Two More Woodstock Reviews

Woodstock: The Oral History, 40th Anniversary Edition was recently reviewed in both the Miami Herald and at the Nippertown blog. Here's the Herald review:

This is ... an excellent, often spellbinding account in the words of those involved, from doctors and cops to shopkeepers and neighbors to festival organizers and musicians. Makower, a veteran writer, spent a year interviewing 75 participants, and since the year was 1988, the recollections are fresher than those collected four decades after the fact.

And here's part of Greg Haymes' review at Nippertown:

...Makower criss-crossed the country to conduct face-to-face interviews with more than 70 festival participants—musicians, the producers, local residents, tech and backstage personnel and, of course, the fans. When the original edition was published, Rolling Stone magazine called it “the definitive story of the mega-concert.”

The new edition includes new forewords by co-producers Michael Lang and Joel Rosenman, but it’s Makower’s original interviews that are the real reason to celebrate the fact that this book is back in print again.

Woodstock review in School Library Journal

School Library Journal recently reviewed a selection of new Woodstock books, including our very own Woodstock: The Oral History. Here's what they had to say about the book:

Joe Makower’s Woodstock: The Oral History: 40th Anniversary Edition, published by Excelsior Editions at State University of New York Press, provides a thorough, even scholarly treatment of the festival. This incredibly in-depth recounting has been “culled from face-to-face interviews conducted during 1988 with the people who made Woodstock happen: producers, performers, doctors, cops, neighbors, shopkeepers, carpenters, electricians, lawyers, journalists, filmmakers, and an assemblage of just plain folks who, by design or circumstances, became part of the event.” The separate segments, identified by speaker, are pieced together into a conversational text that takes into consideration everything from Port-O-Sans to peacekeepers to performances and ultimately tells a fascinating story. Small black-and-white historical photos and newspaper headlines are scattered throughout the pages.

Woodstock's Aftermath

Joel Makower recently postsed a bit of a Woodstock wrap up over on his blog. As he says,

While much has been written about the festival, not much has been said about the aftermath. That story, as I chronicled as part of my 1989 oral history book and audiobook, just republished, is almost as tangled and intriguing as the story of the festival itself: How the four young co-producers untangled themselves from lawsuits among themselves and with scores of others. How Warner Bros. made off with the film and music rights, with barely nothing going to the musicians or producers. How the local townspeople around the festival site never got over the experience, in both good and bad ways.

Joel also includes an excerpt from his book that focuses on the unheralded story of Max and Miriam Yasgur, the dairy farmers who rented their land for the festival.

Woodstock: here, there, and everywhere

Woodstock: The Oral History author Joel Makower had a busy week, appearing in a number of articles on Woodstock as we approach the anniversary weekend. Here's a sampling:

ABC News ran a reflection on Woodstock the other night, which you can watch at their website. The segment includes interviews with a handful of people who were there, including David Crosby. Joel was interviewed and quoted in the companion online article. Here's a choice bit:

"Woodstock created a can-do spirit among the generation," said Makower. "People came together under the unpleasant circumstances and helped everyone else and survived what everyone outside the festival grounds dubbed as a 'disaster.'"

Joel was also quoted in The Houston Chronicle piece that asks "Does Woodstock mean anything after 40 years?" The Kansas City Star runs down a very thorough list of Woodstock books, including ours. Joel is also quoted extensively in articles in the Louisville Courier-Journal and Gloucester County Times, and the book is featured in articles in the Canton Daily Ledger and on the website Tonic—the place where good lives, don't ya know. We're happy to see the book on a fun site like that.

Joel tells us there's another radio interview coming next week, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, enjoy an anniversary weekend filled with celebrations and reflections.

Woodstock's 40th

So we're just about there—the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is right around the corner. While you celebrate this weekend—with a copy of the oral history in hand, of course—you may also want to check out some of the following Woodstock-related events, shows, articles, etc.

This Saturday, the site of the original concert will host an anniversary blowout, featuring some of the same performers who were at the original, including Levon Helm, Canned Heat, Ten Years After, and Mountain.

