As much poetry as NDQ has published over the last 5 volumes, it is reasonable if readers forget that we love and publish essays. As a gentle reminder of both our tradition as a venue for essays of all kinds and as an incitement to consider submitting your work, here’s David Susman’s wonderful essay “Nine Variations on Pete Townshend and Abbie Hoffman” from NDQ 91.1/2.

Check it out below!

 

 

Nine Variations on Pete Townshend and Abbie Hoffman

1

On August 17, 1969, Abbie Hoffman stood stageside at Woodstock. He was high but not at all happy. The festival, it seemed to him, had failed to fulfill its promise as a political event, and had instead devolved into a burlesque of commerce and self-congratulatory entertainment. By the end of the second day, as The Who played their late-night set, Hoffman had had enough. He was determined to address the crowd, and in particular to advocate for John Sinclair, a leader of the White Panther Party, who had recently been sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of marijuana.

Just after the band finished “Pinball Wizard,” Hoffman made his move, rushing to the stage and seizing Pete Townshend’s microphone while the guitarist was adjusting his amplifier. “I think this is a pile of shit,” Hoffman bellowed, “while John Sinclair rots in prison!” Townshend, returning from his amp, wasted no time in his rebuttal. “Fuck off my fucking stage!” he barked, and bashed Hoffman with his guitar, knocking him into the photographers’ pit ten feet below. Thus foiled, Hoffman righted himself, cursed at Townshend, and fled into the crowd.

The incident was not captured on film.

 

2

 Michael Lang, the twenty-five-year-old visionary behind Woodstock, later clarified the nature of the Townshend-Hoffman fracas: Townshend aimed his blow specifically at Hoffman’s head, stunning him but not propelling him from the stage. Hoffman then leapt into the photographers’ pit, nimbly hopped a fence, and “vanished into the crowd”—an exit, in Lang’s view, more dramatic than cowardly. Lang had been sitting beside Hoffman just before the incident, trying to calm the volatile activist, who had been complaining repeatedly about the injustice done to Sinclair.

“Chill out,” Lang advised him, not realizing that Hoffman, who was famous precisely for his uncooperativeness, was also tripping on LSD. Hoffman sprang up and made for Townshend’s microphone before Lang could stop him.

It was a rare moment of failure for Lang, a plucky go-getter for whom things tended to work out. He hadn’t organized Woodstock so much as conjured it: traversing the Catskill Mountains by car, motorcycle, and horse, he’d found the perfect location in Max Yasgur’s six-hundred-acre dairy farm, then put together an improbable coalition of hippies, municipal officials, and won-over locals, who assembled the event in a matter of months. When the turnout exceeded even Lang’s expectations—exceeded it wildly, wonderfully, with half a million arrivals rather than the predicted one hundred thousand, all of them suffused with a beatific energy, more like adherents than concertgoers—he pronounced the event free. Townshend’s brief scrap with Hoffman was the festival’s rare instance of violence, and by the behavioral standards of rock concerts, it was nothing notable. Woodstock turned out to be, as Yasgur proclaimed in a commemoratory address to the crowd, the largest assemblage of people in human history, and almost inexplicably peaceful. It galvanized a generation and sustained it through the battles ahead. Without Woodstock, even more young men would have died in Vietnam. The excesses of the Reagan years would have gone unchecked. In the absence of Woodstock, LGBTQ+ rights would not be part of the public conversation. Black lives would not, in quite the same way, matter.

 

3

Strictly speaking, Hoffman was dispatched not by Townshend’s guitar, but by a swift kick in the backside, according to Who chronicler Dave Marsh. Townshend, in Marsh’s account, “put one of his Dr. Marten boots squarely into Hoffman’s ass,” then, using his Gibson SG as a secondary tool, “swatted” him off the stage—a description that paints Townshend as more exasperated than outraged. In truth, Townshend hadn’t wanted to play Woodstock in the first place. Like his bandmates, he didn’t enjoy festivals, and this one had been miserable even in its pre-performance hours: they’d had to wrest their promised money from Lang, who, at the last minute, was trying to avoid paying the acts—the festival was now free, he rationalized—and logistical mishaps had left the band waiting for an outrageous fourteen hours before they could take the stage. When they finally did, at 3:30 a.m., they launched, exhaustedly, into what frontman Roger Daltrey later described as their worst-ever set.

Woodstock, of course, was a fiasco in almost every facet of its design. Portable toilets, insufficient in number and arrangement, overflowed within the first twenty-four hours, and sewage seeped menacingly toward the audience. Food was in short supply, and emergency provisions were solicited from Catskills resorts and local charities. (History records Mel Lawrence, one of the festival organizers, looking with curiosity at donated jars of gefilte fish.) Sullivan County declared a state of emergency, and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller had to be persuaded not to send in the National Guard. Financially, the event was ruinous for its backers, with whose money Lang had clumsily played: the concert was declared free only after planners realized that they would not have time to assemble ticket booths, and that their shoddy retaining fence had been breached. Hip capitalism, the festival’s organizing principle, died a music-filled death, and, even in the economic tumult of the next fifty years, was never seriously spoken of again.

