Especially Borris, a fiftysomething Toronto movie and TV director. He's pretty sure a cameraman shot footage of him and a Brampton girl named Mo joined together with a yellow rope. He's always wondered if that cameraman wasn't his idol – andWoodstock assistant director/editor – Martin Scorsese.
"Maybe Scorsese was the guy with the camera who filmed me with the rope," Borris says wistfully, adding half-jokingly: "Martin Scorsese, if that was you and you got that footage, please get a hold of me."
By looking for themselves in the 1970 movie, Borris and Doyle – a 56-year-old retired Air Canada employee from Mississauga – are looking for something more basic than evidence of their participation in history. They're seeking proof of their attendance at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. It's not that they doubt it themselves – Doyle will happily show you the ticket stubs and souvenir program booklet to prove it – but so many others do.
"People don't believe you most of the time," Borris says. "It's really weird. Because everybody says they've been there."
Doyle is more specific: "So many people wished they were there. So many people tell you they were there, but they weren't."
He leans forward, taps his precious package of ticket stubs and program materials. Then he lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper: "I was there."
So were half a million other people, thousands of whom journeyed to Bethel, N.Y. – the actual site of the festival – from Canada. Like Borris and Doyle, they have nurtured their memories of that August weekend 40 years ago. Some of these have faded, while others – often of the sheer physical ordeal of the event – have remained with pinpoint clarity. These are important, if only to remind us that mythology often forgets what firsthand witnesses and participants remember.
In Joni Mitchell's song ``Woodstock,'' the festival is poeticized as a "garden." But it only grew to become so out of romantic hindsight. In real life, it was a mess: crowded, dirty, chaotic and frequently verging on collapse. That's why these first-person recollections remain such an indispensable part of the Woodstock story. On one level, they separate baby boomer myth from historical reality. On another, they explain how the event changed the lives of those who were there. THE GIRL ON THE YELLOW ROPE Clay Borris arrived at Woodstock on Friday, Aug. 15, 1969. Armed with a camera and an improvised press pass for "The Cabbagetown Chronicle," the teenaged filmmaker had flown to New York City ("my first time ever on an airplane"), then driven to the festival with a couple of buddies and a girl he'd only met a couple of nights earlier in Yorkville.
"I was part of that Yorkville scene of just hanging out," Borris says today. "She was a real pretty girl and I had no fear whatsoever. I'd go up to any chick and say, `What's happening? You want to go to Woodstock?' I mean it kills me that she just said, `Yeah, okay.' Some girl from Brampton. Her name was Mo. That's all I remember. I haven't seen her since."
By the time Borris and Co. arrived at the fest, "there was complete chaos. There was just thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. The fences were all down and I never had to use the (press pass) or anything. So we just went `Okay,' started rock and rolling and spent three days in the mud and the rain."
Woodstock proved a serial eye-opener for Borris, despite the fact that he'd already achieved a semblance of local notoriety as the result of a profile about him that had appeared in the Star. Woodstock was one of his first excursions outside of Toronto. He'd never seen that many people in one place before. He didn't know there were so many hippies in the world. He'd never seen so many people naked.
In due time, Borris lost everything – but the girl. His sleeping bag disappeared. ("Don't know what happened to it. Never saw it again.") So did his buddies. ("Don't know what happened to them. Never saw them again.") But he remained connected to Mo by means of a yellow rope for the entire weekend.
Besides the music – "that's what kept me going" – his most vivid memories of Woodstock involve the punishing physical discomfort. The venue became a mud bowl after heavy rains on Saturday afternoon. There was little shelter. Food and toilets were scarce.
He and Mo made it as far forward as about 300 metres from the stage.
"Every time people would get up and clap, half a million people were moving in closer," Borris remembers. "So it kept on getting tighter and tighter and tighter. Then it got to the point where we couldn't go to the bathroom or anything, so people used to pass each other (up over the crowd). You'd be passed over hundreds of people until there was a little bit of leeway somewhere where they had space and then you'd go to the bathroom. Some people just started (urinating) right on the spot. We all did."
