The Great Speckled Bird May 30, 1970 vol 3 #18 pg 4
Woodstock (the movie)
Woodstock is an amazing piece of technology, one of the most important films ever made. We have long been accustomed to experiencing films as primarily visual, with sound accompaniment. Woodstock escalates the film experience to a tactile level—the “visual” and the “aural” are merely two modes of an integrated experience of what the audience “feels.” The quality of the camerawork and the editing, the way in which the hours and hours of footage have been put together, are among the finest in the history of film. But somehow what you “see” in Woodstock is only a small part of what you experience, much the same as when you dig a Rock concert—there’s the dope, the lightshow, the people, the setting, the weather, etc.
The professional film-makers who produced and executed this documentary knew exactly what element was needed to change the sense ratio of the ordinary film experience—volume. The sound used in Woodstock is louder and of a higher quality than films have known before. Hollywood epics just throw these tools away. Just as Rock & Roll was at the center of the original Woodstock experience, you might even say that the “sound” of the film Woodstock is dominant, and the visuals of the film more of an accompaniment to those sounds than the other way around. In other words, Woodstock succeeds in embodying an accurate sensual perspective of Western youth-the first film, with the possible exception of 2001, ever to do so. Easy Rider, Blow-Up, Bonnie & Clyde, Z, and Zabriskie Point, though extraordinarily popular with young people, all use more or less conventional frameworks for their unconventionalities; at most they signified new directions rather than completed destinations. 2007 experimented with sound and it attempted to go beyond Sight and Sound to include an exercise in the colors, designs and shapes of Touch. Woodstock goes further.
Woodstock is a brilliant success as far as Form is concerned; its Content falls far short of what these new technical proficiencies are capable of—not so much in what was there in the film but in what was not there. Woodstock is in many ways an extremely subversive film, not in what it “contains,” but rather in what is “is.” The potential for mass experience foreshadowed in the Country Joe and the Sly and the Family Stone sequences are staggering. Implicit in Woodstock is the possibility of producing films to “accompany” recordings so that the record itself would merely be one aspect of an integrated sensual trip. Other potentials have almost no limit. The kids who see Woodstock will not be able to go back to more ordinary films and will demand new, mind-blowing forms that cross beyond the barriers separating different media. The technical potential is just overwhelming. Too bad that technical trip didn’t expand the human consciousness of those who made it: they miss the whole point of the Woodstock experience.
Trying to “interpret” the mass experience at Woodstock has been no easy task. In the massive volume of words inspired by the event, there were almost as many different explanations and interpretations of exactly “what” happened as there were people present at the event. Abbie Hoffman wrote an entire book trying to crawl his way through a maze of confusion, misunderstanding and sensual overload—he got out but by the skin of his teeth. Others have been less challenged by the experience of Woodstock and have contributed less to an articulation of what it all “meant,” but the producers of Woodstock (the film) have chosen the most conservative, least offensive perspective in which to view the three days of “fun and music.”
Gone is the incident in which Who guitarist Peter Townshend struck Abbie Hoffman with his instrument during “Pinball Wizard” for lamenting the absence of some sort of political stance at Woodstock; gone are the police hassles and busts outside the sacred area of Yasgur’s farm; gone is the two-hour Rock masterpiece given to the people there by the Jefferson Airplane at sunrise (including those “political” songs like “Volunteers of Amerika” and “We Can Be Together”); gone are the Grateful Dead, the Band, Ravi Shankar; gone are all the backstage, behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing by all the “HIP” capitalists who succeeded in making a fortune out of Woodstock. Absolutely and completely absent is any attempt to get at where all these kids came from.
How many veterans of Woodstock are or have been in jail or up before judges before and since Woodstock, and will be after they see the film made about them? Every attempt is made in the film to portray soldiers, police and representatives of the “system” as friends of the kids at Woodstock. No mention of what was taking place all around the farm, the searches, the longhair narks, the searchlights, the roadblocks, etc. Not that the groovy experiences of Woodstock did, not outweigh the bummers—it’s just that the people who made this film seem to have been trying to make a piece of non-struggle propaganda while claiming to have been merely “recording” or “reporting” an event. Nothing could be further from the truth: what went into this film was as carefully chosen as is possible in making a film. The incident in which a guy is rapping about “fascists” seeding the clouds functions in a very real, harmful way to discredit the whole perspective of politics. No accident that. Consider that Abbie Hoffman, who succeeded in articulating the experience of Woodstock within the context of the Chicago Conspiracy trial, is nowhere present in the film while such people as Bill Graham are featured. Consider that the only overtly “political” elements retained from the original are Joan Baez, who was safe and married and pregnant and nonviolent and singing “David’s” songs, and Country Joe and the Fish, whose FUCK cheer is a gas but whose Vietnam protest song seems harmlessly obsolete as far as where our heads are at NOW (and where Amerikan troops and war technology are now).
