This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the the Woodstock music festival, an event which symbolizes the Baby Boomer generation. And as a Baby Boomer, I beg you: let’s not celebrate this bad trip, please? The famous “Three Days of Peace and Music” was more like three days of drugs, bad performances, and yes — poop. Poop everywhere.

Oh, songstress Joni Mitchell wrote a song about Woodstock with a lovely melody and wistful lyrics.

“By the time we got to Woodstock,
We were half a million strong
And Everywhere there was song and celebration.

And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky,
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation.”

Yeah, about that. Joni Mitchell wasn’t even there. She was in a hotel room in New York City, waiting to appear on the Dick Cavett Show.

But back to Woodstock.

The festival was the brainchild of four young men, one of them a pharmaceutical heir, who decided to form a music studio in Woodstock, NY. However, that didn’t pan out, so these four amateurs decided that “hey, let’s find a farm and put on a music festival!” would be a great way to make money. In fact, they thought they might be able to get 250,000 hippies to part with a few bucks, and voilà! They’d be rich!

Which of course went against the hippie anti-capitalist trope of the Establishment making evil “bread, man,” but if hippies could smoke some weed and listen to some big name music acts, they’d be down with it.

Credit: Evan Moss/flickr/CC BY-NC 2.0. 

Trouble was, however, large landowners didn’t want all those smelly counter-culture types on their property. So the festival company, called “Woodstock Ventures,” had to finagle a Bethel dairy farmer, Max Yasgur, into allowing the festival on his farm. But the promoters conned Yasgur with a lie: they told him that about 50,000 concertgoers would show up. However, more like ten times that number swamped Yasgur’s farm.

Ah, but more about that farm. If you’re thinking that 500,000 peace, love, and rock n’ roll types lounged in bucolic pastures, you’d be wrong. They actually swarmed onto Yasgur’s alfalfa fields, which had recently been fertilized with manure.

The rest, as they say, is a nausea-inducing history of drugs, lack of food, safety problems (a tractor ran over a kid, who died), and lack of toilets. In fact, there were only three portable toilets for every 10,000 people, so yes, as I wrote above — there was poop everywhere. Then it rained, five inches of it dumping on drugged-out hippies and all that hippie poop. Even sitar performer Ravi Shankar compared them to water buffaloes in his native India.

Good times, right?

But 50 years later, some promotors thought it would be groovy to relive those glory days of 1969. Not only that, but the company promoting the Woodstock commemorative concert would also celebrate vague liberal causes, such as “universal human rights, ethical business practices, unfettered creative expression, free trade, the loving care of our planet, the power of the individual to make a difference, and the overwhelming impact of communities to act as agents of peaceful change.” Rolling Stone magazine breathlessly shouted out the musical lineup, which even included a few old acts from the original festival.

But apparently there weren’t enough aging hippies around, or maybe Millennials don’t really care to relive what Gammaw and PopPop did in 1969. Woodstock 2019 was cancelled.

Good riddance to a lousy idea, I say — celebrating the worst of my generation is ridiculous. Let’s remember Boomers who actually accomplished things, like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, or Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Condoleezza Rice, and Rush Limbaugh. Not all of us embraced the hype, took the drugs, and became smelly hippies.

Featured image: Mark Goff/Wikimedia/cropped and enhanced/public domain.