I was working at Macy’s for the Summer. Justin called to tell me that they had room for one more person but that I had to get my ticket soon. My paycheck had just come in and there was enough there to buy a ticket but there wasn’t room for much else. I would have to rely on other people for beer and food but fuck it right? This was Woodstock!
I had this wild spiky haircut and I used to wear this seventies-style black velvet jacket. I looked like a demented magician. Ticketmaster services were offered at the service desk adjacent to the women’s shoe department I worked in. I remember seeing the store manager while I waited in line to buy my ticket and looking down at my watch and in every direction but at him for as long as I could but I had checked in too many times and after he finished barking orders at the Men’s section manager he waved a hand and forced a smile in my direction and said “Keep up the good work. Two more selling stars and you’ll get a bonus.” I smiled back did a little nod and he continued walking. I was hoping my face wouldn’t register because I was going to have to cut out early to get packed and on the road. It didn’t matter anyway, they had been fucking me all summer, not paying me my commission. It took my mother threatening to sue them for the paycheck to come through … but I didn’t know that at the time. I knew I had been slacking all summer, despite the success I was having in the numbers. I arrived late regularly, took long lunches and ducked out early whenever possible. I bought my ticket and was soon seen walking briskly out the door with my magician jacket flapping in the air behind me.
It was Justin, Casey and Jenn (Justin’s girlfriend) in Justin’s Cherokee headed to Rome. I can’t remember why my girlfriend couldn’t go but I remember kissing her just before I left. She had her hair up in a ponytail and she was wearing these little red polka dotted shorts that drove me wild. I remember wishing she was coming because I wanted her to be everywhere I went but it was only three days, we’d live. Besides, I was leaving for school in the fall. If we couldn’t endure three days, how could we survive being separated the whole school year?
I don’t think I told my girlfriend that Jenn’s friends would also be at this event. They had a tent in the same area as us. It wasn’t that I planned on trying to do anything but I didn’t want her to worry that I was. Casey on the other hand was definitely looking to make some moves while he was there and started talking to them shortly after we arrived. They had this sign up that stated “If the tent is a’rockin, don’t come a’knockin”. I think Casey may have provided the rockin’ one of those nights.
Casey was and still is a big boy. I once saw him drop 225 lbs on his neck, just push it up and stand without any serious bodily injury. He just looked a little stunned but that was it. He was definitely a guy I wanted in my corner when shit went down. For the most part I tried to keep from hanging with him too often, though, because he was into some stuff that was a little beyond my realm of acceptable choices, but I’d soon realize that there couldn’t have been a better person for this trip.
I don’t remember what the deal was with the alcohol. I think we couldn’t bring our beer in so we were left only with the alcohol that we stored in various other beverage containers. I think we had about three bottles. We parked the truck in the parking lot and carried the camping supplies to one of the designated camping areas. Jenn’s friends had arrived before us so we set up next to them and drank a little before walking around the site to familiarize ourselves with the area. Justin and Jenn snuck away to go at it and Casey and I were left walking around by ourselves. He spent a lot of time trying to score one drug or another and eventually did. When I got back to the tent the young lovers were already asleep. Casey would stagger is later that night but he was still up before me.
The drinking was already underway. I was the last one up and Casey handed me a cup and told me to start drinking. The shows were starting soon but we wanted to drink all the alcohol before they started because it was too hot during the day to let it sit there. By 11am we were all drunk and the temperature was well over a hundred. My memory gets a little spotty around this point and through the rest of the weekend.
I remember standing in the hot sun getting there in time to see Korn but we were a bit early. I looked behind us and the amount of people in attendance was staggering. We were not in front, far from it. We were what would be considered the back of any other concert but looked to more like the front quarter of the there. I could not see where the people ended. Before Korn was some mellow stuff like Sarah McGlocklin or something. I really don’t remember. I just know that it was hot as fuck and we were all standing there when suddenly the lumbering giant of a man, Casey, thumped to his knees and then planted his face directly in the dirt in front of me. I guess all the drinking and the sun had gotten to him. Justin reached down and turned him over. Casey opened his eyes slowly and then stood up. We never spoke about that.
All the girls doing dosie dos in their bare feet, the older women sitting on their lawn chairs with their big sun hats and all of the children flocked to the back when Korn came onstage. To tell you the truth I was not a big Korn fan before that day. Justin had always told me that it’s different when you see a band live, that for some reason it makes you like a band more and he was right. It took an event like Woodstock to get me to my first show but here I was and I completely let go. I did a lot of crowd sufing that weekend and it started with Korn. They were insane, the amount of energy that they exuded on stage and the way the crowd reacted to their presence was something I had never seen before. It was immediate, like someone had flipped the crazy switch and just left it on for three days.
To separate the days into this one or that or this band or that would really be a trivial (and ficticious) at this point. There were a ton of bands that I saw and with my state of mind who knows what happened when in that three day time period. Besides Korn being the first I don’t remember the order of things. The bands that stood out to me were DMX and The Offspring. At one point I know Casey got in the middle of the pit and knocked everyone out of it. No one stepped back into it for awhile after out of fear of being clocked in the face by an animal wild-eyed on something unnatural. I remember getting lost from the pack for most of the second day and wishing I had money to buy more water, getting severe burns on my shoulders because the tent was ten degrees warmer than outside and outside was like 110 degrees. I remember being a little miserable when I went to brush my teeth and maybe shower a little and realized that they were very close to the porto-johns and very unsanitary. I know that Justin had sex with his girlfriend one night even though I was laying right next to him, pretending to be asleep. All I could think about was how gross it must be, after being in the hot sun dancing around all day. I remember thinking at some point that I wish I wasn’t there and that was around the time that we decided we would make a trip into the town, even though it meant missing a lot of the show as we had to walk out to the truck and sit in a long as line to get out of the gate.
We ate a proper meal at a diner. Someone must have paid for me because I am pretty sure all my money had gone to what little bit of water I could buy. After we finished eating we decided to go to JC Penny’s to get some supplies. While we were walking there, we noticed a group of people being hosed down in back of the diner. We walked over and started to undress. The man operating the hose threw us some soap and we all showered in the diner parking lot, not too far from the dumpster. There were people lining up behind us as well. I had never been so happy to be clean.
The concert had taken over the town and nowhere was it more evident than in JC Penny’s. There were two or three people sharing every display bed in the store and people laying throughout the rest of the home department with pillows snatched from their sales floor. We grabbed some beers for the ride back through the gates and some sun block. Casey argued with Jenn most of the way out and back and really distracted me from the second degree burn that was beginning to cover my entire shoulder and top back area (to this day the worst burn I have ever endured). We missed Dave Matthews on the way back in and I was a little bummed about that but I did get to see Metallica and the first part of the Red Hot Chili Peppers before the rain started and we all decided, beaten, burned and bruised that it was time to go home.
What was seen on TV, the way that things seem to be at the show… it was crazier than that. It may be the one time in history that the media actually toned down an event and I wasn’t even there for the craziest part of it. I didn’t realize that everything had been burned to the ground until we arrived back in Rochester. I watched the coverage of the event on MTV with my girlfriend. She said she had been watching it all weekend, looking for me. As we lay there taking in the images before our eyes I had a surreal moment of clarity, for one weekend in my life it felt as though I was where the action was. For one weekend in my life, I was in the place that the country was watching. I was a part of history. I had experienced it firsthand.
I would experience other moments like this afterwards (911, NBC evacuations, epic storms) but this was the first. This was one that defined our generation of lost, defiant soldiers ruining all that is good for the generations that follow. There probably won’t ever be another Woodstock with all the carnage and fire produced by us. I’m kind of proud of that.
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