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FROM PAUL INGLES in association with Joel Makower

BACK TO THE GARDEN: WOODSTOCK REMEMBERED


 

Award-winning producer Paul Ingles hosts Back To The Garden: Woodstock Remembered, a two-hour examination of one of the most important rock music gatherings of all time, 1969's Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

Woodstock organizers, musicians and audience members recall the 1969 music festival that rocked the world in more ways than one. Music and memories from the historic event include interviews with with Woodstock organizers Michael Lange, Joel Rosenman, and the late John Roberts, artists Richie Havens, Roger Daltrey and Joe Cocker, and audience members Ron Petras, Vivian Goodman and Danny Diamond.

Music performances from many of the artists are featured: Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Joe Cocker, CSNY, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez and many more.

Produced by Paul Ingles in association with Joel Makower, author of Woodstock: The Oral History from SUNY Press (available July 9, 2009).

The program has aired on WNYC - New York, WBEZ - Chicago, WCPN - Cleveland, Minnesota Public Radio, KUT - Austin,
WAMU - DC, Wyoming Public Radio, KUNM - Albuquerque,
KCUR - Kansas CIty, KGOU - Norman, KXOT - Tacoma,
WXPN - Philadelphia, WFIU - Bloomington, WCAI/WNAN - Cape Cod,
WYSO
- Yellow Springs, WHRV - Hampton Roads, WNIJ - Dekalb, KUNR - Reno,
WRPI - Troy NY, Spokane Public Radio,
KRCB - North San Francisco, Mississippi Public Radio,
WUIS - Central Illinois, WAMC - Albany,
WUAL - Tuscaloosa/Birmingham, WVPE - Elkhart,
WETS - Johnson City, WTIP - Grand Marais MN, WRVO - Syracuse,
WMNF - Tampa, Maine Public Radio, KGLT - Billings,
KSUT - Ignacio CO, North Country Public Radio,
High Plains Public Radio, KAXE - Grand Rapids MN...and more!


HEAR THE ENTIRE PROGRAM ONLINE AT WWW.COOLSTREAMS.ORG
(Hear it for free but consider a donation too for an announcement-free experience)

HEAR THE ENTIRE PROGRAM ONLINE AT WWW.PRX.ORG
(Requires Signing Up For A Free "Listener" PRX Account)

VIEW THE AARP WOODSTOCK SLIDE SHOW

EMAIL YOUR WOODSTOCK COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS TO THE PRODUCER

(Emailing us your comments means we may post them, annonymously, to this site. If you don't want your comments posted, please let us know)


OTHER LINKS AND RESOURCES:

BOOK: Woodstock: The Oral History by Joel Makower (SUNY PRESS)

WEBSITE: Woodstock Festivals

WEBSITE: Woodstock '69 Fan Site

WEBSITE: Woodstock Overview w/ Film Clips

WEBSITE: Who Was There? What Did They Play?

DVD/CD: Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music
(40th Anniversary Director's Cut)



SOME EXCERPTS FROM OUR TRANSCRIPT

The seems to be no disputing that part of the festive atmostphere at Woodstock was the result of a largely unchecked flow of illegal drugs, creating scenes that were everything from comic to troubling. Clevelander Danny Diamond remembers one.

DIAMOND: The main thing that always attracted me, as I was there, was the marketing techniques of quite a few of the guys – who were quite a bit ahead of their time. Selling items like – as the one guy, dressed up in aluminum foil. I'll never forget him. He was selling uppers, downers, lids and reefer. And cocaine. "I got uppers, downers, lids, reefer, cocaine!" He walked through the crowd, constantly, with that same thing. He was selling stuff faster than you could say, "Jack Robinson."

The big-selling item was, of course, rolling papers. People always seemed to forget about those. Such as you're in Jamaica, or something: you pack everything, but you don't pack up the rolling papers. That was there. You could tell the rich kids from New York by the quality of the weed that used to go up, into the air. There was a lot of cheap, garbage weed, but there was a lot of real good-smellin' weed. I remember that, man! It's been since then that I've done that stuff. It's crazy.

