REVIEWS

Talk about an acid flashback!

The release of Woodstock; Back To The Garden - 50th Anniversary Experience melts away the five decades since that original cosmic accident in upstate New York wherein a half a million people—with not enough food, water or bathrooms, in horrible weather, and no police—proved their peace and love credentials by grooving, staying high, happy and helping each other cope as 32 acts stretched out the days and nights into a round-the-clock pinwheel of psychedelic proportions.

The 10 CDs within this box set ($129.98) have a surprisingly good sound and contain dialogue from the stage not heard in the movie or any previous soundtrack. Microphones were left on throughout the festival, thus we get fascinating between-song snippets of (stage manager) John Morris and (MC) Chip Monck reading announcements (“Please bring Jerry’s nitroglycerin pills to the Indian Pavilion”), constantly beseeching fans to climb back down the towers on either side of the stage, warning of the impending monsoon and the various colors of LSD that were being passed around. You can hear Abbie Hoffman, first heralded from the stage by Monck for helping The Hog Farm in the medical tent deal with overly-tripping patrons, shout out his politics during The Who’s set before before being whacked in the head by a pissed-off Pete Townshend.

There are some supremely human moments. Heroin addict Tim Hardin falls completely apart during “Reason To Believe.” Joan Baez does “Drug Store Truck Driving Man” as a duet with Jeffrey Shurtleff who gets political (Baez’s husband was in jail at the time for resisting the draft). Arlo Guthrie’s hipster cool is still hilarious. Mountain and Santana are magnificent while Quill and Sweetwater are underwhelming. And The Incredible String Band (still) flat-out sucks. As do Grateful Dead, whose interminably long noodling that amounts to pure nothingness puts everyone to sleep.

Got a few extra bucks? There’s also a mammoth 38-disc box of all 432 performances including nearly 20 hours of 267 never-before-heard audio tracks plus a hard-cover book by fest organizer Michael Lang, a Blu-ray