Borris and Mo stuck it out at Woodstock until the end, when Jimi Hendrix closed the event with an era-defining, feedback-pierced rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Then they began walking south in hopes of hitching a ride back to New York. They hadn't slept or eaten in days, which only made more surreal the fact that a limousine driven by two "suspicious guys" pulled over and offered them a lift. Unlike many thousands of other Woodstock veterans, Borris hadn't taken any drugs. Still, the limo ride was "weird." Adds Borris today, "Maybe I was hallucinating."
Looking back 40 years on, "All I remember is the stink and the smell and the music and the rain and the mud and losing the sleeping bag and my buddies and the girl on the rope, the photographs I took. If I didn't have the photographs I wouldn't even know I was there."
Despite everything, Borris now casts his Woodstock memories as among "the best experiences of my life. I'm really, really proud I was there."
THE WAKE-UP CALL
On the Friday morning before Woodstock officially started, Walter Doyle woke up in a field near Bethel. It was the third day he'd woken up there, but this morning was different.
"I was only just turned 16," Doyle recalls. "It was pretty weird for me. You know, 800,000 people show up overnight. You go, `Oh s--t. This is wild.'"
Doyle had arrived at the Woodstock site from Boston. He'd made the trip with four friends in two cars, one a '61 Studebaker convertible. Although the youngest of the pilgrims, Doyle was already a hard-boiled countercultural kid, a bushy-haired veteran of concerts, music festivals and political demos. At one such demo, a Harvard Square anti-war rally organized by the Black Panthers and left-wing social activist Jerry Rubin, Doyle took a police-issue rubber bullet in the hindquarters.
Although Doyle's estimate of the crowd's size that morning exceeds the generally accepted audience total of half a million, there's no doubt it was a massive event, unprecedentedly so. There were more people than Doyle had ever seen gathered in one place in his short life, 300,000 more than festival organizer Michael Lang had anticipated
"It was very cramped, but everybody gave you a break," recalls Doyle. "Even the people at the front fence, which could have possibly been a disaster. Everybody gave you your own space. If you wanted to stretch out a bit, they'd move. I never had a problem there whatsoever. It was just three days of good fun."
Even with all that mud, discomfort and chaos?
"Yeah, it was nice," Doyle insists. "Good feeling. I wish everybody could have come. But then again a million was quite enough."
This is something you hear often. People who were there will tell you it was awful, but they'll also tell you they were changed by being there, and for the better. For Doyle, the adolescent target of police rubber bullets, it was confirmation that the kids were all right: left alone, they played in peace.
THE WAITING GAME
The Who came on a few hours after Janis Joplin, whose band was among the acts delayed for hours by the downpour of Saturday afternoon. John Till, the Stratford, Ont.-born guitarist who'd joined Joplin's Kozmic Blues Band just weeks before the Woodstock gig, says the toughest thing about the festival was the waiting.
Like all the acts, Joplin's band was flown in by helicopter. Thus it was from above that Till saw "an ocean of people," but he didn't let the sight spook him. He had a job to do.
Joplin and Co. were told to cool their heels. Things were running way behind. Drinking beer, Till stood by the stage watching Creedence Clearwater Revival's set and trying to keep his focus. But the waiting was taking its toll.
"We were all prepared to go on when we were supposed to be going on," says Till, 63, from his home in Stratford. "So everybody did whatever they had to do to get ready, but then there was the letdown of not going on: `Oh, we're going to be another hour.'
"I think we came out the other side of our getting all jacked up and excited and getting ready to run out there and do our thing. We sort of let the air out of the tires. So when we went on two hours after we were supposed to, I don't think we had as much energy as we would've at the scheduled time. But it was a job. You just do the best you can."
As it was for the people huddled out there in the mud and darkness – the guitarist couldn't even see them under cover of night – for Till it was all about the music. He remembers anchoring his focus on the physical cues provided by Joplin and organist Richard Kermode, the best way Till knew of keeping his mind on the musical task at hand. He didn't think Kozmic performed particularly well, and he didn't think of Woodstock in any other terms than as an especially vexing gig until after it was over.
