Back to Woodstock

Ann Curry • Profile

It was billed as three days of peace and music, but to many who went, Woodstock was much more. Being part of the weekend that defined a generation would change the trajectories of their lives.

Patrick Colucci: I decided at Woodstock that I wouldn't live a lie.

Greg Walter: That sense of community that I got out of Woodstock… it gave me the sense that what I was doing was correct.

A lot of things went wrong over those three days. But what makes Woodstock the most memorable concert in rock history, even 40 years later, is what went right. How on 600 acres of rolling farmland, a disparate collection of drifters and lovers, students and seekers came together to create something new.

Greg Walter: We were really a nation. We were a community. We were a tribe.

Duke Devlin: They read from the stage you know, the New York Daily News, ‘Hippies Mired in a Sea of Mud.’ "The New York Daily News man, they're talking about us."

At a time when the nation was grappling with the civil rights struggle and the war in Vietnam, Woodstock made headlines across the country. And it still resonates today. The director's cut of the documentary “Woodstock,” released this summer, is the fastest selling concert dvd in history. Why do we still care so much about Woodstock? 

The Woodstock Music and Arts Festival was organized by a group of young entrepreneurs hoping ticket sales for a mass concert could finance a recording studio they wanted to build.

They'd need plenty of help to make it happen. One person they turned to: a young mother – and “earth” mother - named Lisa Law.

In the late 1960's, Lisa and her husband Tom had been traveling the West with a mobile extended family known as the Hog Farm Commune, often stopping at mass outdoor concerts like the Human Be-In San Francisco and the Monterey Pop Festival.

Lisa Law: Now my husband and I had built a teepee in 1967. And we would set it up at various festivals. And we took care of anybody that was on drugs that was having a problem. So, it was–became, "The Trip Tent," and people would come in there and sit around the fire and it was like a womb.

But Lisa had more traditional maternal instincts too.

Video   Back to Woodstock: Lisa and Pilar Lisa tells her daughter Pilar about her fondest memories from the festival as they walk around the site. Dateline NBC

Lisa Law: We came to Santa Fe to have our first baby, Pilar.

The rest of her life was anything but traditional. The Laws shared a vegetable garden, chores, even child care responsibilities with a group of families. Woodstock organizers asked Lisa, Tom and the Hog Farm to lend their expertise preparing food for large groups, and caring for people on drug trips.

Lisa Law: We were ready for anything, always.  So we just took it on. That was our job.

So Lisa came across the country to Woodstock, with a small movie camera to document it all. She was seven months pregnant, carting around her toddler daughter, and raring to go.

Lisa Law: Having a baby and being pregnant does not slow me down. It did not slow me down. My children are an extension of me. And so I have no problem doing things with them attached to me.

Lisa, her family and the crew from the Hog Farm arrived at the site and got down to business.

Lisa approached the Woodstock organizers with a demand.

Lisa Law: I need $3,000 to go into town to buy the food. So, he gave me $3,000 and I commandeered a truck and I bought 1,500 pounds of bulgur wheat, 1,500 pounds of rolled oats, 200 boxes of 25 pounds of currants, wheat germ, I bought 160,000 paper plates, a Jade Buddha to bless our kitchen…

Video   Back to Woodstock: Greg Greg Walter, who helped build art structures at Woodstock site, walks the grounds for the first time in forty years. Dateline NBC

A few hundred yards from the Hog Farm compound, a teenager named Greg Walter was helping build the Woodstock arts and crafts pavilion.

Greg Walter: It was a job that anyone would want. You could get 10,000 applicants to work at this music festival. It's amazing.

Before Woodstock, Greg hadn't considered himself part of the counterculture-– far from it.

Greg grew up in a conventional suburban family in Cornwall, New York. He hadn't rebelled against his parents or much of anything. But in 1969, that started to change.

Greg Walter: When you turned 18 at the time, you were supposed to register for the draft. The principal of the high school called me in and already had the papers all prepared for me. I ended up getting my draft card.

He'd seen the images from Vietnam on the nightly news, of course. Now he started paying closer attention. Greg decided he opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam. With a church youth group, he went to his first anti-war demonstrations.

Greg Walter: We weren't real radicals or anything. We just were trying to make our voices heard.

As he got more involved with the protest movement, Greg fell in love with the music that was transfixing American youth.

Greg Walter: The music was one thing that our generation really felt was theirs. It wasn't coming from someone else. We were creating it, we controlled it.

What drew Greg Walter to Woodstock was the musical acts that were signed on, artists like Janis Joplin, Richie Havens, and the band called ’The Band.’

Levon Helm: In 1969, we had just signed a recording agreement with Capitol Records.

Levon Helm, drummer and singer in The Band was a natural fit for the festival. He and his bandmates were already living in the Catskill Mountains north of New York City, in the little town of Woodstock, New York.

Levon Helm:  A lotta the people here play music anyway. So, you know, you go into the gas station, the guy that's helpin' you fill your car up, he may be the best banjo picker around. You know, so people around here have always celebrated music.

The band's first album, Music from Big Pink, was named after their house in Woodstock. Their song “The Weight,” was featured in the 1969 movie “Easy Rider.” The song, the movie and The Band found a strong cult following. It was in the midst of that first brush with stardom that The Band accepted the invitation to play the festival being planned in their own neighborhood. They didn’t know the details about Woodstock, but they knew it was going to be big.

Levon Helm: Well, there hadn't been anything like that except maybe a couple things out in California they had had a couple big music events. Everybody kinda realized that for the east coast, it was a first.

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