The Times has a review of a new VH1 Woodstock doc set to air this weekend. In the piece, Mike Hale writes

How this intelligent, straightforward film ended up on the network of “Megan Wants a Millionaire” and “Daisy of Love” is a mystery, but we should just be grateful to VH1 for broadcasting it.

Sounds like it might be worth checking out...if you can sit through all of the "Daisy of Love" commercials that are bound to run during it.

We also found a couple of dissenting voices out there this morning, with regards to all this 40th anniversary celebrating stuff. Over at the Huffington Post, Nathan Hegedus has heard enough about how great Woodstock was. He offers a cynical, GenX reply to all the hubbub, you could say. And Mark Hosenball writes for Newsweek that he was there and even he's tired of the nostalgia trip everyone's riding right now.

So however you chose to celebrate—or ignore—the anniversary this weekend, we hope you have a groovy time doing it, man. Sorry, couldn't resist. Now here's Jimi to play us out.

The Woodstock legend lives on

Joel Makower, author of Woodstock: The Oral History, 40th Anniversary Edition, was interviewed by Tom Keyser for a piece in the Albany Times Union. Here's the article from yesterday's paper; look for Joel on page two.

The book also appears in Newsday's weekend feature, A Festival of Books about Woodstock. Good to see the book keeping company with all of the other Woodstock product out there! If you haven't yet ordered a copy yourself, you can do so here.

Joel Makower interviewed on Woodstock (again!)

As the 40th anniversary of that little festival in upstate New York approaches, author Joel Makower has been busy with interviews. Last week he was interviewed by KTRS St. Louis and KIRO Seattle. Listen to the KIRO Seattle interview, in which Joel tells some colorful stories about Woodstock and the process of putting together his definitive oral history. There will be more interviews in the near future, and we'll keep you posted on them here.

Joel's also been blogging about Woodstock over on his blog. You can catch Joel, Arlo Guthrie, and Country Joe McDonald in vintage interview clips from 20 years ago when Joel was promoting the first edition of the book, along with audio clips from the audiobook. He's also written a great piece about the famed Woodstock Baby.

Woodstock: Part two of our interview with Joel Makower

With our Woodstock book now available, it's a great time to read the rest of our interview with author Joel Makower. Here's part one in case you missed it. So spin some tracks from that gloriously remastered and reissued Woodstock box set (we know you bought it) and enjoy the stories Joel has to tell. And, no, we didn't doctor that photo of Joel. We think someone else did, but we still love it.

Q. Who provided you with the most memorable interviews? Was it because they were open and honest with their recollections and feelings, or because they were reticent to expound on their memories of that time?

A. There were so many people who were forthcoming, warts and all, about the inner workings of the staff, the backstage intrigue, and the politics of the town folk. I was particularly struck by two people: Wesley Pomeroy, the head of security, and Miriam Yasgur, the widow of Max. Each played a profound role at the event, and each was extraordinarily generous in telling their tales. Pomeroy's in particular was fascinating: how this lifelong cop, 50 years old at the time, a former Justice Department official, tapped into his Buddhist beliefs about crowd control and law enforcement to create some of the most enlightened thinking I've ever heard about how to treat people in ways that are both effective and respectful. He was truly inspiring.

Miriam Yasgur, for her part, was one of the more reluctant participants -- she had moved to Florida, remarried, changed her name, and was quite content with her life without having to regurgitate that particular period. But she agreed, and she opened up in an extremely generous way. We kept in touch for a while afterward and I was honored to have had her share her story with me.

Q. When we were younger, we sometimes questioned Woodstock's impact and began to feel that part of it's "importance" must have been greatly media-driven (cynical Gen Xers, we are). Now we probably view the music and attitudes of that era—and the reactions against them—as helping to birth the musical and cultural scenes we grew up in. So....forty years on, where do you think the concert fits in the public consciousness today? Do you find that it's only grown in stature in most people's minds, or has it lost some luster?

