Unlike the Moon landing I had no desire to commemorate another event from fifty years ago, one that occurred just one month later – the Woodstock music festival.

It was not until 1989 that I finally got around to watching the famous documentary of the event – Twentieth anniversary and all that. Although I enjoyed some of the music, it was obvious, even through the editing, that the whole thing had been a colossal clusterfuck from start to finish.

My overwhelming memory of the movie is from the final scenes as a helicopter climbs up and away over the site at the end, when almost everybody has left. I was just stunned at the amount of rubbish and shit that was left behind. My first thought was: “This is the generation who launched Earth Day and the Environmental movement? What a bunch of fucking hypocrites!” I guess all that environmental stuff at school had seeped into me. No thanks to the fucking hippies though.

As such I was even less than impressed dealing with various worshipful articles over the years about the event than I had been as a teenager reading back-copies of 1970’s paeans to it.

But there are two stories about it that make me feel good, and they both involve Pete Townshend of The Who.
Yes! This photo is from 1975!

First up is Townshend dealing to one of the great 60’s icons:

People have often tried to politicize Woodstock, making it out to be some sort of massive protest or collective act of defiance. Activist Abbie Hoffman of the Youth International Party certainly saw it that way and even went so far as to jump on stage during The Who’s set to deliver a political diatribe. The crowd roared their approval when an angry Pete Townshend shoved Hoffman off the elevated stage and into the press pit.

I’m pretty sure Pete hit Hoffman with his guitar in doing so! It’s lucky Hoffman didn’t try this a decade later with Paul Simonon of The Clash, who were everything that Woodstock was not.

But it’s the following summary from Townshend that really sets the seal on Woodstock and its supposed meaning and legacy and all the over-blown tripe that’s been written about it down through the decades.

“All these hippies wandering about thinking the world was going to be different from that day on. As a cynical English arsehole, I walked through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them, trying to make them realize that nothing had changed and nothing was going to change.

Not only that, what they thought was an alternative society was basically a field full of six-foot-deep mud laced with LSD. If that was the world they wanted to live in, then fuck the lot of them.”

Preach it Brother! The man’s a joy!