On August 15, 1969 at five-o’clock p.m., on a 600-acre hog farm in the small town of Bethel, NY, Richie Havens took the stage as the opening act at the legendary Woodstock Festival.  Destined to become the largest gathering of people in one place at one time, Woodstock stood for three days of peace, love, and music amidst the horrors of the Vietnam War.  Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children made their way to the Catskills in New York to take part in the festival and hear their favorite music groups live.  Even though tickets for the event had been pre-sold, the directors of the Woodstock declared it a free event on the same day that it started.  All over the country people watched footage and read about the festival that many believed was going to be a disaster.  But they were proved wrong.  Music was the peacekeeper at Woodstock, as the people in attendance listened to over twenty-five music groups that performed from the afternoon of August 15 through the morning of August 18.  This weekend during 1969 marks a milestone in American history, where almost 500,000 people joined together in peace for the sake of music.
     Since that mesmerizing time during the August of 1969, numerous books have been written about the Woodstock Musical Festival.  The books allow people to dig deeper and go behind the scenes to find out what made Woodstock such a success.  On the other hand, one can always search the newspaper archives and retrieve an account of Woodstock from a reporter’s view at the same time the festival occurred.  The only difference between a book written at a later date and a newspaper article written during the summer of 1969 is the formality.  Take for example, The Washington Post’s coverage of Woodstock in August 1969.  The readers want to know the what, when, where, and who of the festival.  On the contrary, someone reading a book about Woodstock a decade after the festival took place wants to read more about the why’s and how’s.  By comparing a week of information from The 1969 Washington Post and the information provided by the book Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969, by Robert Stephen Spitz, the difference in the way that the two present their information on Woodstock will become clear. 

     In the Friday, August 15, 1969 edition of The Washington Post, the headline of the Style section reads, “Thousands Rolling in for Woodstock Rock.”  This statement definitely hits the nail on the head.  The article states that, “traffic was backed up for miles and miles and miles and miles in every possible direction of the compass.”  A New York cop even wisely warned that anyone should, “add from five to eight hours to the normal two-hour trip from New York.”  This back up in traffic was unbelievable to the officials at Woodstock.  It seemed to them that every kid in America was traveling to attend the festival.  The August 15 edition also quotes Woodstock officials as stating, “Don’t come.”  The explanation that was sent out over the radio waves to all those heading to the Catskills was, “Due to the overwhelming response . . . highways are impassable.  We, therefore request and urge everyone coming to the Woodstock Pop Festival to turn back.”  Clearly, the people heading to Woodstock did not heed to the warnings of the festival’s officials.  They wanted to be a part of history.
     Oddly enough, the Washington Post made some interesting observations about the huge traffic jam that kept many away from the festival.  In the August 16 edition of the paper, reporter B.J. Phillips notes that, “it was the most patient traffic jam” that the Catskills had ever seen.  Phillips also states in his article that,“there was nothing to do about it, except perhaps park and walk, so they broke out guitars and drums and tambourines, sat on the hoods, trunks, and roofs of cars and tried to make the best of it.”
Rightfully, it was a peaceful beginning to a peaceful festival and Phillips also quotes that “there was no honking of horns . . . but there was plenty of unauthorized parking and trekking across the fields.” Overall, police saw the traffic problem as a crisis adverted due to the fact that not one single act of violence erupted during the traffic jam that was backed up for miles.  The hold up due to traffic did not prove to be a problem for Woodstock officials because, “the music was only an hour late getting started.”  The hippies showed the world that even peace could come out of a strenuous situation. When contemplating what the underlying cause of the traffic jam was, reporter Phillips claims that, “What brought them to Bethel is rock music – their common denominator, the distillation of the finest, the worst, the angriest, the most gentle, the happiest, the saddest thing that youth believe is in their lives.”
