (“The Roadies,” “The Jimi”) are themed around the legend of Woodstock.
On the town’s main street, the Stars and Stripes hang limply in the evening sun, jostling for porch space with the CND logo, since appropriated as the international sign for peace … it’s even worked into some balustrade ironwork. The food, in restaurants like Silvia, is high-end; the bars, such as Early Terrible, are quirky and bougie. And then there’s the open-mic night at the local favourite Colony, where you’ll meet new talent, as well as older locals who were undoubtedly at the legendary festival, which actually took place 90 minutes down the road.
The three-day event wasn’t the first sign of Bohemia or spirituality in the area. The Byrdcliffe Arts Colony (now the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild) was founded in 1902, making it one of the oldest arts colonies in America. Set on 300 acres in the hills above the town, its Arts and Crafts-era conception can be likened to the U.K.’s Bloomsbury Group, the influential circle of artists and writers led by Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.
Financially comfortable creatives have been drawn to Woodstock ever since, with the well-established Woodstock Artists Association & Museum at the centre of the community; the more recent Woodstock Film Festival has also gained some serious clout in the film industry over the past quarter-century. In some other hills above the town, there’s even a prominent Tibetan Buddhist monastery, Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, where director Martin Scorsese filmed scenes for “Kundun” (1997), a movie about the early life of the current Dalai Lama.
In 2017, the Woodstock site was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Matt CharltonBack in the summer of ’69, at the eleventh hour, Woodstock’s organizers found a new site, thanks to a forward-thinking dairy farmer and his sweep of land. And so, Bethel, N.Y., was prepared, the town authorities having been told to expect no more than 50,000 people. An estimated 450,000 came, overwhelming local infrastructure.
“We started hitchhiking (toward Pennsylvania) and heard inklings of this festival. It sounded too good to be true. In a farmer’s field for three days? I couldn’t see that happening,” says Duke Devlin. Fifty-five years later, the local legend is the long hair who stuck around, regaling the likes of me with stories of the three days that changed the musical landscape, from his chair in the Bethel Market Cafe.
The Woodstock site itself is now a cultural centre, the management having elected not to build on the sacred grounds of the original stage. Instead, the buildings that make up the complex overlook the hallowed site, blending into neighbouring fields. The non-profit Bethel Woods Center for the Arts offers a striking outdoor amphitheatre, a small but acoustically perfect inside venue, a golf cart tour with an ever-developing set of uncovered festival finds, and an immersive, colourful, multi-sensory museum. Nearly all of the public-facing staff are volunteers — mostly Boomers, who were, if not at the actual festival, still swept up in the aftershock. You can even roll in with your RV to go camping here.
The Museum at Bethel Woods is a showcase of Woodstock festival nostalgia.
Bethel Woods CenterNeal Hitch, curator at the Museum at Bethel Woods, is currently collecting oral histories from attendees of Woodstock 1969, and during my time there, he has invited two brothers, Carl and Wayne Kieper, who stayed long enough to catch “The Star-Spangled Banner” played by Jimi Hendrix, the last to perform.
Today, they’ve come to see Santana, another 1969 alumnus, play the amphitheatre, and have brought a camping stove — an artifact of the festival — as a donation to the museum. “The area was perfect … the love and peace have never left, and neither has the music,” says Wayne.
Without the centre, without the museum, without the monuments, without that name, you might just stumble across this part of the Catskills and see it as another field, another set of pretty rolling hills. But listen closely and you can still feel the peace, love and music vibrating through every blade of grass.
Matt Charlton travelled as a guest of New York state and Visit The USA, which did not review or approve this article.
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