A. Love the Gen X cynicism. To me, Woodstock captured a moment in time in an intense and extraordinary way: the politics of the day as well as the music; the wit and wisdom as well as the wackiness. It probably wasn't the Best Concert of All Time—there have been many other extraordinary moments in live musical production. But it captured a can-do spirit, a moment of coming together amid a society that was hopelessly torn apart over a war being fought in Vietnam. It was the natural culmination of the half-decade leading up to it—the Free Speech Movement, the hippies, psychedelics, the anti-war politics, the explosion of rock music, and the millions of free spirits coming of age—including voting age.

And it was the precursor of all that was to follow: the growth and power of the antiwar movement, the music industry, Watergate, the environmental movement—and, eventually, the free-spirited entrepreneurs who would build the PC and the Internet. You can pretty much connect the dots.

Forty years later, Woodstock, the event, remains a hazy memory for most people. Many of the memories people remember have come from the movie, not the music. Most of what Woodstock was has faded from view, a vague but meaningful moment that those born decades later heard about but didn't truly understand. My intent with the book was to bring the full history to the fore, helping tell the story of the event and all that surrounded it at the time.

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind

Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong uttered those words when he became the first man to walk on the surface of the moon. Today you can read plenty of articles about that historic moment and also about moving past it and focusing our scientific research on saving planet Earth first.

For a deeper look at the politics behind NASA and the space missions, take check out Defining NASA: The Historical Debate over the Agency's Mission. Author W. D. Kay posits that, while most observers point to the 1969 Apollo moon landing as the single greatest accomplishment of NASA, prominent scientists, engineers, and public officials have been questioning the purpose of the U.S. space program, even at the height of its national popularity.

“Defining NASA is a valuable and interesting contribution to NASA history that deserves serious consideration by the agency’s current policymakers.” — Isis

Order a copy today.

Woodstock has arrived

This morning's delivery from the printer included the long-awaited copies of Woodstock: The Oral History, 40th Anniversary Edition. Copies will be shipping from the warehouse this week and you should start to see it alongside the other Woodstock books in displays in bookstores near you soon. You can always order a copy here as well.

So today's a perfect day to run the first part of our interview with Joel Makower, the man behind the book. In today's installment, Joel talks about what motivated him to work on this book and the challenges involved in making it happen. Look for part two to be posted very soon.

Q. Hi Joel. Thanks for sitting down with us to talk about the book. Let's start with an obvious question: did you attend Woodstock?

A. I was not at Woodstock. I was 17 years old during the summer of 1969, living in the San Francisco Bay Area, and playing (keyboards) in a so-so rock band called The Oedipus Complex. However, my sister, who lived in the Haight Ashbury, went. She didn't read papers or watch TV, but she heard on the street that there was a free concert being given on Bob Dylan's farm in Upstate New York—and that was sufficient information to entice her to go out to Interstate 80 and stick out her thumb. Her journey is one thread of the tapestry of my book.

Q. Speaking of the book, how difficult was it for you to find people who'd talk about the concert? I see that some musicians and residents of Sullivan County were resistant to discussing it all—and for very different reasons. Anyone in particular you would have loved to interview for the book that turned down your request?

A. The biggest challenge was to find a relative cross-section of individuals who could help tell the whole story of how Woodstock happened—and almost didn't: producers, performers, doctors, cops, neighbors, shopkeepers, kids in the audience, Wavy Gravy, Abbie Hoffman, Mrs. Max Yasgur, the guys who made the movie, and so on. There were so many threads to weave together, and figuring out what they all were—and which ones I wanted to include—was the biggest challenge. The community of individuals who produced the concert was fairly accessible and willing to share their stories. Getting to musicians was another story. Many of their gatekeepers wouldn't let me through, and some—Jerry Garcia, Arlo Guthrie, and Country Joe McDonald come to mind—simply didn't want to participate, each for their own reasons. (I later met Joe -- he and I were on Oprah together during my book tour for the original edition, and he apologized and said he regretted not taking the time to talk to me.) In contrast, other musicians—Richie Havens, Joe Cocker, David Crosby, Paul Kantner—were happy to talk.

