The Great Speckled Bird May 30, 1970 vol 3 #18 pg 4

Woodstock

(the movie)

Woodstock is an amazing piece of technology, one of the most important films ever made. We have long been accustomed to experiencing films as primarily visual, with sound accompaniment. Woodstock escalates the film experience to a tactile level—the "visual" and the "aural" are merely two modes of an integrated experience of what the audience "feels." The quality of the camerawork and the editing, the way in which the hours and hours of footage have been put together, are among the finest in the history of film. But somehow what you "see" in Woodstock is only a small part of what you experience, much the same as when you dig a Rock concert—there's the dope, the lightshow, the people, the setting, the weather, etc.

The professional film-makers who produced and executed this documentary knew exactly what element was needed to change the sense ratio of the ordinary film experience—volume. The sound used in Woodstock is louder and of a higher quality than films have known before. Hollywood epics just throw these tools away. Just as Rock & Roll was at the center of the original Woodstock experience, you might even say that the "sound" of the film Woodstock is dominant, and the visuals of the film more of an accompaniment to those sounds than the other way around. In other words, Woodstock succeeds in embodying an accurate sensual perspective of Western youth-the first film, with the possible exception of 2001, ever to do so. Easy Rider, Blow-Up, Bonnie & Clyde, Z, and Zabriskie Point, though extraordinarily popular with young people, all use more or less conventional frameworks for their unconventionalities; at most they signified new directions rather than completed destinations. 2007 experimented with sound and it attempted to go beyond Sight and Sound to include an exercise in the colors, designs and shapes of Touch. Woodstock goes further.

Woodstock is a brilliant success as far as Form is concerned; its Content falls far short of what these new technical proficiencies are capable of—not so much in what was there in the film but in what was not there. Woodstock is in many ways an extremely subversive film, not in what it "contains," but rather in what is "is." The potential for mass experience foreshadowed in the Country Joe and the Sly and the Family Stone sequences are staggering. Implicit in Woodstock is the possibility of producing films to "accompany" recordings so that the record itself would merely be one aspect of an integrated sensual trip. Other potentials have almost no limit. The kids who see Woodstock will not be able to go back to more ordinary films and will demand new, mind-blowing forms that cross beyond the barriers separating different media. The technical potential is just overwhelming. Too bad that technical trip didn't expand the human consciousness of those who made it: they miss the whole point of the Woodstock experience.

Trying to "interpret" the mass experience at Woodstock has been no easy task. In the massive volume of words inspired by the event, there were almost as many different explanations and interpretations of exactly "what" happened as there were people present at the event. Abbie Hoffman wrote an entire book trying to crawl his way through a maze of confusion, misunderstanding and sensual overload—he got out but by the skin of his teeth. Others have been less challenged by the experience of Woodstock and have contributed less to an articulation of what it all "meant," but the producers of Woodstock (the film) have chosen the most conservative, least offensive perspective in which to view the three days of "fun and music."

Gone is the incident in which Who guitarist Peter Townshend struck Abbie Hoffman with his instrument during "Pinball Wizard" for lamenting the absence of some sort of political stance at Woodstock; gone are the police hassles and busts outside the sacred area of Yasgur's farm; gone is the two-hour Rock masterpiece given to the people there by the Jefferson Airplane at sunrise (including those "political" songs like "Volunteers of Amerika" and "We Can Be Together"); gone are the Grateful Dead, the Band, Ravi Shankar; gone are all the backstage, behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing by all the "HIP" capitalists who succeeded in making a fortune out of Woodstock. Absolutely and completely absent is any attempt to get at where all these kids came from.

How many veterans of Woodstock are or have been in jail or up before judges before and since Woodstock, and will be after they see the film made about them? Every attempt is made in the film to portray soldiers, police and representatives of the "system" as friends of the kids at Woodstock. No mention of what was taking place all around the farm, the searches, the longhair narks, the searchlights, the roadblocks, etc. Not that the groovy experiences of Woodstock did, not outweigh the bummers—it's just that the people who made this film seem to have been trying to make a piece of non-struggle propaganda while claiming to have been merely "recording" or "reporting" an event. Nothing could be further from the truth: what went into this film was as carefully chosen as is possible in making a film. The incident in which a guy is rapping about "fascists" seeding the clouds functions in a very real, harmful way to discredit the whole perspective of politics. No accident that. Consider that Abbie Hoffman, who succeeded in articulating the experience of Woodstock within the context of the Chicago Conspiracy trial, is nowhere present in the film while such people as Bill Graham are featured. Consider that the only overtly "political" elements retained from the original are Joan Baez, who was safe and married and pregnant and nonviolent and singing "David's" songs, and Country Joe and the Fish, whose FUCK cheer is a gas but whose Vietnam protest song seems harmlessly obsolete as far as where our heads are at NOW (and where Amerikan troops and war technology are now).