STAGE ANNOUNCEMENT: Sit there. Look at all those people around you. Get acquainted. Have a smoke. The warning that I've received – you may take it with however many grains of salt you wish – is that the brown acid, that is circulating around us, is not, specifically, too good. It's suggested that you do stay away from that. 'Course, it's your own trip, so be my guest, but please be advised that there is a warning on that one, O.K.?

INGLES: Vivian Goodman was twenty-two, and thought she was about to take her first acid trip at Woodstock.

VIVIAN GOODMAN: On the way, we had met some fellows who had shown us some pills, purported to be acid. This was a time that we were ready to experiment. We had never dropped acid before, my friend and I. So, here we had these pills. We thought, "Well, we're going to listen to some acid rock, we're going to go to Woodstock." So, we bought these pills from these guys. They wore motorcycle attire and didn't look at all savory, at all. It turned out that these guys burned us. It wasn't acid. It was probably nothing. I could perceive no effect, whatsoever, of it. We dropped this so-called acid as we were waiting on Friday night. We sat there and nothing happened and nothing happened. In the end, we were sort of glad nothing happened, because it wasn't the place to take your first acid trip.

~~~

RON PETRAS: Some of the houses, they set up a garden hose in the back yard and just hooked it over a tree or a rope, and were letting people take showers underneath it. When I said, "a shower," I don't mean just nude; I mean with clothes on. I don't know if you're familiar, but there was red mud up there. With all the people and all the rains, people were red from head to toe with this mud. They'd let us wash off and clean up. Some of the people, that had food in their houses, would give people stuff to eat.

STAGE ANNOUNCEMENT (Wavy Gravy): There's going to be good food and we're going to get it to you. It's not just the Hog Farm, either. It's everybody; we're all feeding each other. We must be in Heaven, man! There is always a little bit of Heaven in a disaster area.

PETRAS: The Hog Farm brought in, after a couple of days, all these bologna sandwiches, fruit and whatever they could for food. They brought in sixteen-foot box trucks, full. They were just handing it out. There was a guy that was walking down the street and I had a sandwich. I'd only taken a couple of bites out of it. He said he hadn't eaten for a day, and he wanted to know where I got the food from. I just gave it to him. It was just something that was just normal for that. You didn't ask; whatever you had, you shared.

STAGE ANNOUNCEMENT (Wavy Gravy): There's a guy up there, some hamburger guy, that had his stand burned down last night. But he's still got a little stuff left. For you people who still believe that capitalism isn't that weird, you might want to help him out by buying a couple of hamburgers.

INGLES: Vivian Goodman may have ended up with one of those hamburgers.

GOODMAN: The first thing I said to my friend was, "What are we going to eat?" This isn't untypical, for me. There were no obvious food stands, whatsoever. There was no sign of food, really. Maybe the people were just blocking it out: the mass of humanity. We walked up the hill. Already, the hill was covered with people, but we found a little piece of grass and we called it ours and we sat down. Pretty soon, you were shoulder-to-shoulder, and we were way up the hill. This feeling that I was telling you about before, of all being like a family, started to happen again. We talked to everybody around us. It seemed that they were talking to everybody next to them. It was sort of noisy, because everybody was interacting. Then, suddenly, food came. It was being passed up, or passed down; I don't know what direction it came from. But a hamburger passed by; pop passed by; various pipes passed by. Everything was being passed around. There was this feeling that you were at this great, big, family – not my family, but somebody's family – picnic.

~~~

INGLES: We recall a musical and emotional highlight of the festival with Ron Petras, who was then fifteen, but definitely tuned in at Woodstock.