And then there were the townspeople from the area surrounding the concert, who still felt the scars of Woodstock 19 years later, when I did my interviews. Some people were forthcoming but many others still seemed in denial—they simply wish the whole thing had never happened, and didn't want to participate in anything that might further its memory.

Q. What were you doing leading up to your work on the book?

A. I've long had an interest in the various threads that made up my generation. In 1985 I wrote a book, BOOM! Talking About Our Generation, that chronicled the music, media, politics, and culture from 1955 to 1975—from the emergence of Elvis to the end of Watergate. That was a seminal period.

And Woodstock was a seminal moment, not just for the music, but for what happened, and what didn't, at the event. Woodstock easily could have been a disaster. The promoters were thrown off their original site just five weeks before the event and had to scramble to find another site—Max Yasgur's farm—and build a virtual city . . . which never got completed. There were no gates; anyone could get in. The place was packed with kids who were ill-prepared to spend three days in the country. There was inadequate food and medicine, and plenty of drugs.

Oh, and it rained. A lot. Sometimes violently. Any number of horrible things could have befallen, literally, on the hundreds of thousands of souls out in Max Yasgur's muddy alfalfa field. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller called out the National Guard. The news media proclaimed it a disaster.

But it wasn't. And the story of why represents a window into who we were in 1969—the politics and sensibilities of the time. And that, as much as anything, is the story that fascinated me, the one I wanted to tell.

Woodstock: With a little help from my friends

It's been too long since we posted another Woodstock 1969 video, so we're going to remedy that right now. Today's video features an iconic performance by Joe Cocker, singing the heck out of the Beatles classic "With A Little Help From My Friends." Cocker took the original's sing-songy melody from Ringo Starr and proceeded to grab it by the throat and sing it to within an inch of its life. It's an astonishingly intense performance, but one you'd expect from a wild English blues-rock singer like Cocker. This was back when Cocker and others like Rod Stewart, Steve Marriott, and Steve Winwood elevated blue-eyed-soul singing to an art form. We hate when people say this sort of thing, but in this case it may be true: they don't make 'em like Cocker and the rest of those guys anymore.

Also, for those of us of a certain age, our first experience with Cocker's version was hearing it as the opening theme to The Wonder Years. Did Kevin Arnold and Winnie Cooper ever make it to Woodstock?

In Woodstock book news, the recent Publishers Weekly feature on all books Woodstock (including ours), along with our other publicity efforts, have lead to a small flurry of activity around the book. Look for some more interviews with author Joel Makower in the very near future (including one on this blog), and some possible events for the book tied into the 40th anniversary celebrations taking place this summer.

Share your Woodstock memories with the Grammy Museum

We've been away for a few days and are still catching up on everything from the past four or five days. However, we saw this call for Woodstock stories from the Grammy Museum and wanted to share it with all of our Woodstock fans out there:

"We’re asking people who attended Woodstock or were involved in any way to help us put the show together, by lending their own artifacts, photographs, and memories," explains Katie Dunham, the museum's Spokesperson. "We’re looking for muddy sleeping bags, ticket stubs, handmade crafts, whatever tells the story through the eyes of the people who witnessed one of the most significant cultural moments in American music history."

Looks like fun. Feel free to continue sharing your Woodstock stories with us here as well. Only a few short weeks until Woodstock: The Oral History drops. The book is currently featured in a Publishers Weekly piece collecting all of the books that will be available this summer in celebration of the 40th anniversary.

The Woodstock Invasion

Leading up to the release of Woodstock: The Oral History, 40th Anniversary Edition, we're hoping to run some personal recollections of that historic event from SUNY Press staff, colleagues, friends, family, etc. We encourage you readers to share your memories of Woodstock with us as well: drop us a line in the comments section, as some of you have already done.

Today we kick things off with a piece from our Director, Gary Dunham. We're calling it "The Woodstock Invasion." Enjoy.

