MUD GLORY How rock guitar titans

FIFTY YEARS AGO, ARTIST ARNOLD

 Skolnick was commissioned to design a post-er for the original Woodstock festival. He came up with the image of a dove — an age-old symbol of peace — perched on flute, an instrument in vogue with the hippie counter-culture at the time, but at the last minute, the flute was replaced with a guitar neck.

It was a timely substitution. Woodstock was the culmination of a five-year period that had seen the emergence of the electric guitar as the preeminent instrument of rock music — a potent symbol in its own right of the free-spirited, politically engaged, spiritually aware youth culture of the 1960s.

Today, the word “Woodstock” is encased in fuzzy warm mythology. In reality, though, Woodstock was an extremely challenging gig for all the musicians who performed there, not to mention the audience of nearly half a million souls who attended. The festival was a muddy, disorganized mess. Most of the artists who performed later said it was hardly their finest moment. A few, like the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, said it was his band’s worst show ever.

So there’s an element of ragged glory and triumph over adversity in the music played over those three days, captured on audio tape and film, and presented in the most complete form to date on Rhino’s new 38-CD box set, Woodstock: Back to the Garden: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive. Without the dedication and endless goodwill of these performers and their audience, Woodstock could truly have become a disaster.

SANTANA’S SNAKE DANCE

For the artists, the backstage hazard was threefold. (1.) Because of traffic jams all around the site, the schedule had “gone kerblooey,” as folk icon Joan Baez put it. (2.) This meant that performers didn’t know when they were going on, or how long they would have