     Music was more than pure enjoyment for the fans that crowded the Woodstock festival, it was life and it was what they stood for.  For the hippies, the music was a way to talk to the world in a language that everyone could understand.  Phillips notes that “their music is at Woodstock in the form of nearly 25 of the biggest names in rock and folk music.”  The music is what brought the people together and kept them under control.  In the article titled “That Rocky Road” in the August 16 edition of The Washington Post, Phillips reports on the crowd waiting for the music stating that “as helicopters pressed into service from all over the East Coast, began to land with the artists for tonight’s show, the crowd settled back to hear what they came for.”  The Woodstock festival was underway.
    Readers were shocked when they read the headline of the Sunday, August 17 Washington Post.  The headline boasted that “400,000 Jam Rock Festival in Catskills.”  The article goes on to say that “youngsters in mud-caked jeans and sweatshirts wandered to and from the meadow for concerts, sometimes walking several miles or more lugging pets and guitars.”  People were at ease but conditions at the festival were beginning to deteriorate very quickly.  News Dispatches quoted that, 
“One youth has died and an estimated 1,000 others have been treated . . . those hospitalized are suffering from dysentery, injuries sustained in crowds going to and leaving the concerts, and – in some cases – from reaction to drugs.”
The reaction to drugs at the festival did prove to be a slight problem.  Even though marijuana was being smoked openly at Woodstock, the amount of people having bad trips from LSD was enormous.  In one case, there was a teenager that had the largest supply of LSD for sale at the festival.  The LSD that he was selling was making people very sick and “the drug was said to be available at below-market prices . . . and that the LSD was actually strychnine or rat poison.”  Fortunately the Woodstock officials had hired doctors and volunteers to take care of those were got injured or experienced “bad trips” during the festival. 
     As the festival began winding to a close, The Washington Pos tchose not to do the majority of their reporting on the success of the festival.  Instead, the headline of the Monday, August 18 edition stated, “2 More Rock Fans Die at N.Y. Festival.”  The first line of the article almost sounds like a sarcastic statement noting that Woodstock was nearing its end even “after bringing wholesale drug and auto traffic, food shortages, three deaths, more than 400,000 rock music lovers and the spirit of peace to this Catskill mountain resort area.”  The article opens on a note of all that has gone wrong for the Woodstock festival and its audience.  But the negativity does not stop there.  Later in the same article, the News Dispatches note that,
“Adversity – in the form of torrential rains, little food, an insufficient sound system, dangerously adulterated drugs, a shortage of doctors and security officers and a throng more than double the crowd anticipated – has plagued the festival since it began Friday.”
    The truly positive accomplishments of Woodstock are left until the very end of the article with the statement that the hippies in attendance “have heard the finest assemblage of rock performers ever contracted for a single festival.”  Besides the record setting attendance that Woodstock captured, it also goes down in history as the festival of all festival with the musical performances to end all musical performances.

    The visual representation of Woodstock in the Washington Post lies to rest any curiosity as to what the festival was like.  It was not until the August 16 edition that the first photograph of the festival was printed.  The picture shows the major traffic jam that held up the progression to Woodstock.  The photo shows hundreds of people sitting on the tops of their cars and almost every single one of them has a smile plastered on his or her face.  The next photograph shows an overhead view of the hundreds of thousands spread across the 600-acre field.  The caption under the photo states, “thousands jam grounds of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, NY” (Appendix A).  The other photo that accompanies the overhead view shows the lines of cars and people that have already begun to leave the festival.  This pictures caption reads, “bumper-to-bumper traffic and long columns of pedestrians leave rock music festival in the Catskills town of Bethel, NY” (Appendix B).  The last photo that is included in the Washington Post of Woodstock shows a young woman wearing a bikini top and blue jeans carrying a baby on her hip.  She is smiling though her surroundings look depleted and extremely muddy (Appendix C).  These visual representations of Woodstock aid in helping the readers of the Washington Post picture what is going on at the festival.