Woodstock will consolidate and crystallize a certain limited number of thoughts and feelings shared by young people all over the country and bring isolated areas and smaller towns into a national mass youth experience with values more common to New York, San Francisco and larger urban youth scenes; but the film does not go beyond this achievement. That's why kids who have gone beyond the Content of the film are picketing against its rip-off aspects in some parts of the country, and kids who live in places where you can't say Fuck (Worcester Counties all over Amerika), can't wear long hair, and can't turn on even on the smallest scale are demonstrating against city power structures which refuse to let it be shown. It is ironic that a film which is a celebration of the power of the people over an event which was intended to be a larger, but no more unusual than any other planned, profit-oriented "pop festival" is passively attended by masses of kids who are expected to pay $3.50 to $6 in order to see how groovy the Woodstock scene was when everybody got in free. FREE! If ever a film should be distributed for free admission, it is Woodstock. The film also gives the lie to all that bullshit about the promoters "losing everything they had." If you think about the sound equipment used in this film, the cameras, the crews, the incredible, unbelievable amount of control over the finished product, what you know is that, for the Woodstock promoters, the experience there had much more to do with the film Woodstock than it did with the "music festival" at White Lake. Which is why the disaster at Altamont happened in the first place. In other words, the New York experience of fun and music is inextricably bound up with the California experience of bad vibes and murder, and any film that attempts to dig one without acknowledging the other is misrepresenting the truth.

When you leave the Rhodes Theatre and the manager hands you the Woodstock leaflet and a button reading Peace & Love, tell him to accompany you over to 11th Street some night when the pigs are coming down on Woodstock people, tell him to visit Vine City, tell him to ponder what happened to Meredith Hunter, a Black man, at Altamont, tell him to come with us to attend Aldermanic meetings where "loitering" ordinances are passed to keep us and Black people off the streets, tell him to remember the fate of the American Indian nation that once graced the land now labeled the "United States" and relate that genocide to what is happening to the Black Panther Party and to us, members of the Woodstock Nation all across the land yesterday, today and tomorrow. After he's done this, ask him why you can't accompany him to the box office while he's counting the receipts, and get in on some of that $3.50 a head and turn it back over to oppressed residents of Woodstock Nation. Call Warner Brothers and ask them why Fred Hampton is dead and Bobby Seale headed for the electric chair. Ask them why John Sinclair is in jail for 10 years for giving a joint to a longhair nark. Ask them why there are narks in the lobby of the theatre. Ask them why there are new NO SMOKING signs at the entrances to the auditorium, why the ushers cruise up and down the aisles when the film showing is an open invitation to smoke pot and drop acid. Going to Woodstock without being stoned and lighting up at several places in the film makes no more sense than going to White Lake without a stash; but if you believe that the same pigs who are making a shitload of money off of people smoking pot and dropping acid in Woodstock won't haul your ass off for doing it in the Rhodes, be warned now. Our only solution to this problem is to get so much dope, and so many dope-smokers, into the theatre that they couldn't stop us even if they wanted to. Hope your high is as good as ours was.

Woodstock is just a movie, but Woodstock belongs to the people.

—miller francis, jr.

NOTE: You may be interested in a little info about those free comps to Woodstock. Warner Brothers gave the Bird 200 passes to a prescreening of the film at the Rhodes Theater, mostly to the afternoon show. They also gave WPLO-FM 500 passes to the night show. Neither knew about the other's tickets. The Bird figured these passes would be a good way to raise some much-needed cash for the Atlanta community, especially in view of the pig action on 11th Street, so we presented an idea to the Midtown Alliance meeting in Piedmont Park They dug it, everybody else dug it, so on Tuesday the Bird and the Community Center began asking $1.50 donations to the bail fund in return for the Woodstock passes.

Raising the money wasn't all that easy with 500 free tickets floating around, but if the Bird had known about WPLO's passes and vice versa, we might have been able to work something out together which would have raised a lot more money. Who knows what WPLO's reaction to the plan would have been?

The point is that we did raise some money for the bail fund, and Warner Brothers got mad as hell. They called the Bird and asked why we hadn't asked them about "selling" the tickets, which they considered a crime of the highest degree. Our reply took about 30 minutes, but the gist of it was—it's none of Warner Brothers' business. A more relevant question is why didn't Warner Brothers ask us, and people living in Woodstock communities all over Amerika, what we thought about $3.50 to $6 prices for tickets, none of which goes back to the people who made Woodstock happen in the first place. We're sure that if Warner Brothers had asked this and similar questions of the kids who know the reality of living in Woodstock Nation, they would have gotten some damn good answers.

