Music for Grownups: The Museum at Bethel Woods

By: Richard Gehr | Source: AARP.org | 2008-12-04

Next Aug. 15 will mark the 40th anniversary of the start of the Woodstock music festival, which many have called the greatest party ever thrown for half a million young people. But rather than risk a horrendous traffic jam (like the reported 20-mile backup in 1969) next summer, we decided to play it safe and visit The Museum at Bethel Woods, which opened in June next to the site of the historic concert, on the day after Thanksgiving.

Located about 10 miles west of Monticello in beautiful upstate New York, the new museum is a part of the larger Bethel Woods Center for the Arts and consists of 6,728 square feet of colorful and user-friendly exposition technology. It joins the 15,000-seat performance pavilion that launched in 2006. This recent blustery late-autumn day bore little resemblance to the summer storms and resultant mud lakes that transformed the original three-day rock fest into a literal acid test, one that the experimental examinees passed, by all accounts, with flying colors.

Little at Bethel was new to us geezers. Upon entering the museum, visitors are plunged into "The Sixties," or at least a breezy rundown of the historical factors—1950s economic prosperity, the civil rights movement, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassinations, feminism, rock music, etc.—that led to the late-'60s youth movement in general and Woodstock in particular. Once the big picture has been sketched, the museum distinguishes itself with snappy yet fascinating presentations on Woodstock's planning (haphazard), how the masses arrived (slowly), security (and/or the lack thereof), and the efforts by kind local residents to feed the throng of hungry kids huddling in Max Yasgur's famous cow pasture.

Yasgur, who died in 1973, rented out his 600-acre farm under the assumption that only 40,000 people would be showing up that weekend. His neighbors threatened to boycott his dairy, but Yasgur was adamant that America meant nothing if not the freedom of longhairs to assemble peacefully, and he declared that the local townsfolk could do something very anatomically uncomfortable with salt if they didn't like it.

Cable TV billionaire Alan Gerry bought the concert site in 1997 in order to create the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. The 103-plus-acre Yasgur homestead, however, can still be yours for an asking price of $8 million.

Original documents, the emotional testimonies of locals, and even a replica of the psychedelically painted Chevy bus that belonged to the Merry Pranksters communal group help to convey the event's strange mixture of charm and excess. The museum neither makes you wish you were there (at least not in the way "Woodstock" the movie does), nor does it trivialize the experiences of those who made the journey. Downers such as the "not specifically good" brown acid are mentioned only in passing.

"The Festival Experience," as the museum's multimedia centerpiece is called, distills Woodstock into an 11-minute highlights reel involving six projectors that cast overlapping imagery onto 50-foot-high screens with a 270-degree panorama. "Woodstock: The Music," meanwhile, condenses the festival's 32 career-making performances into a 21-minute video that also weaves the nostalgic memories of Carlos Santana, Richie Havens, and others who were there with envious comments from a few contemporary musicians since inspired by the event.

It must be nice to visit the museum prior to attending, say, a Crosby, Stills and Nash show next door. Returning to the museum lobby (after passing through the inevitable gift shop) during the off- season, on the other hand, felt a little like stepping directly into a highway travel plaza and food mall. If the Bethel museum teaches us anything, it's that Woodstock was a lucky accident that went down in history as one of the world's great cultural flukes. But if you really pay attention, you can still a hear a little bit of Woodstock in nearly any great live rock show.