There’s a well-known saying that if you think Woodstock was great, you weren’t there. The point is that the mud, drugs, lack of food and water, and often bad music made the whole thing a disaster for those who were there. I don’t know about where you live, but where I’m from in New Jersey, everyone of a certain age claims to have been there. I’ve even made that claim a couple of times. At least I was at the great, but now forgotten, Atlantic City Pop Festival two weeks earlier. If everyone who says they were there was actually there, there would have been millions of people rolling around in the mud, instead of the hundreds of thousands who were actually there.

Jeff Giles reviewed the Blu-ray version of the new 40th Anniversary Edition Director’s Cut of the Woodstock film a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t read Jeff’s review because I make it a point not to read any reviews of something that I’m working on until after I’ve finished my review. So this may end up being a point-counterpoint, or maybe we’ll agree on everything.

I first saw Michael Wadleigh’s film in a theater in New York City when it was released in 1970. It was the same night as the Knicks seventh game victory over the Lakers (the game where a hobbled Willis Reed provided one of the most inspirational performances in sports history), and since there were no vcr’s, and certainly no dvr’s yet, I missed the game. The things we do for love. I may have seen the film once in the years since then. The biggest surprise for me after all these years is that the film, so fondly remembered for the bands, is not about the music at all. It’s about people. The people who organized the whole thing. The people who went and lived to tell the tale. The townspeople who were massively inconvenienced that weekend. The man who cleaned the Port-O-Sans. (more…)