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Those long ago August days of the Woodstock Festival signaled clear, profound change for villagers and farmers in rural New England, a change heralded by fear and the threat of invasion more than love and music. Growing up on a small farm in the Maine mountains, I remember those specific days vividly. The usually rutty dirt road winding up the mountain to our village of eighteen people was being paved for the first time, at last, cars would not need to be left at the base of the mountain in the spring while the mill workers trudged a long, muddy road home. As the unfamiliar smell of hot tar drifted up the mountain, my family one afternoon scrambled for hours through the surrounding woods looking for a stray pig.

Despite the excitement at home, all the talk by my parents and older relatives centered on Woodstock. Yes, the festival was taking place some six hours to the faraway south in the Catskills, a place traditionally out-of-sight, out-of-state, and out-of-mind for those I grew up with. But this particular event mattered because it unsettled my folks and many townspeople as a larger, more complex world drew in around them. I remember overhearing talk of Woodstock a number of times, including my father muttering to one uncle and a few friends that “the damn hippies had come into the mountains, taken over a farm, and, by the Jesus, they might try to do the same thing here (pronounced hee-uh).” Men even talked of forming militias to roust the hippies if they tried to move into the western Maine mountains (I am not kidding). Woodstock shattered the innocence for us rural New Englanders that country lives were separate and safe from the rapid, sometimes rabid changes going on around us in the cities during the late 1960s. Woodstock changed us by breaching the divide we had always drawn between urban and rural. Slogan-ridden protests, unfettering drugs, unwashed long hair, and bewildering music were no longer someone else’s world, someone else’s problem. The invasion had begun.

Woodstock, in their own words

We've been sharing a lot of Woodstock-related videos and links with you lately, in celebration of the July publication of our 40th Anniversary Edition of Woodstock: The Oral History. You may have noticed that we're not the only ones celebrating 1969 at the moment. This being the 40th anniversary, there are books on Woodstock popping up all over the place, along with new websites, concerts, movies, etc. What makes our book stand out in this crowd of tie-dyed nostalgia sweeping the nation? For one thing, ours provides the definitive oral history of the concert—from its planning stages through the event itself and beyond. Joel Makower interviewed a wide array of people to put together this book: producers, musicians, film crew, security, concessions workers, agents, locals, and even the Merry Pranksters. The following are just a few of the people who were there that contributed their amazing stories to the book: Wavy Gravy, Michael Lang, Miriam Yasgur (who, along with her husband Max, owned the land on which the festival was held), David Crosby, Chip Monck, Richie Havens, and the late Abbie Hoffman. This Anniversary Edition contains first-hand accounts that have not been diluted by time or, um, anything else, for that matter. The stories were still fresh in the minds of those who lived them when Joel did the work for this book, and it shows, like in the following account, where Wavy Gravy describes the moment where hippies were first introduced to granola:

When I announced breakfast in bed, we were introducing hippies to granola, really for the first time. But we didn’t make it exactly right. I think the oats weren’t toasted enough, but still, what we tried to do was go around with Dixie cups full of granola and so that wasn’t just some rant that I was running. We were actually going for it.

Hippies + granola have gone in hand in hand for so long that we never imagined there was a time when they hadn't. Mind blowing.

So pre-order a copy of Woodstock today and enjoy the most realistic history of the mega-concert, from before the time that memories were either lost of embellished. This is Woodstock, raw and honest.

Woodstock's Green Connection

Joel Makower, author of Woodstock: The Oral History, recently talked with the folks at Woodstock Story. The article focuses on Joel's work as a strategist on clean technology and green marketing, and how the challenge of preserving our natural resources must be met by not only those in the trenches of the green movement, but also by big businesses.

Read the entire piece and also check out the book's featured page on their site while you're there. Then surf Woodstock Story for a bit—it truly is jam packed with loads of information about Woodstock.

Woodstock is available from SUNY Press for pre-order now.

Woodstock: Sly wants to take you higher

Having a tough time recovering from the Memorial Day weekend? Finding it tough to get your energy level back up after a weekend filled with either too much partying or too much time spent doing nothing? Well, Sly and the Family Stone can remedy that. Today we have an epic Woodstock 1969 performance from Sly and his Family Stone. They perform the heck out of their classic, "I Want To Take You Higher", even segueing into a crowd participation portion part way through that was intended to get everyone involved and do just what the song intended: take 'em all higher. After watching this we are pretty sure you'll notice a serious jump in energy level. Combine that with a strong cup of coffee and you may even be productive on your first day back after the long weekend. If you can stop watching Woodstock videos when you should be working, that is.

