When the Music's Over: Woodstock's Aftermath

[The last in a short series of departures from my usual fare, on the occasion of the re-release of my Woodstock book and audiobook and the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival.]

The 40th anniversary weekend of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Festival has now passed. Forty years ago at this time, hundreds of thousands of muddy, mostly happy souls were making their way back home, finding their cars, hitching rides, or otherwise traversing their way out of the jam-packed festival site.

While much has been written about the festival, not much has been said about the aftermath. That story, as I chronicled as part of my 1989 oral history book and audiobook, just republished, is almost as tangled and intriguing as the story of the festival itself: How the four young co-producers untangled themselves from lawsuits among themselves and with scores of others. How Warner Bros. made off with the film and music rights, with barely nothing going to the musicians or producers. How the local townspeople around the festival site never got over the experience, in both good and bad ways.

One of the stories that most intrigued me was that of Max and Miriam Yasgur, the dairy farmers who rented their land for the event. Max, a 50-year-old Republican who let his land be used in part because he thought the producers - who seven weeks before the festival had their permit summarily revoked by the county where they originally had planned the event - had gotten a raw deal. (Of course, he also got a pretty penny for his troubles.) Woodstock altered their lives in some fundamental ways.

Max died in 1973. In 1988, I interviewed Miriam, since remarried and relocated to Florida, for my book. I was struck not just by her willingness to share her story, but by the story itself, in particular what happened after the music ended and the throngs departed.

What follows is an excerpt from her story:

Miriam Yasgur: Once the people started to leave, they left very quickly. The place emptied out within two days. And when they were all gone, the worst of it was the anger that we felt from people that didn't like the trash. We were unhappy about it too but there was nothing we could do about it at the time. Other people in the community hailed us like movie stars because we had been involved in this thing.

Some of my neighbors were very nasty. Many of them were not. After the festival they said, "You know, these people were very nice. We were inundated and we didn't like the garbage and so on, but we had very good experiences with these people. It went better than we thought, and most of them were very nice." As a matter of fact, they gave a testimonial dinner for Max a year later in Bethel. [Woodstock co-producer] John Roberts came up and somebody had brought Life magazines with the pictures of the festival and everybody signed it for Max.

The community made the dinner. A committee decided that they wanted to express their appreciation to Max in order to show him that the entire community was not against him, because he felt very badly when people that he knew and had had good relationships with would either be nasty to him or would not talk to him after the festival. And he felt very strongly that he hadn't harmed his neighbors-hadn't meant to harm his neighbors certainly-and he had a strong sense of neighborliness and he felt very badly about this. It really affected him. And so some of his friends in the community, realizing this, spoke to other people in the community and they said, "Why don't we show Max that we appreciate the fact that we all did a lot of business, that nobody was really hurt by this, and that he intended to do a good thing. And let's thank him for it." So they did have this dinner and they were very nice.

Occasionally, a parent would call and say, "I'm having problems with my youngster, who doesn't want to go to school"-or "He's getting into drugs," or whatever-"and I feel that since he looks at Max as a hero, perhaps if Max would talk to him it would help." Max would say, "Send him over." So we would end up with little groups of kids sitting on the chairs, on the floor, whatever, and they would sort of rap, they would express themselves. Max spoke slowly, stopped to think before he answered, and he would express his point of view and he would always offer to help if they needed help. And they would confide in him. Or they would say that, "I'm having this problem because my parents don't understand," and he would take the trouble to call the parent and discuss it with the parent if it was warranted.

And he did this for the few years that he lived after the festival because he felt it was a worthwhile thing that he could do, that maybe the festival gave him this opportunity. I don't know that he had a sense of trying to atone for any damage the festival did, but he was always interested in young people. He just liked working with young people, and he felt this was an opportunity. And he enjoyed having them come over. He enjoyed listening to them.

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