They say if you can remember the 1960s you weren’t there. That’s especially true of the 1969 Woodstock festival, which was ruled a national disaster by authorities and a money-loser for organisers who had no way of collecting entrance fees from the 500,000 attendees, but stands as a high-point of the ‘peace and love’ counterculture for a remarkable lack of violence, the good humour of folks under adverse conditions (it rained, there wasn’t enough food, Abbie Hoffman interrupted The Who) and a still-unmatched line-up of rock and pop acts.
Fortunately, even if you weren’t there, director Michael Wadleigh was, running around with multiple crews, filming performances — seminally, Jimi Hendrix melds The Star-Spangled Banner with Purple Haze — but also the locals, the put-upon staff (the help-desk girl says she’s had to answer acidhead questions like, “What’s the colour of jealousy?”) and the blissed-out and bedraggled ‘beautiful people’. A two-part epic, this would earn its rating for the music alone (even Sha Na Na), but the tiny moments — the smiling nun flashing a peace sign, the announcer warning against “the brown acid”, the police chief who says how proud he is of these young Americans — stick in the mind after 40 years of backlash against everything Woodstock represented.