Field of tie-dyed dreams: How Woodstock changed a generation
David Crosby’s most enduring memory of Woodstock isn’t going onstage at 3 o’clock in the morning. It isn’t the fear that Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young felt at playing their second-ever show. Nor is it the gargantuan crowd, teeming like an ant colony on a field in upstate New York. No, the first image that comes to the musician’s mind is an incident between a policeman and an attendee.
That summer of 1969, hirsute hippies such as Mr. Crosby typically viewed police with fear and suspicion. Blame the tumult of the times. During 1968, there’d been several incidents in which police had shot and wounded students and black activists. Most infamously, officers in riot gear used clubs and tear gas to disperse hundreds of protesters outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Demonstrators routinely referred to the authorities as pigs.
At Woodstock, Mr. Crosby witnessed a decidedly different act by a representative of The Man.
“A girl cut her foot,” recounts Mr. Crosby. “She’s standing around on one foot, bleeding badly. And this cop, who’s just come on duty and he’s got a razor-sharp crease in his pants and his shoes are as shiny as mirrors – he is really turned out – sees her. Walks over into the mud. Gets the blood and the mud all over himself. Picks the girl up and carries her gently and sweetly to his car where he lays her on the back seat, again getting the blood and the mud all over himself and his uniform and his car. He doesn’t care. He’s taking care of the girl. And then about 14 hippies push that car out of the mud.”
After a brief pause, Mr. Crosby’s voice softens. “I thought to myself, ‘You know, that’s working,’” he says. “‘That’s a bunch of humans being good to each other.’”
Fifty years on, Mr. Crosby isn’t the only boomer wistfully recalling the seminal events of
The birth of WoodstockA slapdash start – with heartAn enduring mythology “A glimpse into what’s possible”
