Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Woodstock: Three Days That Defined A Generation’ On PBS, Which Looks Back At The Festival 50 Years Later

Were you at Woodstock? Neither were we, but being born only a couple of years after the event, we’ve bathed in the nostalgia that surrounds the festival, and how everything came together to make it more than just a simple music festival. But how did things get to the point where 500,000 kids were in a hay field, listening to some of the best musical acts around for free? The new American Experience movie Woodstock Three Days That Defined A Generation tries to answer at least some of those questions.

WOODSTOCK: THREE DAYS THAT DEFINED A GENERATION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Fifty years on, the mysticism around the original Woodstock Music Festival continues as if the event happened a year ago. As we get towards the golden anniversary of the weekend that was billed as “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days Of Peace, Love And Music,” American Experience looks back at the festival in the new film Woodstock: Three Days That Defined A Generation.

Director Barak Goodman, who has made award-winning docs for PBS for over two decades, decided to examine the festival not as much from the musical perspective, but the personal one. He combines archival photos and footage — much of it shot for the 1970 Woodstock documentary that helped build up the mysticism around the event — with contemporary and archival interviews.

And, while we hear from some of the artists who appeared on stage, much of the movie’s perspective is given by the people who produced the festival — Michael Lang, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman — people who helped worked at the festival, and festival attendees. You get a fuller picture of just why the festival, a for-profit venture, ended up being such a shambling mess from a business perspective.

It wasn’t supposed to be a free concert, and it wasn’t originally supposed to be on Max Yasgur’s hay farm (yes, not his dairy farm) in Bethel, New York. It was supposed to be in another town, but they pulled the permit at the last second over security concerns. So to set things up again in Bethel on such short notice led to choices like “build a stage or build a fence.” When you understand that, you understand why it became a free concert.

And what the film gives is a more overall picture of what was going on from its Friday afternoon start to early Monday morning when Jimi Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” There’s extensive footage of Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm, where people came to ride out bad trips and get fed, and what you might have seen in the arts and crafts area on the edges of the field. And the townspeople in Bethel, who provided food that was airlifted in because all the roads were clogged with abandoned cars, get a lot of coverage, because the near-miracle of having a half-million kids in a muddy field for three-plus hot summer days with very few incidents doesn’t happen without the good people of the town supporting the festival.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There have been countless documentaries about Woodstock, but we’re not sure how many of them made the people as important as the music.

Performance Worth Watching: We’re still blown away by how Richie Havens made up “Freedom” on the spot because he had been playing for hours — he was pressed into being the opening act because everyone else was delayed — and had nothing else to play.

Memorable Dialogue: The between-sets stage announcements were amazing to listen to. We didn’t hear the most famous one, “Don’t eat the brown acid,” for some reason, but just mundane ones about people who were separated needing to meet up or someone’s wife having a baby. It’s fascinating how personal and intimate it made a gathering of 500,000 seem.

Sex and Skin: Lots of people stripped down, especially away from the field where the main stage was, because, well, freedom, man.

Our Take: A few things about Woodstock that most of the gauzy reminiscences about it over the decades have tended to only get mentioned by cranks like us. For one, it wasn’t the first or the last music festival during that time period, but one of the biggest ones where the young attendees didn’t get into conflict with security, police or each other. The news media reported back to the rest of America about the traffic, the abandoned cars, the food running out, etc. The movie the next year cemented the peace and love image in everyone’s minds. And finally, the festival was a hugely disorganized mess, with acts going on in the middle of the night because of logistical delays. There’s a reason why Hendrix played as the sun came up on Monday; he likely was scheduled to go on hours before on Sunday night.

Goodman’s film touches on some of these issues, but not enough of them. Yes, his focus was about the peace and love, but he does touch on why things got to the point where the concert was free, but once the festival starts, his focus is the music, how much was going on away from the stage, and how everyone banded together to keep things going. Goodman definitely determines that it was extreme good luck that especially during the Sunday monsoon, that people didn’t get electrocuted or that riots didn’t happen when the food ran out.

But he didn’t really talk to people who were there with tickets and thought it was unfair that others got in for free, or to people who weren’t exactly okay with being out in the heat and mud around overflowing porta-potties and no food. (Maybe it’s because mostly everyone was stoned or high, who knows?). And they didn’t talk to artists, like Roger Daltrey, who had some of their worst performances at the festival. And, as usual, bands not in the original documentary got very little attention (no one remembers that Sha Na Na played Woodstock. Yes, Sha Na Na).

Our Call: STREAM IT. Woodstock has a complicated legacy and a lot of myths surrounding it, but Woodstock: Three Days That Defined A Generation decided to go with the story that most of us know by heart. But it’s still an entertaining watch, if not overly informative.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Woodstock: Three Days That Defined A Generation on PBS