5.  "TO LOVE AND MUSIC"

Woodstock was drugs and sex and rock and roll. Woodstock was Janis coitus interruptus Joplin, and Jimi genius Hendrix, and the gorgeous sweating chest of Roger Daltrey of The Who. Woodstock was Country Joe McDonald, handsome as a wild Indian. "So it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for, don't ask me, I don't give a damn, the next stop is Viet-Nam." Woodstock was Dirty Sly and the Family Stone gettin' HIGH-YUH! along with a half a million people. Woodstock was cockeyed Joe Cocker, bent up like a weird palsied street person but singing like Ray Charles. Woodstock was rain and mud, GI's in disguise, and cops putting their guns up and cooking hot dogs for hungry hippies. Woodstock was white ladies of the lake emboldened by the roadblocks set up between the golden city of freedom and their sororities, pulling back their river-rat hair with the lake dripping from their pretty elbows, not really unaware of the cameras grinding away on the shore, focused on their lovely breasts. Woodstock was Wavy Gravy and his Hog Farm, "How about breakfast for four hundred thousand people?" and his words to the wise, "DON'T TAKE THE BROWN ACID, YA DIG?" Wood stock was Abbie Hoffman shouting in my ear over Creedence Clear water Revival to take this jackknife, which I wouldn't because he was poking fun at my nonviolence, or so I thought ...

Woodstock? Hell, I was already pushing my luck. I'd been on the music scene for ten years and still didn't take dope or use a backup band.

But Woodstock was also me, Joan Baez, the square, six months pregnant, the wife of a draft resister, endlessly proselytizing about the war. I had my place there. I was of the sixties, and I was already a survivor.

We flew in over upstate New York. I pushed Mom in the helicopter after Janis Joplin, and we chopped our way above the patchwork farmlands and the hordes of roving backpackers. Janis clutched her ever present bottle of booze and everyone leaned out over the door, the wind blowing us into wild people, the blue and black clouds ahead of us and all around. Was it just the bizarre weather, or did we all sense history in the making?

They put me in the bridal suite of the Holiday Inn. People were crashed all over the floor in the lobby and I got the bridal suite. I must have given it away because I was in another room the next morning when I heard a great thundering racket and saw a helicopter landing in the parking lot just outside my window. I stuffed some toast in my mouth and flapped my arms at the pilot, who was grinning into my bedroom. He nodded that he'd wait. I bundled off with some press and I cannot remember who else. The whole event had me so wired up I didn't mind flying around cumulonimbus thunderbusters in a tiny helicopter. Ours was the last flight into the golden city that day. And my mom didn't make it till the next day because of the mud. Scoop, the lunatic roadie, was driving and kept getting stuck deeper and deeper, and telling Mom that everything would be OK. Finally he just stopped and smoked a joint, and everything was OK, at least for him.

Woodstock was Manny trying to get my mother to smoke a joint, She wouldn't. She was too scared, she said.

Sometimes famous people make fun of the glamour that surrounds us. And sometimes being famous is more trouble than it's worth. But there are times when it is marvelous! Woodstock was one of those times. I had the run of the entire fairgrounds, backstage included, special access to everything, no want for food and drink, and plentiful offers of a place to rest.

When one of the big thunderstorms hit (just after the crowd had chanted "NO RAIN, NO RAIN!"), I was instantly ushered into a  van, It belonged to Joe Cocker. I (the square) hung out with his band (the junkies) and chatted and drank beer and felt very in-crowd, even if they didn't know me well enough to laugh at my jokes. At one point a stagehand stuck his head into the van.

"You all right, Joan?"

"Yeah, I'm fine!"

"You're sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure . . ."

"We can't get you anything?"

"No, really. I got everything, thank you."

It turned out there was a rumor out that I'd gone into labor.

Yes, indeed, Woodstock was two babies getting born and three people dying. Woodstock was a city. Yes, it was three extraordinary days of rain and music. No, it was not a revolution. It was a technicolor, mud-splattered reflection of the 1960s.

I sang in the middle of the night. I just stood up there in front of the residents of the golden city who were sleeping in the mud and each other's arms, and I gave them what I could at the time. And they accepted my songs. It was a humbling moment, in spite of everything. I'd never sung to a city before.

You know what Live Aid did? It proved what I've been telling the press at every Woodstock anniversary for the last ten years. There can never be another Woodstock. Woodstock, in all its mud and glory, belonged to the sixties, that outrageous, longed for, romanticized, lusted after, tragic, insane, bearded and bejeweled epoch. It is over and will never return. I do not miss it. But sometimes I resent the eighties.

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