Woodstock will consolidate and crystallize a certain limited number of thoughts and feelings shared by young people all over the country and bring isolated areas and smaller towns into a national mass youth experience with values more common to New York, San Francisco and larger urban youth scenes; but the film does not go beyond this achievement. That’s why kids who have gone beyond the Content of the film are picketing against its rip-off aspects in some parts of the country, and kids who live in places where you can’t say Fuck (Worcester Counties all over Amerika), can’t wear long hair, and can’t turn on even on the smallest scale are demonstrating against city power structures which refuse to let it be shown. It is ironic that a film which is a celebration of the power of the people over an event which was intended to be a larger, but no more unusual than any other planned, profit-oriented “pop festival” is passively attended by masses of kids who are expected to pay $3.50 to $6 in order to see how groovy the Woodstock scene was when everybody got in free. FREE! If ever a film should be distributed for free admission, it is Woodstock. The film also gives the lie to all that bullshit about the promoters “losing everything they had.” If you think about the sound equipment used in this film, the cameras, the crews, the incredible, unbelievable amount of control over the finished product, what you know is that, for the Woodstock promoters, the experience there had much more to do with the film Woodstock than it did with the “music festival” at White Lake. Which is why the disaster at Altamont happened in the first place. In other words, the New York experience of fun and music is inextricably bound up with the California experience of bad vibes and murder, and any film that attempts to dig one without acknowledging the other is misrepresenting the truth.
When you leave the Rhodes Theatre and the manager hands you the Woodstock leaflet and a button reading Peace & Love, tell him to accompany you over to 11th Street some night when the pigs are coming down on Woodstock people, tell him to visit Vine City, tell him to ponder what happened to Meredith Hunter, a Black man, at Altamont, tell him to come with us to attend Aldermanic meetings where “loitering” ordinances are passed to keep us and Black people off the streets, tell him to remember the fate of the American Indian nation that once graced the land now labeled the “United States” and relate that genocide to what is happening to the Black Panther Party and to us, members of the Woodstock Nation all across the land yesterday, today and tomorrow. After he’s done this, ask him why you can’t accompany him to the box office while he’s counting the receipts, and get in on some of that $3.50 a head and turn it back over to oppressed residents of Woodstock Nation. Call Warner Brothers and ask them why Fred Hampton is dead and Bobby Seale headed for the electric chair. Ask them why John Sinclair is in jail for 10 years for giving a joint to a longhair nark. Ask them why there are narks in the lobby of the theatre. Ask them why there are new NO SMOKING signs at the entrances to the auditorium, why the ushers cruise up and down the aisles when the film showing is an open invitation to smoke pot and drop acid. Going to Woodstock without being stoned and lighting up at several places in the film makes no more sense than going to White Lake without a stash; but if you believe that the same pigs who are making a shitload of money off of people smoking pot and dropping acid in Woodstock won’t haul your ass off for doing it in the Rhodes, be warned now. Our only solution to this problem is to get so much dope, and so many dope-smokers, into the theatre that they couldn’t stop us even if they wanted to. Hope your high is as good as ours was.
Woodstock is just a movie, but Woodstock belongs to the people.
—miller francis, jr.
NOTE: You may be interested in a little info about those free comps to Woodstock. Warner Brothers gave the Bird 200 passes to a prescreening of the film at the Rhodes Theater, mostly to the afternoon show. They also gave WPLO-FM 500 passes to the night show. Neither knew about the other’s tickets. The Bird figured these passes would be a good way to raise some much-needed cash for the Atlanta community, especially in view of the pig action on 11th Street, so we presented an idea to the Midtown Alliance meeting in Piedmont Park They dug it, everybody else dug it, so on Tuesday the Bird and the Community Center began asking $1.50 donations to the bail fund in return for the Woodstock passes.
Raising the money wasn’t all that easy with 500 free tickets floating around, but if the Bird had known about WPLO’s passes and vice versa, we might have been able to work something out together which would have raised a lot more money. Who knows what WPLO’s reaction to the plan would have been?
The point is that we did raise some money for the bail fund, and Warner Brothers got mad as hell. They called the Bird and asked why we hadn’t asked them about “selling” the tickets, which they considered a crime of the highest degree. Our reply took about 30 minutes, but the gist of it was—it’s none of Warner Brothers’ business. A more relevant question is why didn’t Warner Brothers ask us, and people living in Woodstock communities all over Amerika, what we thought about $3.50 to $6 prices for tickets, none of which goes back to the people who made Woodstock happen in the first place. We’re sure that if Warner Brothers had asked this and similar questions of the kids who know the reality of living in Woodstock Nation, they would have gotten some damn good answers.
-miller francis jr.