The other articles, all crammed on to page 25, included a “Man in the News” profile of Max Yasgur, Reeves’s piece about the festival’s financial woes and another with the headline, “Bethel Pilgrims Smoke ‘Grass’ and Some Take LSD to ‘Groove.’” From nearby Monticello, Michael T. Kaufman wrote a piece about how the residents of the largest town in the area banded together to help “the sick, the hungry and the marooned.” The description of the music, in a review by The Times’s rock critic, Mike Jahn, was buried at the bottom of the page. His favorite performance belonged to Sly & the Family Stone.

The group, which is led by a former San Francisco disk jockey, Sylvester (“Sly”) Stone, has artfully risen above the mass of soul bands by using melody styles vastly different from what is usual in soul music. The best example of the group’s sound fusion is “Everyday People,” its song about brotherhood, which became one of the most popular records released this year. Sly and the Family Stone has managed to combine a happy-sounding melody line with an infectious and very danceable soul beat. The crowd here responded many times more warmly than to any of the groups or individuals that appeared earlier.”

Aug. 18, 1969

‘Morning After at Bethel’

On Tuesday, The Times editorial page weighed in. Shakespeare was quoted.

Now that Bethel has shrunk back to the dimensions of a Catskills village and most of the 300,000 young people who made it a “scene” have returned to their homes, the rock festival begins to take on the quality of a social phenomenon, comparable to the Tulipmania or the Children’s Crusade. And in spite of the prevalence of drugs — sales were made openly, and “you could get stoned just there breathing,” a student gleefully reported — it was essentially a phenomenon of innocence. The music itself was surely a prime attraction. Where else could aficionados of rock expect to hear in one place Sly and the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane and those other lineal descendants of the primeval Beatles? Yet it is hardly credible that they should have turned out in such vast numbers and endured, patiently and in good humor, the discomforts of mud, rain, hunger and thirst solely to hear bands they could hear on recordings in the comfort of home. They came, it seems, to enjoy their own society, free to exult in a life style that is its own declaration of independence. To such a purpose a little hardship could only be an added attraction. *** Five thousand people were treated for injuries, illness and an excess of drugs. One hundred arrests were made on drug charges. And for three days traffic was tied in knots — for most of the rebels against the consumers’ society have cars. By adult standards the occasion was clearly a disaster, an outrageous upset of all normal patterns. Yet the young people’s conduct, in the end, earned them a salute from Monticello’s police chief as “the most courteous, considerate and well-behaved group of kids he had ever dealt with. Perhaps it was just the communal discomfort, that whiff of danger, that they needed to feel united and at peace. For comrades-in-rock, like comrades-in-arms, need great days to remember and embroider. With Henry the Fifth they could say at Bethel, “He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a tiptoe when this is nam’d.”

Aug. 25, 1969

‘Woodstock: Like It Was in Words of Participants at Musical Fair’

A week after Woodstock ended, perhaps after recognizing that the original news coverage may have leaned a bit too much into the traffic jams, the mud and the drugs, and ignored what it was now calling “the most ambitious music festival ever held,” The Times ran another front-page article. Gelb wrote that he had “the sense that something of considerable significance had taken place — but what?” To unpack that significance, the paper assembled six attendees for a round-table conversation — five men, one woman, ranging in age from 16 to 22. Gelb even joined the four reporters to conduct the interview, which lasted two and a half hours. The resulting piece came with a disclaimer:

“Because of the wishes of some of the parents — or, in one case, because a participant was on probation for a drug offense — the full names of the young people are withheld.”

