Marc Harris grew up in upstate New York and although he didn’t attend Woodstock, he remains fascinated by the event, which proved to be an iconic moment at the end of a turbulent decade.
“If it had gone as planned, none of us would be talking about it today,” the Columbus historian said during his visit to the Columbus Rotary Club Tuesday. “It was supposed to be a concert for 50,000 people and it was only one of several big concerts that year. It didn’t turn out the way it was expected to turn out.”
Few things did go as expected in the chaotic 1960s and Woodstock proved to be representative of 1969, one of those friction-point years as Americans challenged, changed and sometimes even affirmed the establishment order of the 1950s as baby boomers began to come of age.
“It’s been 50 years now, and we are still seeing the impact,” Harris said. “In many ways, Woodstock was an expression of what was going on in America at the time.
“Woodstock was chaos,” he later added. “It was wet, miserable, unorganized and memorable.”
On Aug. 15, 1969, the planned concert for 50,000 descended into chaos as approximately 400,000 people converged on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel Town, New York, storming through the fences to turn Woodstock into a free three-day concert and a cultural and musical phenomenon.
On Tuesday, Harris put the event into the context of its time.
“I think to understand Woodstock and why it has remained the cultural event it is today, it helps to consider all the other things that were going on in 1969,” Harris said. “From politics to protests, sports, culture and counter-culture to technology, a lot of big things were happening.”
In 1969, Richard Nixon was beginning his first year as president.
“He came into office without much of a mandate, given his narrow win,” Harris said. “The Vietnam War was the big issue and Nixon wanted to negotiate a peace on his terms. Vietnam wasn’t going away in 1969. It never really went away.”
Beginning in 1969, Nixon alternately tried to coerce or strong-arm the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. The CIA’s covert invasion of Cambodia in 1969 started that sequence, but the war would outlast the Nixon administration.
The year was also one of protests, especially on college campuses as students rallied against the war and for civil rights, Harris noted.
Even in sports, the struggle between the old and new was evident.
Super Bowl III was a clash of eras, Harris noted, with the New York Jets and their brash young quarterback from Alabama against the NFL’s traditional power, the Baltimore Colts and the crew-cut and aging quarterback Johnny Unitas.
“As you will remember Joe Namath didn’t just say the Jets would win, which would have been fine, but guaranteed it,” Harris said.
Also in ’69, the New York Mets, which had languished at the bottom of the standings since it entered the League as an expansion team in 1962, had a stunning run to the World Series title, stunning the favored Baltimore Orioles in five games.
“They were called the Amazin’ Mets,” Harris said. “And up until that year, the only thing amazing about them was how bad they were.”
The cultural shifts of the time were also evident at the movie theater, Harris said.
“Look at the movies that out that year,” he said. “You had ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ ‘Easy Rider,’ ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,’ ‘The Wild Bunch’ and ‘The Graduate.'”
Each of those films had themes or subplots that reflected the “revolutions” of the day, from gay story lines (Midnight Cowboy) to the sexual revolution (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) to “discovering America.”
“But even in those films, you could see some resistance to those sweeping changes,” Harris said. “‘Easy Rider’ was about discovering America, an old theme. But note that the discovery went from West to East instead of East to West.
“In ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,’ the characters realized that the swinging lifestyle maybe wasn’t so good,” he added. “And with ‘The Graduate,’ it produced one of the great songs in film history. That song was a message of nostalgia for a simpler time in a time of change. For all the change, a lot of people were feeling that way in 1969.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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