Haze, mud and rock 'n' roll: Sonoma County residents remember Woodstock

One hundred minutes into the original Woodstock film, you see a blonde girl twirling a daisy who appears mesmerized by the delicate petals.

With the 50th anniversary of Woodstock this weekend, Gail Hayssen of Sebastopol reflects on being that 14-year-old blonde girl, although she can’t recall all the details captured on film.

It’s still a bit hazy - and that goes for much of the three-day festival at Max Yasgur’s farm that drew more than 400,000 flower children to partake in “3 Days of Peace & Music.” While that legendary August weekend in 1969 ended up swamped by rain and mud and unexpected numbers of attendees for a campout that was a logistical nightmare, Woodstock lives on as a cornerstone of rock ’n’ roll history, a marker for a generation and a largely successful counterculture experiment.

Hayssen, now 64, has a laugh that defines her; it’s a cackle, like the cry of a goose. When she lets it run wild, you get a sense of the free spirit she was five decades ago, the one who was spellbound while listening to Joe Cocker sing “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

At 14, Hayssen was one of the youngest concertgoers and it was only possible because she comes from what she coins “an unconventional family.”

Hayssen said, “I had no restrictions. My grandparents were Orthodox Jews and my dad was the rebellious first son. He raised us to be atheist vegans. Also, I was always considered older than my age, 14 going on 25.”

When Hayssen learned about Woodstock, she was intent on going with the 19-year old guys in her neighborhood because rock ’n’ roll was more than a lifestyle for them. It was their culture, and they had a set of customs around it - rituals.

“When an album came out we’d go to Ricky’s basement and get high and listen to the album from one end to the other,” she said.

Somehow Hayssen was elected to buy the concert tickets and so she collected $18 from each of the five guys who treated her like she was their kid sister.

The kid sister earned her ticket through babysitting and, at 75 cents an hour, Hayssen said it required a lot of babysitting.

A Girl Scout at 12, Hayssen had some good ideas for the campout aspect of the concert, although she’s still a little foggy on whether she was the impetus. At any rate, the gang set off to do a “trial run” a month before the concert, in a yellow Chevy Impala, driving a couple of hours from their hometown of Flushing to check out the concert site - a 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York.

“The guys were tripping on acid, but I wasn’t,” Hayssen said.

They collected enough intel to prepare, and when they drove to the concert a month later they had a trunk filled with blankets and scads of food in a cooler - tuna and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, water, drinks, chips and cookies.

When they hit traffic, she recalled, “Ricky drove the car in reverse, up an on-ramp, and cut across the freeway.”

Flattened fences

Once they arrived, it was clear from the flattened fences that no one would be collecting their tickets. The concert Hayssen had painstakingly worked for was now free.

“For a minute, you felt like ‘What?’ but then you just let go and went into the experience of the event,” Hayssen said. “Instead of the rolling hills of green pastures we saw a month before, we saw a sea of people.”

The first thing the guys did was find a long log and lug it over to the fourth row, center stage. They were a foot above the mud, while most concert-goers had seats of soggy earth.

“The stench of the mud is something you’ll never forget,” Hayssen said. “There were moments when the sky opened with downpours. I was worried about electrical shocks.”

As for sleep, this group also had a plan. Hayssen slept in the back of the Impala with a pink blanket. Meanwhile the guys slept outside the car, nearby in sleeping bags.

“We had everything we needed,” Hayssen said. “We never had any issue with being hungry, and we shared what we had with other people.”

What Hayssen remembers most about the music is that it defined the generation.

“I don’t feel that the music of today has the same substance as the music of that generation,” Hayssen said. “There was so much going on with the war in Vietnam, the assassinations and the mind-expanding drugs. The voice of a young generation was in the music. I’m not saying there isn’t some good music today. But it really was a time and an era.”

Hayssen slept through Janis Joplin, which she deeply regrets, but said a high point for her was listening to Country Joe McDonald singing the “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag.”

Something amazing

Petaluma resident Stanley Gumpel, who responded to an online request for Woodstock stories, said the music is what made his memories. He arrived at the venue just as Joan Baez was performing. He remembers that Richie Havens’ performance was followed by “an unknown group” - at least by people on the East Coast - known as Santana. “There was a collective jaw drop of 100,000 people,” he said. “The rest is history.”

Longtime Sebastopol resident, George Palma, attended Woodstock when he was 16 and living in New York. “I piled in a car with a few friends to go check out this festival we’d been hearing about,” he recalled. With no idea of what to expect, his group didn’t really prepare for a camping trip, but through the kindness of strangers and their own desire to persevere, they still had a great time.

“I could tell immediately on arrival that we were about to experience something amazing,” Palma said. “Although there were times I was cold and wet, and I came with nothing, everyone shared what little they had and helped each other out.”

Fills in gaps

Hayssen said the new book on the market - “Woodstock, 50 Years of Peace and Music” - fills in a lot of gaps in her own memories with facts like these:

Organizers expected 150,000 but were surprised when nearly half a million die-hard music lovers made the pilgrimage.

Woodstock became a free festival when organizers, short on time, opted to finish the stage rather than the fences. They didn’t want to risk a riot.

There were MASH-type tents to take care of people who were in need of medical care.

One of the biggest problems was people cutting their feet because so many were barefoot. But there were also epileptic seizures and cases of asthma tended in the tents.

Despite the medical issues and Mother Nature’s antics, there was a notable calm during the festival.

In the book, David Clayton-Thomas, singer for Blood Sweat & Tears, said, “You know, the strange thing is there were half a million people there for three days in the mud and rain and the weather didn’t cooperate. There were not enough port-a-potties and certainly not enough food and drink, but there was not one incidence of violence in that three days, and if you could show me another town, a small city of 500,000 people that can go three days with no violence, I’d be surprised.”

Spiritual awakening

Hayssen said, for her, Woodstock was a rebellion, a spiritual awakening, a commune and a peace movement all set to the beat of rock ‘n’ roll.

She said this quote in the book still holds true today:

“Right in front to the left of me, a guy came up and painted “WE ARE ONE.” It was painted across the fence right to the left of the stage. Right in front of the Woodstock stage, and I thought that those three words captured what that event was, and I’ve never felt that kind of experience ever again.”

Palma agreed, “It truly was all about music, peace, love and understanding.”

You can reach Staff Writer Peg Melnik at peg.melnik@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5310.