By then, all the helicopters were booked for medical and food supply purposes, so Joplin and the band were chauffeured back to their hotel by limousine. It was the middle of the night, but already the roads were lined with homebound hitchhikers illuminated by passing headlights. Somewhere in the distance, The Who thundered until nearly dawn. All Till wanted was some sleep, oblivious to the significance of what he'd just taken part in.
"I had no idea it was going to take on the aura or its place in history that it did."
SOUTHBOUND
Larry Kent, already one of Canada's pioneering independent filmmakers (The Bitter Ash; High), didn't arrive at Woodstock until Saturday afternoon. He and two colleagues had departed Montreal –normally a three- or four-hour drive away – at 3 a.m. By the time they arrived on foot, after parking miles from the site, it felt like they hoofed it the entire way.
"Everything is impressionistic now," chuckles Kent, still making movies at age 72. "It seems like we parked in a Montreal lot and walked."
Kent also remembers the general craziness and utter lack of comforts, creature or otherwise. "I can't explain," Kent says from his home in Montreal. "It was just a mess as far as physical comfort was concerned. It was muddy, it was miserable, it was hard to find toilets. Everything was wrong."
And yet ...
"It should have been a bad experience," he allows. "But it wasn't. There was this terrific, terrific atmosphere. You could just feel it. Also, the irony was, with the amount of people there and this terrific discomfort, there was no feeling of anger or angst. It was very difficult also to get toward the bandstand. But we did make a terrific push. We wanted to see The Grateful Dead, and we did actually get quite close to the bandstand. That was a very exciting moment."
This is something else veterans of the Woodstock mud trenches insist upon. Walter Doyle said it. Clay Borris said it and so did Larry Kent. Two things transcended everything: the music and the mood.
"That's why I keep saying it was about emotion and feeling," says Kent. "The word `euphoric' just keeps coming through, and we weren't even drinking for Christ's sake. We had a couple of beers and that was it. And yet we were high. All the time we were high."
No one remembers any fighting. Everyone remembers the music. The sound system was sufficiently powerful that it could be heard far more widely than it could be seen, and it seemed to provide a blanket of sonic sedation over the 600 acres of Max Yasgur's farm. Kent remembers hearing The Who shattering the darkness of Saturday night.
Kent and his friends began working their way back to Montreal Sunday morning. "It was a nightmare," he says. He still kicks himself for having missed Hendrix – but so did most people who went – yet remains convinced that he didn't miss out on a "feeling," a kind of collective nurturing climate, that he hasn't felt since.
THE BORDER BLOCKADE
When Ossie Parsons finally saw the Woodstock movie when it was released in Toronto in March 1970, he remembers crying. It was a moment in history he should have witnessed, and the most painful thing is that he almost did.
Parsons, now 59, was a big-haired musician and event promoter when he heard about Woodstock in the summer of 1969. In early August, he'd successfully filled a busload of kids bound for the Atlantic City Pop Festival (which Hendrix had also closed), and felt confident he could pull it off again for Woodstock.
Using the old Rockpile – now a CTV building – at Yonge St. and Davenport Rd. as his base, he sold enough tickets to fill two buses with eager Canadian kids. One of these was a demure 17-year-old named Patty Daprato, who had eased any parental concern by fibbing that she would be staying at "the YWCA in Woodstock, New York."
With no idea of the size of what they were heading toward, and unaware that the roads leading to the festival were virtually choked to a standstill, Parsons' buses headed toward the border at Buffalo. Just to be safe, Parsons commandeered the vehicle's PA system to make it perfectly clear that taking drugs into the U.S. would be a very stupid idea.
At the checkpoint, the buses were ordered to pull over. The passengers were held in the vehicles for an hour, at which point the buses were boarded by U.S. customs officers armed with billy clubs and wearing unclipped holsters. One by one, every passenger was removed from the bus and taken to a building where they were individually questioned about where they had come from and where they were going. So many strip searches were conducted that extra women officers (wearing, for some mysterious reason, leopard-skin-patterned leotards) were called in to handle the surplus.
Sleeping bags were sliced open with knives. Luggage was ripped apart. Some of the passengers alleged they were beaten. Big-haired Ossie had his scalp scoured for drugs. A bag of marshmallows was confiscated as possible proof of possession of illicit narcotics. Patty's mother had packed her a picnic lunch containing salted hard-boiled eggs. The border officers insisted the eggs were covered in heroin. Forty years later, dry amazement is still audible in Patty's voice: "We had caused an international incident."
