Memories of Woodstock, the rock-'n'-roll festival he helped create, haunt Artie Kornfeld still: the cops opening fire on the crowd of stunned hippies, body parts flying everywhere, the dying screams of musicians as the stage burst into flames, the rapes and the looting of the dead.

Of course, that Woodstock only happened in Kornfeld's raving, mushroom-besotted brain, a hellish daylong hallucination triggered by a dose of psilocybin. Only a countervailing shot of Thorazine administered by festival doctors enabled him to stagger out to the edge of the stage to see the transcendent climax of Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix's soaring sunrise performance of The Star-Spangled Banner.

``There were a lot of good trips at Woodstock, but there were some bad ones, too,'' admits Kornfeld, sprawled comfortably across a couch in a gated Delray Beach subdivision a thousand miles and more light-years away from the mud and the dope and the music and the wonder of Woodstock.

As the 40th anniversary of the festival begins Saturday, Woodstock remains a mythic touchstone for both everybody who loved the 1960s and everybody who hated them: three days of rampant drug abuse, outdoor sex and loud rock 'n' roll, all blissfully free of adult supervision.

Somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 people showed up at an event planned for a crowd a sixth that size, turning an upstate farm into New York's second-biggest city overnight.

Careers were launched: Woodstock was the first significant public performance by Crosby, Stills & Nash, Melanie and Sha Na Na. Epitaphs were written: Headliners Hendrix and Janis Joplin would be dead of drug overdoses in little more than a year. Politics were embraced: The crowd sighed in sympathy at Joan Baez's gentle paean to her draft-dodging husband, locked up in federal prison. Politics were rejected: When antiwar radical Abbie Hoffman ran onstage and grabbed a microphone, The Who's Pete Townshend clubbed him to the ground with a guitar.

People danced and sang and made love. (The producers of the Woodstock documentary were sued by a man who said his on-camera coupling with a pretty girl destroyed his carefully cultivated homosexual image, wrecking his hairdressing business). It rained. It stank. Portable toilets backed up.

DISASTER AREA

There wasn't enough food (most concession stands ringing the concert grounds quickly ran out when the employees swapped hot dogs and hamburgers for dope; some that didn't were torched by the crowd to protest capitalist predation).

New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller declared Woodstock a disaster area, and the Army and National Guard began airlifting supplies in and casualties out.

With no cops present, drug use reached such epidemic proportions that the festival's public-address system kept up a running commentary on the best kinds of LSD. (``The brown acid that is circulating around . . . please be advised that there is a warning on that.'') The Woodstock medical corps even set up half a dozen ``freakout tents'' where overdoses could be treated and bad trips waited out.

The immediate reaction of over-30 America, as measured in the news media, was one of horror. HIPPIES MIRED IN A SEA OF MUD, shrieked the New York Daily News. NIGHTMARE IN THE CATSKILLS, added The New York Times over an editorial that demanded: ``What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?''

Join the discussion

The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. In order to post comments, you must be a registered user of MiamiHerald.com. Your username will show along with the comments you post. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

     Showing: Oldest first Newest first Most-recommended first Least-recommended first

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.repliedToText@

@Nyx.replyAnswerText@

Reply to this Comment @Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@