We also found this recent interview with Levon Helm, of the Band, discussing his Woodstock memories. Surprise—they're not all as charming as you might think.

Remember to stop by the SUNY Press booth (#4840) at Book Expo in NYC later this week and maybe even snag a galley copy of the forthcoming Woodstock: The Oral History, 40th Anniversary Edition.

Woodstock's opening act

Today's video from the vault features the man who kicked off the festivities on stage at the original Woodstock: Richie Havens. Richie wasn't supposed to be the opener, but he was pressed into that coveted role after a number of bands were late getting to the concert grounds. Best known for his soulful, folk rock covers of other artists' songs (including the Beatles and Bob Dylan), Richie wound up stretching his set at Woodstock to include an epic mash up of the traditional blues song "Motherless Child" with "Freedom." The performance became a hit after it was featured in both the Woodstock film and soundtrack.

We just discovered this Woodstock site and it's a treasure trove of news and notes. Along with tons of great stuff about the 1969 event, this site seems to be keeping track of all of the news about anniversary concerts that are popping up across the country. We hear they'll be adding our book to the site soon, so thank you, Woodstockstory.com!

Stay tuned in the near future for our interview with Joel Makower, the man who put together what Rolling Stone called “the definitive study of the mega-concert.”

The Band, Woodstock, and a (very) brief history of the world

Our road to the 40th anniversary of Woodstock leads us back to the stage today...

Today's video is a wonderful song the Band played during their set at Woodstock 1969. The Band were so good they didn't need a fancy band name—they simply told you what they were right there in their name. And they were a band, that's for sure: the individual players formed a stronger whole. They created some of the most textured Americana music of any era, which is ironic, given that four of the original members were Canadian. Like most rock 'n' roll stories, this one ended after fissures between self-appointed leader Robbie Robertson and the rest of the band led to a breakup in the late seventies. So enjoy one of their higher profile performances of their classic song "The Weight."

However...before you get to the song, you're treated to an interesting history of, um, the world, as it lead up to Woodstock. You'd think that would take a long time, but somehow the fast talker in this clip managers to sum it all up in under a minute. Bravo.

Hippies mired in sea of mud

That's the memorable August 17, 1969 headline in the New York Daily News. Referring to Woodstock, of course. You can practically see the the headline writer snickering while he wrote that one. The paper also captioned an accompanying photo with "They Don't Melt"—"they" being those muddy hippies of the headline who battled the elements and—surprise!—didn't melt like chocolate during those late summer days in Bethel, NY. Hard not to laugh at that headline today, but 40 years on it sure works as an eye-catching blog post, no?

As you know, we're counting down to the summer release of Woodstock: The Oral History, 40th Anniversary Edition. From time to time we'll be filling this space with an assortment of Woodstock-related stuff leading up to the book's release. We'll post some videos of classic performances, talk with the man who put together the oral history, and share with you anything else we stumble across, including news on rumored anniversary concert(s) for this summer. All we've heard is that they're considering Brooklyn's Prospect Park for an anniversary blowout. What are you hearing?

For now we'll kick things off with probably the greatest band to play Woodstock (okay, we might be biased): The Who. Looking back, The Who were an odd choice for three days of peace and music. The music part, sure, but the peace part...well, they used to destroy their instruments on stage with a ferocity rarely seen from bands at that time. They're often called one of the (many) forefathers of punk and you can easily imagine Pete Townshend or Keith Moon beating up Crosby, Stills, and Nash, can't you? They could probably take Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young also. Anyway, they were a band on the rise and their Woodstock performance helped catapult them (and their recent concept album, Tommy) into the upper echelon of bands of the era. So crank the volume—or if you're at work maybe plug in your headphones so you won't disturb your cube mates—and enjoy these two clips.