It was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I went with my older brother and his college roommate. Like everyone, we were totally unprepared for the experience. We expected to park in a parking lot, not 5 miles away on the road. We expected to pitch our tent at the campground, and purchase groceries at the local IGA market. We never did see any kind of official campground and the grocery store shelves were empty. We had a bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies with us. We had tickets, of course there was no one checking them. I think they cost $18.00 (about $145.00 today) for the three days, I was making a bit above minimum wage, $1.85 per hour (about $15.00 today) at the local A&P supermarket at the time.
I was into the music, but the "hippie" culture was pretty foreign to me. My first reaction was, "Wow! There sure are a lot of rather unhygienic looking people!" Many of the locals were sitting on their porches, rather stunned by the seemingly unending parade of "weirdos."
Friday night it rained. We slept at the music site using newspapers for blankets. The known, to me, acts: Ritchie Havens, Tim Hardin Arlo Guthrie, and Joan Baez were really good, but the surprise of the night was unknown, at least to me, Melanie. She blew the crowd away. Although, I do have to say that when she was first announced as an unscheduled act, we thought for sure that either Arlo Guthrie or Joan Baez had backed out. They came on afterward.
Saturday was hot and very muddy. The mud had a particularly pungent odor. I remember standing in a concession line for a very long time to buy one of the worst hamburgers I had ever tasted. It cost $1.00 at a time when A MacDonalds burger could be had for under $0.25. Food that people had brought circulated among the crowd. You were encouraged to share if you had extra, and encouraged not to be greedy if you were taking.
Santana absolutely was the shining star act of Saturday afternoon. Largely unknown at the time, they made the crowd pay attention. Saturday evening and on into Sunday morning was an amazing line up of more well known acts. Canned Heat, Janis Joplin, Mountain, The Who (performed a large portion of Tommy), Sly Stone lit the stage on fire, and Jefferson Airplane welcomed the dawn, were amongst my favorites. It did get a bit scary, though, being caught up in the crowd as it continued to surge towards the stage.
Sunday morning, we walked the five miles back to the car to sleep for a while. We got back to the site to catch some of Joe Cocker and the Grease Band. The rain started again. We debated as to whether or not to stay for Hendrix, who we really wanted to see, but in the end we decided we had enough, and went back to the car while Country Joe and the Fish were performing. I never did get another chance to see Hendrix.
As I wrote above, I was not into the "hippie" culture. Woodstock was quite an epiphany for me. I had largely accepted what I had been told by my parents, teachers, read in newspapers and magazines, watched on television about these dangerous, filthy "communists," "Anti-Americans," "free-love advocates," etc. My eyes were opened to the fact that much of what I had been told and believed was just plain wrong. It started me on my life-long road of questioning authority, researching and analyzing data before making decisions and judgements, and most importantly, modifying my views when the data demands. I reevaluated many of my prior held beliefs after Woodstock. I eventually spent my career as a research scientist in biochemistry and molecular biology in metabolic disease early phase exploratory pharmaceutical research.
I was also one of the maybe seven or eight folks who did not intentionally smoke pot at Woodstock!