The buses were held on the tarmac for 12 hours before being turned back. Having heard what had transpired, Canadian customs officials let the vehicles pass without inspection. By Monday, the story of the incident had made the front page of the Globe and Mail. "U.S. Strips and Bars Ontario Music Fans" read one headline. Said another: "Youth Rejected At Buffalo, Want Ottawa to Complain."
In the end, three arrests were made, but all charges were subsequently dropped. Nobody on the buses had made it to Woodstock.
The irony isn't lost on Ossie and Patty. While no small part of the Woodstock legend is based in the absence of violence and hassles at the event itself, 150 kids from Toronto were subjected to harrowing treatment for simply trying to get there. "Violence wouldn't have been fitting with the times," says Patty of the peace that prevailed at the concert. "The only violence would have come from anybody that was policing."
But even in this incident something of the mythical spirit of the festival prevails. As awful as the border incident was, Patty says, "it is wonderful for us to relive a very special moment in our lives."
Wonderful? Special? How? It was during this trauma that Patty and Ossie fell in love. They have been married 35 years.
WOODSTOCK: A 21ST CENTURY BUYER'S GUIDE
Commemorative Woodstock concerts may be few and far between, but there's no shortage of celebratory swag hitting the market:
BOOKS
The Road to Woodstock: A behind-the-scenes account of the festival's origins, events and aftermath told by Michael Lang, the event's organizer. He oughta know.
MOVIES
Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (Director's Cut, 40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition): This edition of the Academy Award-winning 1970 documentary includes a full disc of previously unreleased extras, a few hours of "featurettes," and daft packaging made to look like a fringed suede vest.
Taking Woodstock: Ang Lee's forthcoming movie is based on the memoir written by Elliot Tiber, the gay veteran of the New York Stonewall riots who also happened to the guy who brokered the deal to bring Michael Lang's "Aquarian Art Exposition" to Max Yasgur's farm.
MUSIC
Woodstock – 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm: A six-disc CD collection featuring never- released performances. Out Aug. 18.
The Woodstock Experience: A 10-disc CD collection that contains the complete Woodstock performances of Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin and the Kozmic Blues Band and Johnny Winter.
EVENTS
Heroes of Woodstock: This looks like the closest thing we'll get to an "official" Woodstock reunion concert. Levon Helm (of The Band), Jefferson Starship, Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Mountain are among the artists scheduled to perform at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts on Aug. 15. The event, part of an ongoing tour called "Heroes of Woodstock," is scheduled to be opened by Richie Havens, the first musician to take the stage 40 years ago.
Geoff Pevere
THE YOUNG MAN WITH THE PLAN
Originally planned to take place in Walkill, N.Y., the Woodstock Music & Art Fair – named in the spirit of the boho/artistic community where organizer Michael Lang (pictured above) had settled some 70 kilometres away – was abruptly bounced to the property of cattleman Max Yasgur in nearby Bethel when the civic authorities at the original site came down with a bad case of hippie jitters.
As a Walkill Concerned Citizens Committee spokesperson told a local reporter just before the plug was pulled, "Citizens fear for the health, welfare and moral well-being of the community and festival visitors as well."
Although frustrated, Lang wasn't surprised. He'd sensed resistance to his vision of "an Aquarian Exposition" in Walkill from the beginning, so he'd kept the concept as quietly portable as possible for the event he envisioned.
"I hated the Walkill site," says Lang today, "and I was just working on it because it was there. But I was always of a mind to keep looking elsewhere."
Lang, only 24 at the time, scrambled to find a new venue, negotiating the relocation of the already nationally promoted Woodstock Fair event a mere month in advance.
"It sort of did come off the way I was thinking of it," Lang says of the moment he realized his baby was going to be a monster. "Only it came off on steroids. It certainly felt vindicating in terms of the way we prepared not just Walkill but also Bethel, in that we were looking to make this an all-welcoming, all-encompassing event for whoever showed up. So we were prepared for a lot of contingency."
Geoff Pevere
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