The Woodstock Experience

Author and Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien is one of 70 contributors who share their personal memories in a new book entitled Woodstock Experience. The book's release coincides with the 40th anniversary of the festival and talks to audience members, photographers, artists and Woodstock producers Artie Kornfeld and Joel Rosenman. O’Brien, a pioneer of creative non-fiction, first won literary acclaim for his 1973 memoir If I Should Die In A Combat Zone and, in 1990, his book The Things They Carried was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Woodstock Experience is comprised of two separate volumes: Volume One is the definitive oral history of the festival; Volume Two features previously unseen photographs of the late Dan Garson, taken as a 17-year-old student. In addition, there are loose-leaf essays, a specially pressed vinyl record featuring Santana and Jefferson Airplane live at Woodstock, a facsimile hand-drawn site map, a fine-art print by legendary 60s artist Peter Max and an original festival ticket with every set. The collection of artifacts are housed in a three-part folding box which features exclusive screen-printed art by leading artist and designer Shepard Fairey.

Check out this excerpt from the book where O’Brien reveals the role music played in the lives of American GIs serving in Vietnam and how the Woodstock festival boosted their morale:

"To know there were all these people who felt the same about it as I felt, as I was in it ... It felt good. Music helped us bounce to that war. It gave us a soundtrack. One of my strongest recollections of Vietnam — over all the horror and dead people, even stronger than those memories — is the memory of the whole company of us, 100 men, shifting across the rice paddies, right before dusk had settled in and the whole company singing ‘Hey Jude’. ‘Anytime you feel the pain, hey Jude refrain, don’t carry the world upon your shoulders ...’ That’s what the world felt like to us. We were carrying the whole damn war on our shoulders.

Songs like ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane. I can remember listening to that song in a rice paddy in the middle of nowhere. It captured that hallucinatory, upside-down, inside out, distorted feeling of the war we were fighting. It wasn’t about the war but it was how the war felt. You fell down a rabbit hole and all the old values were upside down: thou shalt not kill became you should kill, you better kill. I felt like a white rabbit and so did a lot of the guys with me, just falling down this rabbit hole of war.While you’re there your thoughts aren’t of global communism and containment, they’re about that rice paddy and that tree line and this gun in my hand.

In the end ’Nam was the centre of Woodstock. If there wasn’t a war called Vietnam going on, recollections of Woodstock would be truly different – it would be one more jamboree. Because there was a war that the music was bouncing off, it made it an important social event in the history of this country.What’s really cool is that, all these years later, after Woodstock and after ’Nam, the music endures. Somehow that’s a kind of revenge. Who remembers the names of the admirals and the generals? Very few people, but the music endures."

Woodstock Experience — signed by Michael Lang and Arlo Guthrie — the limited edition box set of 1,000 copies, is available only through Genesis Publications:  www.genesis-publications.com; tel: +44(0)1483 540970; price: £395.

Photo courtesy of www.genesis-publications.com