    Robert Stephen Spitz’s book, Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969, is an in depth look at how and why Woodstock took place.  Spitz begins his book with an Author’s Note in which he states that Woodstock “was an unprecedented historical event that spanned the generation gap and prompted a culturally divided nation to reassess its inherited morality” (vii).  The festival brought people together in unity for the hope of peace.  Spitz explains his hope that by
“Unmasking the underlying reasons for what occurred in Bethel, by rendering a fair and genuine reconstruction of that captivating summer,, it will be possible to retain an untarnished impression of the festival, and, perhaps, never let go of the old magic” (ix).
Spitz has the desire to make Woodstock stand still in time and he accomplishes this feat by writing a detailed dialogue of all the events that happened that faithful summer in 1969.
     Spitz’s narrative is an extremely informative account of all the hardships that the four festival producers had to endure.  The dialogue catalogs the mishaps one after another and Spitz reveals that there were many.  In one case, Spitz notes that the “fences had been liberated by the people” (401).  The people knocked down the over two and a half mile fence and hundreds of thousands had already entered the grounds for free.  No one was at the fence to take up tickets or sell them due to the fact that a day before the festival, hundreds of off duty police officers backed out of their deal with security officials handling the festival.  Besides the lack of security, the performers appeared to be a big problem as well.  Sweetwater was the band that was due to open the festival but they did not arrive.  Instead, Michael Lang found himself begging Richie Havens to do the opening act saying, “You’re the only guy that can save us, man” (Spitz 405).  The fact that the performers did their acts depending on who was at the festival when only adds to the problems that the officials at Woodstock had experienced.
     Despite all the things that went wrong, got fouled up, or got cancelled, the spirit that Woodstock represented lived on through it all.  Max Yasgur, the hog farmer that devoted his land to the Woodstock festival, became so moved by it all that he was quoted as saying “if these are the kids that are going to inherit the world, I don’t fear for it” (Spitz 389).  To say the least, the appearances of those who attended the festival in 1969 were very deceiving.  Spitz noted that the audience included “long-haired boy gypsies, their pretty ‘old ladies’ in pilgrim dress, the hip students, and the young rock rebels” (398). These types of people represented the type of culture that many in the world were afraid of.  But this culture used their actions at Woodstock to prove those fears to be inaccurate.  When the first storm hit White Lake at 10:35 Friday evening, some hippies made tents and sheltered their friends, the others “sat unprotected in the open field, just happy to be there, thrilled to be part of the spiritually thriving Woodstock Nation” (Spitz 424).  Even when the inconveniences occurred, the crowd of hundreds of thousands remained peaceful, all united under the love of music and the hope of peace.
     The music was no doubt the heart and soul of the Woodstock festival.  After all, it was why hundreds of thousands of people had gathered at Yasgur’s hog farm in Bethel, NY. There was Joan Baez who “Gave lovingly of herself, playing a selection of songs about America’s changing social structure, poverty, union leaders . . . and between numbers, pointing to the wide-open countryside and the covey of tents on the other side of the road she exclaimed that everyone had the right to be heard” (Spitz 425). Baez closed the first day of the show at 3:00 am on Saturday morning but there were many more bands to follow.  On Saturday afternoon, Santana performed and his act “proved to be one of the festival’s uncontested highlights” (Spitz 438).  Santana’s performance set the stage for the acts that were to follow, the acts that people at Woodstock had truly come to see.  Spitz explained that “the darkness caused the stage to radiate with the majesty of a crystal chandelier, and the loyal subjects hungrily awaited the appearance of their kings and queens” (459).  The time had come for the Woodstock music festival to hit its anticipated height.
