What Ever Happened to
The Age of Aquarius? (2)
Reflections on “The First Aquarian Exposition”
aka “Woodstock” — August, 1969
(an excerpt from the forthcoming memoir: Time Capsule: 1969*)
Since the Internet has destroyed our capacity to read anything much over 1,200 words, I have broken this ~4,000-word account into three bite-size chunks, each of which will take 6–7 minutes to read. This is Part 2 of 3; If you haven’t read Part 1 first, here it is:
Part 1: You Can’t Get There From Here
and now:
Part 2: Where Are The Purple Vibrations?
After staying dry through Friday night’s downpour, we awoke to a sunny day filled with Aquarian promise: and the promise of spiritual awakening induced by magic chemicals.
That Saturday was the day that Artie, Jamie and I had agreed were would all drop acid for the first time. We hadn’t been able to score any actual LSD, but our friend Charles’ sister said she had a strain of mescaline called “Strawberry Field” which sounded just as good, so we’d scored a few tablets of that instead.
We woke up at about 10AM, and some of the group put together a breakfast of fried rice, chicken and zucchini. After breakfast we smoked some pot, split up the remaining stash, and headed off for the festival.
The big question was: when do we drop the mescaline?
I was scared shitless of this stuff. Despite having smoked a lot of pot and hash since the end of the school year, I’d never experienced any drug-induced visual hallucinations. And I’d heard that unless your mind is right to begin with, you could have a bad trip . This stuff we had was supposed to be really potent. I wasn’t sure if I could handle it.
I had no idea what would be the right time to take it, but I didn’t want to seem ignorant and ask anyone. I finally asked Jamie if he had dropped his yet, and when he said yes — about a half mile down the road — I did likewise.
Almost immediately after I’d swallowed my tab, a yellow school bus rumbled by; the driver offered to shuttle us to the concert. The eight of us piled in and moved to the back of the bus. I was really ready for a great day, and felt such a release after dropping that tab that I promptly jumped up on the seat, stuck my head out the window and waved to all the people we passed. I don’t know about the mescaline, but the pot had certainly kicked in…
When the bus had gone as far as it could take us, we stepped off — and hitched another ride with a couple of New York Post writers in a Plymouth Valiant — their press credentials let them get their car still closer to the concert grounds. The inside of the car was already full of hippies, but we hopped up on the trunk and rode another half mile toward the festival entrance.
What we found at the top of the hill has since been recorded as one of the indelible images of the event, a visual manifestation of the new Aquarian Order we thought had finally arrived.
What had once been the entrance gate was now just a series of steel poles sticking out of the mud. The cyclone fences that had been constructed around the entrance had been trampled into the dirt. The promoters had given up any prospect of crowd control, and the multitudes just swarmed in.
Seeing the wreckage, my friends and I thought it would be a lark offer a concession to the crumbling capitalist order: we made the effort to walk the extra distance in order to go through what remained of the actual gates, slipping through the mire as we went. It was obvious that nobody was bothering to take any tickets, which explains why I still have mine, found among the other artifacts and journals in the Time Capsule I sent myself from 1969.
After forging our way past the ruined gates, we picked our way through the crowd until we found a clearing in the grass big enough for the eight of us to spread our blankets, about maybe 200 yards from the stage left, about thirty yards downhill from the road that bypassed the field.
We were looking forward to the scheduled performances by the likes of Country Joe and the Fish, Santana, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and The Jefferson Airplane. We didn’t get to see much of these bands individually, but here we were going to get a chance to see them all in one place.
But before any of that could be revealed, we all had to deal with whatever the hell was in that pill we’d just swallowed.
By the time we found our spot whatever chemical it was we’d ingested was starting to take effect. Things seemed to be both slowing down and speeding up at the same time. There was a pulsation in the air, in my body, in my head. My brains were sloshing around in my skull, an ocean pounding on a rocky cerebral coast. This was interesting, but not hardly what I was expecting. Where were all the purple vibrations I’d been promised?
Then I just got plain sick to my stomach. I’d no sooner sat down on my blanket than I had to get up and leave. Without excusing myself, I started heading back up the hill, hopefully to find a close-by toilet to stick my head in. Instead, when i I reached the top of the hill I hesitated, to let my sloshy brains settle, to collect my senses. I took refuge on the bumper of a car, and promptly hurled my breakfast of zucchini and rice into the mud.
As the people around me all cleared away, I apologized profusely. They said it was OK, like they were all quite familiar with the side effects of whatever wonder drugs I’d swallowed. In light of their sympathy, I promptly threw up some more.
Once my stomach was empty, life inside my head began to smooth out again But this was not the hallucinogenic experience I thought I’d signed on for.
Whatever it was we’d taken — LSD, mescaline, something laced with speed or who knows what — it made us all sick to our stomachs. I was the first to lose my breakfast, and shortly thereafter Artie and James lost theirs, too.
We weren’t on serious “bummers” — we weren’t seeing giant reptiles, or Richard Nixon’s face on everybody that walked by — so there was no need to be taken to the tent where people on actual bummers were being treated. This wasn’t the “brown acid” that Hog Farm leader Wavy Gravy (aka Hugh Romney) famously warned the crowd to avoid.
Rather, the three of us just sat on a blanket in the grass, under the cloudless August sky, our heads in our hands, waiting for the sickness to pass. The music played, but it was hard to focus on, let alone appreciate, the performances that were offered on the stage hundreds of yards away from our little patch of blanket. I vaguely remember hearing Country Joe. And I remember a terrific buzzing in my ear, which turned out to be the group called “Canned Heat.”
Our little group was two-thirds, maybe three-three quarters of the way up the stage-left side side of amphitheater-shaped hillside. We could see the stage from our vantage point, but not much of what was happening on it. On the other hand, considering the vast size of the hillside it had to cover, the sound was surprisingly good.
It was the rest of the logistics of the day that proved the most challenging. I’ll go into some detail about that in
Continue with Part 3: That’s What Records Are For
©2016 Paul Schatzkin / Cohesionarts.com
