Taking in the Woodstock Museum

By Richard Lacayo

I paid a visit a few weeks ago to Bethel, a very small town in upstate New York where I had been once before. As soon as I got there, it started raining. I wasn't surprised. The last time I was there it also rained quite a bit. That was in August 1969, when I was one of the 400,000 or so people who converged on the place to attend something called the Woodstock festival. I had headed there that time by instinct, like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, because I was 17 years old and anything involving guitars or hippies demanded my immediate attention. The opposition of my parents, the discouraging weather forecast and traffic so heavy it closed the New York State Thruway meant nothing compared with my need to get in on whatever this thing was going to be.

What it turned out to be, of course, was something none of us foresaw: not just a concert but a spontaneous utopian community. Now I was back, 39 years later--cue the wistful music--to visit the Museum at Bethel Woods, which is perched on the edge of the festival site and dedicated to telling the story of Woodstock and of the 1960s generally. A museum about Woodstock was probably inevitable. Those three days of peace, love and mud have become the baby boomers' version of the Trojan War, their collective foundation myth. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing was commemorated with interactive displays, a replica hippie bus and a gift shop.

The museum, which opens June 2, has been a consuming project for Alan Gerry. Long ago, he was a high school dropout who ran a business selling and repairing televisions in nearby Liberty, N.Y. But eventually he founded Cablevision, which he sold in 1996 for $2.7 billion to Time Warner. At 78, he's a venture capitalist who wears an American-flag pin on his lapel--which makes him an unlikely guy to devote himself to the legacy of a place that had a freak-out tent. But he does have a daughter who attended Woodstock (against his wishes). And another who missed out but persuaded him much later to buy the land where it all happened.

So in 1996, the year the serious money rolled in, Gerry purchased a chunk of Max Yasgur's farm, 37.5 fabled acres (15.2 hectares), with that lovely sloping field that I can say with authority is one of the most uncomfortable places in North America if you happen to be stretched out in a damp sleeping bag. Eventually he bought nearly 2,000 adjacent acres (about 800 hectares), enough to start thinking about putting in a golf course and even a theme park--bad ideas that he abandoned. Instead, two years ago he opened the Pavilion Stage there, an outdoor concert venue whose lineup this summer includes Cyndi Lauper, Steely Dan and Tony Bennett. The museum, which hopes to attract 90,000 visitors in its first year, is the second major element in what's now called the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.

But building on hallowed ground is a tricky matter. After Gerry entered the picture, a preservation group sprang up to resist any construction in the bowl that held the stage and most of the crowd. In the end, the main structures were located at or just beyond the upper rim of that land, most of which remains open. The site is compromised, but nothing like the way it would have been if tract-housing developers had gotten hold of it.

And the museum itself? It's entertaining and briskly informative, filled with flat-screen TVs showing period footage and glass cases that hold things like old Jefferson Airplane album covers. I enjoyed it well enough. But I was never able to shake the feeling that the place that really preserves the spirit of Woodstock is that big open field outside. Woodstock was the last great event of the 19th century, a delayed outburst of Romantic-era communalism and nature worship. It was built on sentiments that aren't conveyed very well by institutional means. So if you visit the museum, which I recommend, here's what I would do: play with the interactive screens, admire the replica hippie bus, watch the film clips of Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez and the Who. Then go outside, head over to the slope and lie facedown in the grass--preferably in the rain.