-miller francis jr.

(The following dialogue with Bob Maurice, producer of the Woodstock film, is an edited version of a long interview taped last week at the Marriott.)

MAURICE: What we tried to do was to pass on the experience of Woodstock, really try to create an environment in the theater which would make people forget that they were in a theater and [which would] really give them as much as possible the same experience as actually having been at Woodstock. And that's, of course, quite cunning because that's much more effective than propaganda. We're passing something on. It really is dissemination in the exact meaning of that word. I wouldn't call it propaganda because we've left out our point of view. We haven't interpreted Woodstock.

There was organization in the filming, there was structure. But I think that there was nothing organized about Woodstock. It really was an historical accident, not a proselytizing event. It wasn't a peace march, and it wasn't a demonstration, and it wasn't in any sense an "example." It wasn't consciously done. There was no prior intent or motivation on the part of anyone who went up to Woodstock to create Woodstock. I think Woodstock is the one of the few instances in which all of the rhetoric of the past 10 years or so has been fulfilled. So that for once instead of talking about what was desired or demonstrating in favor of a position, we simply just went ahead and did it. Because precisely what was going on there was that everyone had already accomplished everything that the rhetoric was about. Woodstock in a sense is "after the Revolution"-that's what it will be like, after everything has changed. You know, it's senseless to indulge in more rhetoric so all that you can do about something like that is just pass it on. Do I make myself clear?

BIRD: I think so. I just have a hard time reconciling that with my experience at Woodstock. It is true that feeling you are talking about, but I couldn't help but think-perhaps you felt it too-that the helicopters circling over that crowd—the same type of helicopters that three months earlier had been clumping tear gas on Berkeley, or dropping marines in Vietnam. You are trying to say that people didn't feel this. The fact that people were getting busted right outside by the New York State Police, people were being stopped with searchlights and shotguns-it happened to us as we were leaving.

MAURICE: Every review that I've read objected to our point of view and criticized us for adopting a view which they see and object to. The interesting thing is that none of the reviewers agree on what our point of view is. What's really going on is that each reviewer is merely seeing his own tendencies in the film and then accusing us of it. Everyone sees a point of view in the film. Well, there really isn't. If a point of view film had been made of Woodstock, it would have been incredible. It would have had martialed so much material towards one end that you would have a very directional film. And now you don't. One critic said the film wasn't "organized," and what he means by that is that it doesn't make a single point, it doesn't begin with a point and then illustrate or support it. Well, reality isn't like that. Woodstock wasn't like that.

I guess the core of Woodstock was three or four days. We shot those three days just about in their entirety, and we were up there about a month beforehand shooting all the preparations and the townspeople and we stayed afterward and shot the cleaning up. Well, that 120 hours we made a three-hour film. So a lot of stuff was left out. Well, you can't accuse me of having left out 117 hours of film on purpose.

And the mud has not been left out by any means. The Army thing is not left out, but you don't have to devote a half-hour to make a point. You can make a point in a 10-minute shot. If the person who is watching is intelligent, he will see it. There's a shot in that film of an Army helicopter landing. You know, a Army helicopter lands with machine guns sticking out the front. You know the army was there. I know the police were there because I had to deal with them also. What you don't know is that the F.B.I, was there; I had entanglements with them. It's true that it was potentially a massive bust, and a very unpleasant thing, and the latent paranoia was quite strong. It did work out. Holy Christ! Think of all of the dope that was at Woodstock and how few arrests there were— and they were all outside the place. It's true that there is nothing in the film that shows police arresting people, and I think that the reason for that is that none of the 18 cameramen/ directors witnessed any such event. I think the only time that happened was when people were leaving and it was all over. But what we saw was cops who were turning on. New York City cops who were wearing those red Woodstock shirts, and I know the ones I saw were in the backstage -area, and you know they're potentially friendly anyway because New Yorkers are so emotional and hysterical. By Friday they were joking and by Saturday the very, very pleasant atmosphere had gotten to them and they were turning on and enjoying it very much.

BIRD: I think you 're trying not to see, but I think you do see a really close connection between Berkeley, the garbage strike in Atlanta, the 21 Panthers in jail in New York, the fact that this film which is a film about 500,000 people and 20 entertainers, and what 40 people saw in their experience is now being sold to these same people for $3.50 a ticket. And at the same time many of these people who contributed so much to the film in some part through dope they used are in jail or need bail money. Do you see any relation between the film and the needs of the people in it? The fact that they need bail money? People in Atlanta need bail money. Are any places in the country doing benefits with Woodstock?