After the Woodstock attendees talked about why they went and their impressions of the scene — Lindsey, “a 16-year-old junior at one of the city’s better private schools,” said the music drew her there and she was blown away by the atmosphere — the conversation turned to drugs. And the paper performed some Times-splaining:

All the panel participants carried some kind of drug to the festival — mostly marijuana (known as “grass” or “pot.”) But there was also hashish (abbreviated as “hash”), barbiturates (“downs”) and LSD (called “acid” after its chemical name, lysergic acid diethylamide). On the way to Bethel, the participants worried about being searched by the police. Once concealed drugs in a hollowed-out arm rest of a car; another hid his on the floor, reading to ram it through a hole if a search began. A third said he was prepared to hide his in his underwear and demand that the officers produce a warrant made out in his name. None was searched. Once they reached the festival their caution evaporated in the air made sweetish by thousands of burning “joints” (cigarettes hand-filled with marijuana). Anything they didn’t bring seemed to be readily available, even heroin (called “skag”) though none of the participants actually sought or saw any. Not infrequently drugs were given away by young people eager to share. What couldn’t be had free could be bought from dealers roaming freely through the crowd, or others who stayed back in the woods on what they took to calling “High Street.” Most of the participants regarded the drugs as an essential part of the scene — like flags at a Fourth of July celebration.

What The Times called “conflicting themes of alienation and commitment” were woven throughout the conversation, as the other attendees, all from “comfortable middle-class backgrounds,” weighed in.

Some of the young people had taken part in the political fervor that culminated in last year’s Democratic convention in Chicago. Some had been in peace marches and campus protests. One of the boys had spent his Easter vacation rebuilding the run-down house of a poor black family. But there was also the temptation of living a life of comfort free from “too much responsibility.” Judy. There were so many people there, I thought, wow, wouldn’t it be a good idea if we could show our power by, you know, getting political. And then I thought a little more about it and I said, oh, what for? It’s already here. We already know it, we haven’t got to bother. Dan. I think it was apolitical, if anything. Chicago was very political. Woodstock was just like government and politics just didn’t exist. Jimmy. But although they didn’t exist up there in Woodstock, people were very aware. Like whenever Joan Baez said anything about, you know, about the laws that do exist, whether they were being put into effect at Woodstock or not, the fact that they do exist was not forgotten by anybody. Bill. Oh yes. There was evidence of outside politics. I mean you saw the Army and you thought of Vietnam and things like that. I mean when I saw the helicopters landing and picking up the wounded, it reminded me of Vietnam.

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Sept. 7, 1969

‘Mike Lang (groovy kid from Brooklyn) plus John Roberts (unlimited capital) equals Woodstock’

Several weeks later, Mr. Reeves, who would go on to write critically acclaimed books about John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, delivered a lengthy piece for the Sunday magazine that evoked the New Journalism then revolutionizing magazine writing. He used his incredible behind-the-scenes access at the festival to capture the frayed relationship among the organizers, as Woodstock Ventures careened toward $1.3 million in debt.

Here comes Mike Lang! He’s rolling along the New Jersey Turnpike in a U-Haul truck filled with a few thousand psychedelic posters and other salable stuff. The kid from Brooklyn is coming home from Florida, 23 years old, curly brown hair down to his shoulders, Indian vest and dungarees. Groovy! February, 1968. Look out, New York! Look out, America.” Look out, John Roberts! There’s John Roberts in his apartment on East 85th Street. Same age as Mike, horn-rimmed glasses, Rogers Peet suit. At 25 he’ll inherit the first million dollars from the Polident trust fund. Outasight! A year ago he and a friend put that advertisement in The New York Times: “Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting and legitimate business enterprises.” Beautiful! There were 1,400 replies, including one from the man with the flying car and another from the lady with a formula for watermelon-flavored Popsicles. Mike and John were meant for each other, poet and patron. Sorry, Popsicle lovers, but Mike got most of that unlimited capital. He had an idea, the greatest happening in history — The Woodstock Music and Art Fair. “I knew it was going to happen,” Mike said the other day as his white Porsche stopped in front of the Plaza. “Even before I found his money, I knew it was going down. I have this sense of time.” “Mike’s from another planet,” said the lank redhead with him as men stopped to watch her climb up out of the little car. “He has these two bumps on his head, like horns. And funny leprechaun ears and eyes that slant up.”

Nov. 6, 1969

‘Woodstock Festival Costs Bethel Official His Post’

Woodstock has continued to reverberate throughout the ensuing decades, as the event took on almost mythic qualities. But there were some more down-to-earth, and much more local, repercussions, soon after the festival, as this Associated Press article in The Times made clear.