BETHEL, NY– Woodstock didn’t even happen in Woodstock.
The legendary music festival, considered one of the most important cultural events of the 1960s, took place 60 miles away in Bethel, New York, an even smaller town than Woodstock. It’s a fitting misnomer for an event that has become both legendary and real – and has less to do with location than with the memories it conjures about the state of mind of a society at the end of a messy decade.
An estimated 450,000 people converged on a plot of land owned by dairy farmer Max Yasgur to attend an “Aquarian Exposition” that promised “three days of peace, love and music” from August 15 to 17, 1969. Most were teenagers or young adults – people now approaching the twilight of their lives in an era when only a small part of the population has living memories of the 1960s.
That ticking clock is why the Museum at Bethel Woods, located on the site of the festival, has embarked on a five-year project to extract facts from the legends and collect first-hand Woodstock memories before they fade. It’s a quest that has taken museum curators on a pilgrimage across the country to capture and preserve the memories of those who were there.
“You have to capture history from the mouths of the people who had the direct experience,” said music journalist Rona Elliot, 77, who has worked as one of the museum’s “community connectors.” 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 jigsaw puzzle – an arsenal of everything that happened in the 1960s.”
Woodstock attendees have done hundreds of interviews over the decades, especially on major festival anniversaries. But the Bethel Woods museum is going deeper with a project that began in 2020 and relies on techniques similar to those of the late historian Studs Terkel, who produced hundreds of oral histories about what it was like to live through the Great Depression and World War II . .
“There is a difference between someone being interviewed for an article or a documentary and cataloging and preserving an oral history in a museum,” said Neal Hitch, senior curator and director of the Museum At Bethel Woods. “We had to go to the people where they are. If you just call someone, they don’t know exactly what to say when we ask you to tell us about these personal, private memories of a festival when they were maybe 18 or 19.
To find and meet people who wanted 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 pay curators and community liaisons like Elliot to tour the country travel and capture 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 help feed the Woodstock crowd. Museum curators traveled to Florida, hopped on a “Flower Power” cruise ship and visited Columbus, Ohio, before making a California swing earlier this year that included a community center in San Francisco, located near the former homes of festival artists Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Death.
Richard Schoellhorn, now 77, made the trip from his home in Sebastopol, California, to San Francisco to discuss his experiences at Woodstock. He was initially hired as a ticket security guard when the festival was scheduled to take place in Wallkill, New York, before a community backlash led to a late move to the Bethel location.
Schoellhorn still reported for work at Bethel, but soon discovered that his services would not be needed as the festival became so overwhelmed that organizers stopped selling tickets.
“I was walking around Woodstock and Hugh Romney came up to me and said, ‘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 says, “Do you want to volunteer?”
Schoellhorn went to work in a tent set up to help people who had bad experiences with the hallucinogenic drugs they had taken. He ended up getting stoned himself while enjoying the first concert he ever attended.
“It felt like everyone was in the same boat,” Schoellhorn said. ‘There wasn’t one section where people were rich. No one was there specifically, from the beginning.”
Before attending Woodstock, Schoellhorn said he was a loner who wanted to pursue a career in marketing. After Woodstock, he became so outgoing that he lived on a commune in Colorado for several years before working as a dialysis technician for 35 years.
Another Woodstock attendee, Akinyele Sadiq, also joined the curators in San Francisco to reminisce about his memories of watching the festival from 25 feet away from the stage.
Although the festival was not scheduled to begin until Friday, Sadiq left for Bethel on a bus on Wednesday. When the bus broke down, he hitched a ride and was delivered to the festival site at noon on Thursday, allowing him to claim a spot so close to the stage that he is visible in photos taken during the performances.
By the time he left Bethel a few days later, in a hearse that a fellow festival-goer had converted into a van, Sadiq had changed.
“Before Woodstock, I had no real leadership. I didn’t really have many friends, but I knew I was looking for peace and justice and that I wanted to be with creative people who wanted to make the world a better place,” Sadiq, now 72, told the AP. recorded his oral history. “Before Woodstock, you thought if you lived in a small town there might be a dozen people you could get along with. But then you realized there were at least half a million of us. It just gave me hope.”
Hitch says curators have heard many life-changing experiences while collecting more than 500 oral histories to date, and are confident they will amass even more in the coming year. Community Connectors reached Florida last month and will head to Boston in March and New York City in early April. That will be followed by return trips to New Mexico and Southern California.
The museum plans to focus on finding and interviewing festival goers across upstate New York, where Hitch estimates about half of the Woodstock audience still lives.
The museum will sift through oral history in 2025 before focusing on 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 what she was meant to do.
“I want this to be a learning tool,” she says. “I don’t want historians to tell the story of a spiritual event that seemed like just a musical event.”
