INTERVIEW: Woodstock memories live on at The Museum at Bethel Woods
Photo: The Museum at Bethel Woods tells the story of Woodstock. Photo courtesy of the museum / Provided by press rep with permission.
The 1969 Woodstock Festival continues to live on in the memory of those who attended and those who have only seen the images and videos. Whether it’s Richie Havens opening the festival with his spirited guitar strumming or Joe Cocker crooning in his unmistakable voice or Jimi Hendrix sending the crowd home with a now-iconic rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the influences of Woodstock live on more than 50 years after 450,000 people descended upon a farm in Bethel, New York.
Today, at the site of the festival, fans and enthusiasts can still enjoy some art, culture and music. The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is a campus of buildings on the historic site of the original festival. In the summertime, audience members can take in a concert in the music pavilion, and throughout the year, those who want to learn more about those fateful days in 1969 can visit The Museum at Bethel Woods, which has a permanent exhibit focused on Woodstock and its countercultural stamp on the world.
“In the museum field, this job is known as a really good job,” said Neal Hitch, senior curator of The Museum at Bethel Woods. “It’s just an interesting place to work, and there’s not other museums like it. I don’t know of another museum that has a museum director that also is on the grounds of one of the largest outdoor music pavilions in the United States. So, I knew about the job. I had friends that talked to me about the job. You just never know. When a job looks too good to be true, sometimes you think maybe it’s too good to be true, but after being here for a couple years, this job is literally too good to be true. It’s really an amazing place to work.”
Hitch is particularly proud of the award-winning permanent exhibit on display in the museum, which focuses on the culture of the 1960s that created the conditions for a counterculture. This counterculture then created the conditions for one of the defining moments of the decade: the Woodstock Festival, which was a multi-day celebration of peace, love, music and art.
“That exhibit is very media-heavy,” Hitch said. “It’s got some original 30-minute films that were made for us, one on 1968 made by The History Channel, and so the average visitor stay time in the exhibit is about an hour and a half. If you watched every bit of footage we have in there, read everything, it would be two-plus hours. In the middle of that exhibit, there is a multimedia experience that is about … everyone who played on the Woodstock stage in the order they played. That’s a nine-minute multimedia experience that really puts you as if you were in the crowd of Woodstock and gives you a really great overview of what the festival was. I think that’s one of the coolest things we have in the exhibit.”
In addition to the museum, audience members can also enjoy the 600 acres of the historic site and view where the actual stage was located, where the throngs of people sat and danced, and how the land was used as a farm. Along the way, attendees learn how the festival was originally going to be located in Woodstock, New York (hence the name), but was relocated to Bethel. How Havens was not supposed to be the first act, but Sweetwater was stuck in traffic.
“When I walk around, it just feels like the site is magic,” he said. “That’s why it was chosen for Woodstock. [Producer of the festival] Michael Lang says the minute he stepped out of the car he could feel magic on this site, and I think you can feel that today. There’s just an energy here that you really don’t get everywhere. Partly I think that’s an energy about creativity, and everything about the Woodstock Festival was about creating something new. I think that’s also at the core mission of Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is creating, and so I think it’s a good meeting of history and presence.”
On an annual basis, the museum welcomes approximately 60,000 people. Because of the concertgoers who enjoy some music at the pavilion, the actual number of people on the site is closer to 250,000 every year. In many ways, the museum benefits when a concert is held in the warmer months. This summer, for example, the pavilion and its lawn will be packed for acts like the Dave Matthews Band and Phish. No doubt some of those patrons will arrive early and learn about the Woodstock story in the museum.
“We have a great number of people that come to a concert at the pavilion and then also see the museum,” Hitch said. “If you buy a ticket to a show here at the pavilion, you can buy a reduced price ticket that makes seeing the exhibit a bargain, and a lot of people take advantage of that, especially if it’s your first time coming to the site or maybe you come to several concerts but have never really seen the exhibit. I think that’s one of the best opportunities here is to come and for not very much money you get to come into the museum exhibit a couple hours before the show starts. It’s fun, but it’s also easy. Parking is easier if you come here and park early and go to the exhibit, that’s for sure.”
The museum has also launched a new oral history initiative. When COVID-19 closed museums and live performances, the arts community was devastated. Hitch was brand new in his curatorial job, having only been hired six weeks prior to the shutdown. What this pause did was give everyone at the museum some breathing room to think about legacy, the museum’s collections, music and what might Woodstock’s 100th anniversary look like one day.
“One of the things that we looked at is the strength of our museum collections is our oral histories, though it’s also the weakness of the collection,” he said. “In the 10 years that the museum existed, we collected 66 oral histories, and those were from prominent artists and promoters. They’re really important. If you read them, they really leave a story about who was involved, but I have this thing I say, and that’s, ‘Woodstock isn’t one story.’ Woodstock was 450,000 stories, and when you’re here at the site, you often meet attendees. We call them alumni, Woodstock alumni, and they all tell a story. And in the middle of that story will be this amazing piece of information, a piece of history you’ve never heard before because again everyone had a different experience, and so we made this plan. We want to collect as many oral histories as we can in the next five years.”
The museum staff started to put the oral history procedures together, and they began recording and transcribing people’s testimonies. The Museum at Bethel Woods has now ballooned their oral histories from 66 people to 1,200, and they won’t stop until they get to 4,500, which would represent 1 percent of the people who attended Woodstock.
For Hitch, this is a personal and professional endeavor. He was only 5 years old when the original festival occurred, but he certainly was influenced by the event (and he remembers the music of Woodstock ’94 and ’99).
“I grew up in the Midwest, so I was in Nebraska when the festival happened,” he said. “I have a PhD in history and have been a historian. I’m really a historian of American culture. This is an era that I’ve taught before, and certainly Woodstock is at the core of things that you teach or read about from the 1960s. And I’ve also been a musician almost my whole life. I’ve had these two lives, one where I’ve been a musician, and that’s been one of the defining things about what I did after work, and one has been a historian, which I’ve done now for years and years at work. But they’ve never come together. They were just these two parts of my life. This job has brought me full circle where I get to do my historian job, and I get to listen to music or read about music, interpret music every day. That’s what makes this job remarkable. You really are doing history. You certainly are interpreting a major historic site, but you also are participating in the excitement of peace, love and music.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Museum at Bethel Woods is now open daily. Click here for more information.
