It’s been a rather busy month full of concerts for me, and so I decided to sit for a couple nights and regroup by finally watching the Oscar-winning documentary Woodstock, the nearly four-hour (!) 1970 picture about the grandaddy of all rock festivals.
The daunting length of Woodstock – 224 minutes in the directors’ cut! – put me off watching it for far too long, but once you sink into its patchouli-scented vibes, director Michael Wadleigh’s uncanny eye for capturing those three days in 1969 (with help from a variety of editors including Martin Scorsese!) sucks you in.
Woodstock pivots between candid moments of the heaving 400,000+ crowd and intimate, close-up concert footage, swinging between the near and the far in a way that really evokes the scope of the event. Even now, viewing this swelling mass of humanity on Max Yasgur’s farm is startling. These bands were playing on a pretty humble stage and sound set – with no giant screens for the crowd – and yet still managed to hold attention. It all seems so low-fi and ramshackle from our hi-tech world of 2026, but also deeply moving.
At times it’s almost comical, like watching a grasshopper try to entertain a stadium, like when laidback folk singer John Sebastian alone with his guitar tries to gently lecture a wall of humanity, but then someone like Richie Havens takes the stage and holds the crowd in the palm of his hand with a few strums and footstomps, and it’s magic.
Everyone remembers Jimi Hendrix’s barn-burning closing performance – which teeters right on the edge of self-indulgence – but how about Ten Years After’s searingly loud take on “I’m Going Home”? Or The Who lurking out of the darkness like rock ’n’ roll spectres? Or Sha Na Na‘s frankly bonkers appearance?
Wadleigh’s eye for both the masses and the music separates Woodstock from many other concert films, and the still-innovative split screen approach gives it an immersive feel not quite like anything else. It’s the small moments that stick with you – the beaming smile on a blonde woman’s face lost in the music during Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice”, or the poignant little interview with the guy cleaning out all the disgusting porta-potties, a hardworking average American joe who says he’s got a kid at the festival – and another fighting away in Vietnam. I wonder how that family came out of all those crazy times (of course, it turns out the toilet guy later sued over being in the movie, so it goes).
Still, seeing all these hopeful, hairy faces slogging through the mud in Woodstock in 1969, you wonder how and who they are today. The commercialised repackaged idealism of the ‘60s is beyond parody now, but there is a distinct vibe to these times that an awful lot of people have been trying to capture ever since. The occasional sneering angry conservative local and the kindness seen in counterpoint by other locals about Woodstock disrupting their lives seems to evoke so much of the culture wars still splitting America today. It’s not so different, then and now.
I quickly decompressed from all the hippie peace and love by watching Woodstock 1970’s evil mirror image, the Netflix documentary series Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, the biggest (and last) attempt to pimp hard for that ‘60s nostalgia vibe with a musical journey that went horribly, depressingly wrong. Then again, when you book headliners like Limp Biskit, Kid Rock and Korn, you’re probably not really capturing the vintage Woodstock feeling. Toxic masculinity seems to be the order of the day, with a nihilistic mob of teens lashing out and calling it a “party.”
Trainwreck was a cold splash of water after Woodstock’s idealism, with an endless army of shirtless frat boys screaming incoherently. Free food and camping turned into price-gouging capitalism run amok. The purpose of Woodstock ’99 was to “get fucking wild” and “party”, and needless to say it all kind of collapsed into a full-on riot of violence, vandalism and fires by the end, which Trainwreck forensically dissects. The desperate need to “repeat” Woodstock ’69 or live up to the impossible nostalgia were the seeds of the festival’s destruction. A sad attempt to do yet another Woodstock reboot in 2019 for the 50th anniversary never even got off the ground.
Of course, both festivals were flawed, could never live up to expectations and yet probably had their moments, too – Woodstock 1970 glosses over lightly the issue of overcrowding, feeding the hordes and any violence at the scene, while Trainwreck focuses so heavily on the bad vibes and sense of disaster it kind of skims over that there were dozens of non-bro rock artists also playing and that despite everything, some people even apparently enjoyed it all.
The original Woodstock becoming a proxy for the fanciful mythical never-land of hippie dreams was kind of a happy accident, which defies attempts to do it all over again. I don’t think I would’ve liked to be there, and I know I wouldn’t have wanted to be at ’99, but more than 50 years on the documentary is a powerful piece of cultural history, with some fantastic performances along the way. We put our dreams into music festivals, but in the end, sometimes you just have to go where the day takes you.
Nik Dirga 