MAURICE: No.

BIRD: Is anything that is being taken out of the experience at Woodstock being returned to the people, other than the reliving of that experience?

MAURICE: Well, I don't own the film. Warner Bros. does. Warner is engaged in putting film into theaters so that it can make money, and the theater owners show the film so that it can make money, and that is exactly the same situation that applies to the records of the artists who played at the festival. They make records to make money, etc.

BIRD: It seems a more direct utilization of the people at Woodstock than of the film itself.

MAURICE: Exactly. It seems that way, but it’s not. I really disagree with your phrasing that something's "taken out" of Woodstock. Nothing was taken out of Woodstock. Nothing was physically taken. No one suffered a loss. No one experienced an inner emptiness or a physical alienation as a result of the making of our film. If anything, what we've done is the reverse. It's a giving into—so you have to pay for it, right? You have to pay to get into the theater to see the film, but you've got to contrast that with getting in to see it for nothing—that's impossible. $700,000 is a lot of money. I don't have it, you know. I've got about $10,000. Warner Brothers is not a benevolent organization; it's a business. It's not interested in Rock festivals per se. It's not interested in you or in me, or in anything —it's a business, it's got stockholders. And I was quite willing to make a deal with Warner Bros. because I wanted to make a film, and because I felt that it was important, it was important to me personally, and I also felt that if the film existed, and people saw it, even if they had to pay that that was better than its not existing and no one seeing it. Well, Warners put up the $700,000 because they're—as you know, all of the studios are going broke, they don't really have much money to play with either so they put the money up because they hoped to make more money. That applies to everyone.

Now about the other thing, the people who are in jail for dope busts, I agree. It's one of the things that I feel very, very strongly about. I think it would be a very good thing if part of the money of this film were used to get some of those people out of some of those 30- year sentences. But there isn't anything I can do about that. I mean, I've already done a lot in making the film. But my talents and energies, like everyone else's, are limited. I can't go on from that to, you know, a whole other kind of activity. I thought it was very important to make the film. It's an honest film.

BIRD: I think it's fairly obvious by now, considering the tremendous success of Easy Rider, that what you have turned over to Warners is one of the very few types of films that is going to make money now.

MAURICE: That's bullshit.

BIRD: What happens after Woodstock, after Easy Rider? What is the next film going to be about?

MAURICE: But I'm a film-maker-I don't give two hoots about Warners. If Warners goes out of business, that's their problem.

WARNER BROTHERS: He doesn't work for Warner Brothers.

MAURICE: The points are these: Warner Brothers did not make the film. They didn't have anything to do with it. I made it, with my company. But Warners is in the business-of distributing films—they're a distribution company. So, they pay for the cost of the making of this film and in exchange they can distribute the film. That's fine with me. Because all I want is to be able to make a big movie about something I'm interested in, exactly the way I wanna make it. Which I got. Now what happens at Warner Brothers from here on in is of no interest to me. And I don't work for Warner Brothers.

I'm very much of an outlaw anyway. I had to do incredible things to finish that film in, you know, my way. I must tell you that Warners did not want me to make the film which you will now see, they wanted something quite different. I wanted to make the film I wanted to make, and I did just horrible, horrible things to them, to beat them down, and intimidate them, and just generally scare the shit out of them. Because, I wanted to win.. .And I threatened to destroy the film, you know, unless they completely stayed out of it. fl I’m blacklisted at this point. But it doesn't mean anything at this point to me, because all of our enjoyment comes from doing things outside the system which is also where our power comes from.. .The fact is that nobody else could have made that film but us.

I mean literally—nobody else could have done it. It was just too insane, and required a kind of adaptiveness and flexibility and tirelessness. Wadleigh, the guy who directed it, is incredible.

BIRD: Before W., China would have been the place where you would hear of 500,000 people in one place. It's shocking for Americans to think of that many people in one place, especially for that long. And when you make a film about that, you almost have to relate to what those people do after that film. It's entirely different from making a film about just a few people. It doesn't let you go when you get involved with that many people.

MAURICE: I think the thing that's bothering you is this thing of "co-opting," which happens all the time

BIRD: I don't think you can co-opt what happened at Woodstock.

