Book Review: 50 Years: The Story of Woodstock Live

Cassell, £30

IT was at an altogether more bijou music festival in the village hall in Darvel in Ayrshire a few years back that I had a companionable chat, over a beer, with Neil Hubbard, who played guitar for Joe Cocker’s career-making performance of The Beatles’ With A Little Help From My Friends at the legendary Woodstock in upstate New York in the summer of 1969.

Hubbard is, I believe, the only musician with whom I have enjoyed a one-to-one who played at what has a strong claim to be the most famous pop music event in history, certainly before Live Aid. Julien Bitoun’s authoritative new book, The Story of Woodstock Live, published to mark its 50th anniversary, makes it possible to be reasonably sure of that, with its exhaustive lists of band personnel and set lists, and immaculate chronology of the weekend.

Bitoun, a guitarist himself as well as a writer with a style of admirable clarity, firm critical judgement, and a merciful absence of the jargon and invented vocabulary that bedevils writing about music, never allows his focus to stray from the fact that Woodstock was a music festival. Its lasting importance – “legacy” if you really must – is in the reputations, like that of Cocker, that it made, and the decline of others (Joplin, Hendrix) that it documented.

Woodstock was enormous and chaotic. Half a million people were there and another couple of hundred thousand tried to go and gave up, stuck in traffic. Fewer than ten percent of that crowd were still around when Hendrix played his closing set. The sound system was inadequate and dangerous, but just two people died over the weekend, and there were two babies born. If it was less decadent than often imagined, although cannabis and LSD were relatively cheaply available, it was still the last flowering of the hippy era of peace and love, which died with Meredith Hunter at Altamont when The Rolling Stones tried to create their own event near San Francisco less than five months later.

Bitoun is good on the context of the festival. His book begins with the story of how it came to be, what inspired it, and who made it happen. It ends with an appendix on those who were not there, and why, and where they chose to play instead (including the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell). But the bulk of The Story of Woodstock Live is an hour by hour unfolding of what was happening on stage from 5pm on Friday August 15, 1969 to 11am on the morning of Monday August 18, and goes far beyond anything documented in the triple album and hugely successful movie made from the event.

Far from that being as dull as I may be making it sound, in its authoritative meticulousness, this large-format book is beautifully laid out, and supremely readable, with a marvellous portfolio of photographs used to best advantage. It would give coffee table books a good name, except that the table should probably be furnished with something more exotic than coffee.

Alongside Cocker, the big winners of the weekend included Richie Havens, Santana, and Sly and the Family Stone – which is an interestingly diverse list, given the overwhelming whiteness of the crowd. The UK’s victors, belligerently evicting Yippie spokesman Abbie Hoffmann from the stage and playing most of their new album, Tommy, were The Who. The weather and the sunrise (during See Me, Feel Me) were on Pete Townsend’s side that weekend, for all that his own attitude was a bit punk-rock for the time.

On successive anniversaries of the original festival, and notably in 1994 and 1999, there have been attempts to recreate the event near to the original site, usually involving a few of the original artists. Often organisational shambles has been the chief reminiscent ingredient, and at time of writing that is threatening to be true for an ambitious multi-stage Woodstock 50 event. A line-up that runs from The Killers, Miley Cyrus, and Robert Plant through to Jay-Z, Janelle Monae, Imagine Dragons and Pussy Riot has been advertised for the same August weekend, with ’69 veterans Santana, Melanie, David Crosby, John Sebastian, Country Joe McDonald and Canned Heat also on the bill, but ticket sales have been put on hold amid uncertainty over licensing and other issues.

Much nearer home, of course, Scottish music fans have been dismayed to see their regular out-of-town summer music communes retreat to city centre sites. Perhaps it is time to recognise that the hope of Woodstock died with the 60s, and, as doomed Tim Hardin sang at 9pm on its first Friday, (How Can We) Hang On To A Dream?