By the time I got to Woodstock... Oy vey
COURTESY HARRY PINCUS
A teenage Harry Pincus, left, with singer Arlo Guthrie at Coney Island
on Labor Day 1969, two weeks after Pincus’s anticlimactic Woodstock
experience.
without a ticket home? Furthermore,
the scene was full of astounding hippies,
rugged, mature men with full
beards and long fl owing hair, and wild
and beautiful ladies. The hills were alive
with the intoxicating smells of weed,
patchouli oil, mud, sweat and shit. An
Old Testament ghost with fl owing black
cape, a staff, and a goat, fl oated past us,
just as Richie Havens began stamping
out “Freedom” before our very eyes.
We soon wandered back to explore
the facilities, and discovered that save
for some porta potties and a few phones
attached to long lines of city kids calling
their mothers, there were none.
I had just quit my straight job, and
fi gured that I looked like a child without
so much as a wisp of facial hair,
in the lame, striped polyester shirt my
mother had foisted upon me. It was also
clear that we might as well just give up,
because fi ve teenaged Jewish refugees
from Brooklyn would be unable to compete
with thousands of ripened hippies
for the attention of the ladies.
I would soon have my long hair and
a beard, live in a fl ower truck and cavort
on a goat farm in Colorado with
other naked souls, but by the time I got
to Woodstock…I just wasn’t ready.
As we watched Richie Havens, from
a nearby rise on the hill, it occurred
to me that being wedged into such a
throng for three days and nights might
actually be a bore. Richie Havens was
minuscule, and the sound was no better
than it might have been on my friend’s
stereo, back at Trump Village in Coney
Island.
In light of the extravagant circumstances,
we soon cooked up a bogus
exit plan. We would all leave, in order
to check out the bungalow colony, and
then return to the festival.
As soon as we hit the road out, however,
opposing the endless fl ow coming
in, a sense of remorse overtook us. We
realized that we could never return.
Of course the bourgeois comforts of
the bungalow colony were still there
waiting for us. But now all we had was
an empty wooden shack, and no one
had any desire to sleep on the fl oor that
night.
Bob then tried to buck us up, by proposing
that we visit a certain waitress
he knew at Poppy’s Pancake House in
nearby Parksville.
They had yet to build the highway
extension that doomed Poppy’s, and the
joint was jumpin’. Bob’s waitress friend
was a sweetie, but didn’t have enough
girlfriends available to go around. As
we couldn’t just go home, we soon arrived
at a collective decision. We would
go off with a waitress or two and see
Jane Fonda in “Barbarella” at the drivein,
and then head for home.
And so it was that our weary troop
pulled an all-nighter, and was nearly
killed on the way home when Bob’s exhausted
driving skills suddenly blinked
out beside an 18-wheeler on the highway.
When I fi nally awoke that evening
back in Brooklyn, and strolled out to
the sultry courtyard of the Amalgamated
Butcher’s Union Co-op, everyone
was listening avidly for accounts of the
great Aquarian Festival at Woodstock.
“I was just there,” I yawned. “It was
O.K.”
BY HARRY PINCUS
The passage of years is relentless in
the human scheme, and it’s hard
to believe that 50 have passed
since that frozen tip of a January morning,
when I walked away from Wingate
High School, Brooklyn, New York, with
my diploma in hand.
The Beatles had taken to the roof
of Apple that very day, and splendidly
“passed the audition.” It all happened so
fast, we didn’t know what we had lost.
It was the year of the American
apogee, when we went straight to the
moon, Alice, in a module with less computing
power than an old phone. And
it was a summer of savage darkness, in
Vietnam, and Manson’s mad spree. On
Chappaquiddick Island, a black Buick
plunged into that darkness, and a dream
died in the churning tides.
The world has certainly changed
since that landmark summer, when
hundreds of thousands of us journeyed
to an Upstate New York farm, for something
called Woodstock. They’ve been
trying to fi nd “Woodstock” again, of
late, as if the Genie of Innocence and
Hope still resides in the same bottle.
But, sadly, that particular sprite only
lives on in the aged eyes of those who
looked upon the mountain and saw the
light of electric guitars and the hopes of
a land of children.
Unfortunately, efforts to stage a
50th anniversary concert recently fell
through, with Woodstock co-founder
Michael Lang calling the fi asco, “a really
bizarre trip.”
My own journey began when I acquired
an offi ce boy’s job at a small Wall
St. brokerage. There on the 33rd fl oor
of 140 Broadway, I took my place in
the adult workforce, supplying blue envelopes
for Janet while the brokers perused
Screw magazine, which they hid
in their attaché cases.
I prepared the coffee, maintained
the Pitney Bowes postage stamp meter,
and most important, cut the ticker
tape, which emanated ceaselessly from
an ancient mechanical oracle mounted
beneath a glass bubble on a hallowed
pedestal.
But, inspired by a 20-year-old coworker
who had left the day before to
join a swami commune in West Virginia,
I dumped the Wall St. job and
set off for Woodstock. Some kids from
Brighton Beach and I had assuaged our
parents’ collective terror by renting a
room in a nearby bungalow colony, for
an additional 5 bucks a head.
We were already tooling up Ocean
Parkway in my friend Bob’s ’67 Chevy
Impala when we heard that hundreds
of thousands were also on the way, and
that a state of emergency had been declared.
Oh boy!
The cost of gas, at 29 cents a gallon, as
well as the room in the bungalow colony
and the tickets for the three days, which
I believe cost $21, weighed heavily upon
our 16-year-old souls. When the WMCA
Good Guys announced on the car radio
that the fence had been breached,
and the concert was “free,” Bob decided
that we ought to unload our tickets on
some yokels along the way.
In retrospect, I hope our victims kept
their tickets, because they now fetch a
premium on eBay. As for Bob, he would
go on to sell his communications company
to some corporate Big Brother for
$5 million and, sadly, expire a few years
later, on the day his divorce was fi nalized.
It was the young Bob who’d cooked
up the adventure, from his scarred desk
beside yours truly at Erasmus Hall summer
school. It was Bob who had a car.
Bob supposed that we could somehow
join the Woodstock fi lm crew.
My friend was preternaturally overweight,
acne-ridden and balding, which
was unfortunate, as he was otherwise
quite brilliant and the possessor of legendary
driving skills. It was as if his
land yacht of a car was an extension
of his body, and while the last few miles
of our journey took hours, the big old
Chevy had, by now, taken on at least
20 kids. We had people on the roof, the
hood, the top of the trunk and, most delightfully,
girls sitting on our laps.
With Bob in full command, we managed
to secure a parking spot just shy
of the broken cyclone fence behind
the stage, and simply walked in to the
Great Aquarian Festival. The sight of
hundreds of thousands of bodies, heaving
and writhing, lined up along the hill
was either awe inspiring or terrifying,
depending upon how neurotic you were.
I, of course, was terrifi ed.
All I could think of was what might
happen once darkness descended upon
this enormous bowl of humanity. What
would happen when I lost my friends,
and was left to my own wanderings,
Schneps Media TVG August 8, 2019 19