MAURICE: You'd have to be pretty slick to do it. Because one of the things that Woodstock was, by definition, was a rejection of exactly that, a rejection of ultimate values. Again, it was not a proselytizing situation. People were not saying. This IS the thing to do; this IS the way to live at all. What they were saying was just for three days we're not going to tell anyone else what to do and we don't want anybody to tell us what to do. We simply want to enjoy ourselves. You can't co-opt. Because it's not there. It's like trying to hold sand between your fingers. If it had been a radicalizing, a proselytizing event, if it had had intellectual content, one could co-opt that position and say, "I approve of this position." Like Johnson did. And they could say well, great, I approve of this, too. But there was no position taken at Woodstock.

BIRD: In San Francisco, demonstrations are being held against this film...

MAURICE: And in Los Angeles.

BIRD: What these people seem to feel is that well, you said that nothing was taken out of Woodstock. Yet whatever it was that was done with the experience of Woodstock is being sold at a very high price. Do you lay all of the value of the film to the people who made it? Or do you see the people who made it as rather disseminators? Or go-betweens? The techniques that you use, the way that the people who made this film have been able to bring out what happened at Woodstock are extremely powerful techniques. Warner Brothers doesn't understand them. You talked before about the use of power and how you fucked Warner Brothers. Certainly you can look at this film-as-a tremendous type of power. The economic returns from it are still completely in the hands of Warner Brothers.

MAURICE: I happen to be one of those who believes that all reality is tainted, and that it is impossible to do anything which is not, in some way, either in the act or in its implications, tainted. It's impossible to design, or do, something which is entirely good. Because I really feel that OUR definitions of good and evil are exactly that. They are imposed, we really want them to be imposed on a reality that defies that, which doesn't by nature really very clearly fall into good and evil. And the consequence of that, at least for me as a human being, is that I am incapable of doing anything which I am sure is clearly good and only good and not in any way evil. I'm sure that everything that I do is potentially in its implications in its eventualities in . some way is going to not be to someone else's advantage or negative in some other way, which I don't even know about. The only way in which you can avoid doing evil is by doing nothing. By absolutely avoiding action.

I'm convinced that contemporary radical politics is purely Christian. It's one of the manifestations of Western Christianity. And it's that dichotomy of good versus evil, essentially a Christian one, and it's idealistic, and it's the belief that you really can separate out a principle of evil and a principle of good and call one God and the other the Devil and eliminate one and have a purely good structure of reality. Well, I don't think that's possible. And it's exactly that that is the basis of Communism. You know. Communism defines a specific social order as the good, and the other thing as the evil, and it very naively believes that you can separate them out physically. But you cannot cut it with a knife. People are too complicated for that. What we're doing in this conversation you may feel is very very good. It may be very bad for me! You know, in some way that you're not aware of. Vice versa. I gave that up a long time ago. I'm incapable of doing something which is not open to reproach, which isn't screwed up in some way. You're looking for, you're asking too much of me. You really are. If I had done all the things which are ancillary, which surround the making of the film itself, I wouldn't have had any time left to make the film.

WARNER BROTHERS: I hate to interrupt you...

BIRD: I agree with you that there is a problem with the radical movement in the U.S., but we should narrow that down and say the white radical movement. But I think the problem is the opposite of what you are talking about. To distinguish between evil and good is a luxury. To be able to think about an absolute good and an absolute evil—And the place you have to look for more real politics and less rhetorical polemics is TV Black people. You 're just indulging yourself in all this talk about good and evil.

MAURICE: But what's wrong with bloodless revolutions?

BIRD: I wasn't even discussing that. It's the use of power—that film is a very powerful thing, /understand quite well that Warner Brothers can distribute it quite easily and make money off of it, that's not the point. The point is that none of that money is coming back to people, not the fact that Warner Brothers is making money off it. God knows a lot of people are making money a hell of a lot worse ways than that, but that's not the point. The point is that NONE of that money is coming back.

MAURICE: I wouldn't use the phrase "coming back," because the money doesn't belong.. .the money didn't come from the places you want to send it back to. When you buy gas, the money comes from you, when you buy food, it comes from you, when longhairs, dopers and Blacks buy fountain pens and tires and all of that, it comes from them. You could just as well speak about sending that money back, too. I think there's a failure in logic that makes you want to say, Woodstock's different, it belongs to the people. That's bullshit! I reject that personally. It doesn't belong to the people—1 made it. Insofar as I made it, it belongs to me. Beyond that, I would very much like to see everybody be able to go see Woodstock for nothing, but that's only because I'd very much like everybody to be able to see all movies for free.. .But I can't really answer what you're saying, and I can't assume the guilt, either. You're trying to say that I'm...

WARNER BROTHERS: Bob, excuse me...

MAURICE: Oh well, okay.

WARNER BROTHERS: We're on a real tight schedule. I'm sorry, do you mind?