     The crowd had already witnessed the musical acts of Quill, The Canned Heat, Richie Havens, Country Joe McDonald and The Fish, Tim Hardin, not to mention Ravi Shankar and Santana.  All the performers had given the stage their all, though most, only after settling their nerves about playing for a crowd of almost half a million fans.  Even the famous names that were to appear had never played in front of a crowd of more than 17,000 at other festivals.  But the crowd was there for a reason and that was to hear the bands it craved for.  According to Spitz, “Certain names were pure magic to the audience – Grace Slick, Marty Balin, Roger Daltry, Peter Townsend, Sly Stone, and, of course, the beaded Persephone, Janis Joplin, who was expected to cast her spell over the crowd as soon as Jerry Garcia danced the Dead offstage” (459). The people in attendance at Woodstock had the privilege of witnessing some of the most gifted musicians of their time.  The festival went out with a musical bang on Monday, August 18 at 8:30 am.  Spitz notes that “if Janis Joplin was the pearl, Hendrix was unquestionably the diamond in the rough, the patron saint of psychedelic rock” (486).  Hendrix performed a free-form version of the “Star Spangled Banner” that led into “Purple Haze.”  Hendrix also provided Woodstock with a closing that it deserved.  He “brought the crowds emotions back to earth with an instrumental prayer – a final tribute to a Nation that had breathed a moment of eternity and passed out of the picture forever” (Spitz 487).  And it was on that note, literally, that the festival ended.  As shown, the Woodstock festival is a major part of American History and the history of rock and roll and Spitz portrays this theme in his book Barefoot in Babylon. 

    After reading both the 1969 Washington Post’s account of Woodstock and Spitz’s Barefoot in Babylon from 1979, it is clear that they had different themes in mind.  As stated earlier newspapers tend to focus on the what, where, who, and when of an event, while a book likes to probe into the event further by asking how and why.  The type of information covered, the way in which the information is presented to the reader, and the formality of the presentation, are the three main differences between the coverage of Woodstock in the 1969 Washington Post and Barefoot in Babylon.
 As far as the 1969 Washington Post is concerned, Woodstock was just another event that deserved coverage because people were curious about.  It is the newspaper’s job to give its readers information about current events in a brief but informative format.  This is exactly what reporter B.J. Phillips and News Dispatchers did in their articles.  Spitz on the other hand chooses to write about information that does not appear on the surface of the festival like The Washington Post does.  If people wanted the basic facts about Woodstock, they could read the newspaper articles.  If the reader wanted to know why Woodstock took place or about all of the events that occurred behind the scenes at the festival, they would read a book devoted to that type of information.  This is the main difference in the information that is presented to the audiences of the 1969 Washington Post and Barefoot in Babylon. 
    Besides the type of information that the two included on Woodstock, they also differed in the way that they chose to present that information to the reader.  The newspaper articles on Woodstock were short and concise, only dealing with immediate facts about the festival.  This was due to the fact that the audience of the Washington Post was reading the article for fast information about Woodstock.  They were not interested in the in-depth coverage of the event.  That was left up to the books that were to follow about Woodstock, such as Barefoot in Babylon in 1979.  Spitz presents his non-fiction work in a detailed dialogue, putting his reader first-hand behind the scenes of Woodstock.  He focuses on what the event meant to the people who financed it as well as the people in attendance.  The book is for a reader who wants to find out more information about Woodstock, deeper than the surface facts that the newspaper articles present.
    The difference in the formalities of the 1969 Washington Post newspaper articles and Barefoot in Babylon, is a difference in writing forms.  The newspaper article is a form of subject writing which requires a higher level formality than in an informal dialogue.  Barefoot in Babylon falls under the category of personal writing and does not need to obtain the same level of formality as does the newspaper articles.  Both present the material about Woodstock in a different manner, but at the same time they both include very pertinent information about the festival.  Each form of writing puts its own twist on the interpretation of Woodstock.
    Clearly there are differences in the way that Woodstock was presented in the 1969 Washington Post and in the 1979 book, Barefoot in Babylon.  Both prove to be very acceptable sources on the Woodstock festival.  From the kind of information given in the sources to the form of writing used to the formality of the content, they all add up to two different views about Woodstock. 
 

Spitz, Robert Stephen.  Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music
Festival, 1969.  New York: The Viking Press, 1979.

The Washington Post, August 15 – 21, 1969.