PETRAS: I think one of the coolest things was when Sly Stone played, which was, "I Want to Take You Higher." I was up at the top of the hill at the time. You could hear the music, but it was kind of faint. Then, they started, "I want to Take You Higher." Everybody was throwing up the peace sign or a fist in the air (for power). That was really cool because people on top – can you imagine? You saw the group of people. Everybody was doing it, and everybody was yelling, "Higher!" Toward the end, you were just pumped up, because this went on for like ten minutes or something.

INGLES: Larry Graham was then bass man for Sly and the Family Stone.

GRAHAM: You know how people, when they want you to come back for an encore: they stand up, they yell. But half a million people, doing that, is really something. I had never heard anything like that in my life! It's something to really get the heart pumping. I'll really never forget that feeling. We walked back out, onto the stage, and the volume of the crowd went even higher. It was so intense! Then, we struck up, playing an encore. It was like, wow. We just knew that was a turning point. You leave off the stage and you go back to the trailer and you can't finish hugging each other, you know? Jumping up and down, "Hey!!" Carrying energy back to the trailer. That was, it turned out to be, the turning point and, really, the world, on a large scale, became aware of Sly and the Family Stone.

~~~

INGLES: Most, heading home after Woodstock, had a sense that they were taking something home with them: something besides the mud on their clothes, including Ron Petras and Vivian Goodman, who answered the question, "Do you really think Woodstock changed you?

GOODMAN: I think it did. Well, a number of things that happened to me then have a lot to do with who I am now. But this thing about working together; love, not war; peace, not striving and straining for the buck; a lot of the sentiments in the music – but, more than anything else, the communal feeling – I think that stayed with me. And the feeling that, if I'm going to do something in my life, it's not going to be just for a paycheck, just to get ahead, but it's going to, maybe, be to make a better life for person next to me. Some of that grew out of that feeling at Woodstock. I think it did.

PETRAS: There was a guy, on top of the hill, by the concession stands. There was like two foot of mud. He was a mime, I would say. He was just acting out roles. We were up there for about an hour, maybe more, watching this guy. This guy was so talented, so good. At first, you thought, "who's this yo-yo, rolling around in the mud?" But then, you saw what he was doing. He was boxing with another guy, wrestling, surfing, doing all these different acts. You'd swear that there was an invisible person, this guy was so good. When he got hit, he'd shake back in the mud. This guy was covered, from head to toe, with this mud, and I mean, it was thick. You just think back: he had no problem with going out, showing his talents, and being himself. People really enjoyed that. I think just that, alone, where you remember people, being themselves, makes you think, "What can I do to just be myself and relax? I know not all people will like me, but I hope some do." There was a lot of that there; I try to remember that, as much as possible, so I don't start pointing my finger at other people, saying, "You're not right; you're not good."

(c) 2009 - Paul Ingles / Cedar Creek Studios, Inc.


About Producer Paul Ingles

Paul Ingles has been in broadcasting since 1975 and has experience as a producer, news and sports reporter, recording engineer, editor, on-air personality, trainer and manager. Paul has worked at radio and television stations in North Carolina, Washington, DC, Ohio and New Mexico. More recently, as an independent radio producer, he has filed reports for NPR news magazines (Morning Edition and All Things Considered) and NPR newscasts as well as numerous other public radio programs. He has been reporting extensively on The Beatles during this 40th anniversary year. To hear more of his Beatles reporting and programs, click here.

He has produced radio programs on music, popular culture, literature, media literacy and other topics that have been distributed nationally, including - The Beatles In America - 1964, The Emergence of Bob Dylan, The Emergence of Paul Simon, Everything Was Right: The Beatles' Revolver, The Two Sides of Sgt. Pepper: An Honest Appraisal, Paul McCartney: An Appreciation, George Harrison: An Appreciation and The Day John Lennon Died. Most were carried on over 100 stations. Paul has also taught a rock 'n' roll history course for the University of New Mexico and written a series of books called THE ROCK HISTORY REFERENCE GUIDES that are in use at dozens of radio stations across the country.

In 2003, he founded the non-profit media organization Good Radio Shows, Inc.

Click here for more about Paul's work.