 

4

What Hoffman recalled, in his drug-soaked memoir Woodstock Nation, was not Townshend’s boot in his ass, but a guitar being brought down on his head, hammer-like: “I lunged forward, grabbed the mike and shouted out ‘FREE JOHN SIN…’ (CRASH). Pete Townshend, lead guitarist, had clonked me over the head with his electric guitar, and I crumpled on the stage.” Only after returning to Lang and chewing him out (“Peace my ass, huh…how come he tried to kill me?”) did Hoffman jump into the photographers’ pit, “flying like some shaggy-dog Tarzan,” and flee into the crowd. The account rings true in its combination of hostility, exuberance, and just plain silliness, all Hoffman trademarks. He had been a full-blooded participant at the festival—helping, reveling, tripping—but he’d been skeptical from the start. A king of performance activism, he knew a put-on when he saw it.

Woodstock was born, if not exactly as farce, then as capital in search of farce. Joel Rosenman and John Roberts, well-heeled Ivy Leaguers with dreams of writing a sitcom, had settled on the premise of two entrepreneurs who find themselves, week after week, entangled in harebrained business schemes. By way of research, Rosenman and Roberts ran newspaper ads seeking “interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions,” hoping, of course, to receive the daffiest possible. That they happened upon Lang and his business partner, Artie Kornfeld, and that they eventually agreed to sponsor what they thought was a good idea, only to discover, in the end, that it was an incomparably goofy one, was a bifold irony that would haunt them long afterward. But goofy Woodstock was. Its mishaps could have fueled a sitcom fully: the downpour that arrived, by one account, right on comedic cue, just minutes after Roberts bemoaned that the only misfortune that hadn’t yet happened was a thunderstorm; the stage, massive and hurriedly built, loosening in the mud and inching down an embankment; Lang, stoned and glassy-eyed at moments of highest chaos, delivering his mantric “I got it covered” to incredulous staffers.

 The first rule of comedy is that the characters don’t laugh along. They don’t realize they’re in a comedy. When Woodstock ended, the attendees left Yasgur’s trashed field (Lang recounts seeing, from his departing helicopter, an immense peace sign constructed of detritus) and set out into the world, where they would spend the coming years rhapsodizing about their experience. The American revue, with its peculiar combination of politics, entertainment, and general cultural folly, marched on.

 

5

 Townshend makes clear that he did not bring his guitar crashing down on Hoffman at all. Rather, he used its headstock to shove the annoying trespasser out of the way. In the process, Hoffman’s neck was cut by one of the strings that protruded like stray quills from under the guitar’s tuning pegs. (“It could have cut his artery,” Townshend admits.) Hoffman “reacted as though stung” and, bleeding, returned sulkily to the side of the stage. He remained there until the end of the next song, when Townshend caught his eye. “Sorry about that,” he mouthed. “Fuck you,” Hoffman mouthed back, and then, with no particular flair, left the area.

 They weren’t enemies, in the greater scheme. In fact, Townshend and Hoffman were united, if not by a shared sense of stage etiquette, then by their antipathy toward Woodstock’s attendees. “A bunch of hypocrites claiming a cosmic revolution simply because they took over a field,” Townshend considered them, a sentiment perhaps disguised by the fact that antagonism was his trademark: he was furious on stage, mopey off. But even more than Hoffman, Townshend recognized the particular inanity of the Woodstockers, who seemed ill-equipped for revolution, or even for sensible concertgoing. They arrived, many of them, without money, food, or a change of clothes. They kept the medical tents hopping, famously because of their bad LSD trips but less famously, and more voluminously, because of their lacerated feet, the consequence of walking around a farmer’s field without shoes. They ascended into the lighting and sound towers and petulantly refused to come down, despite organizers’ pleas. (The most un-Woodstockian moment of the festival was when announcer Chip Monck, getting parental, chewed out the offenders: “If your determination was the same as your selfishness, we’d be able to have gatherings like this every week.”) Their chant in the face of the impending thunderstorm—“No rain! No rain!”—seemed less a spiritual invocation than a huffy complaint (“Somebody do something!”) from a generation more loud than resourceful.

 And when Hoffman was removed from the microphone, they cheered—vehemently, jubilantly. Drug enthusiasts by principle, radicals in theory, they were no doubt sympathetic to John Sinclair’s plight, but Back to the show! was a closer-held philosophy. That philosophy would only harden in the years to follow. The continued ascendancy of television, and the popularization of its devious cousin the remote control, would give it fuller form. In the hands of Woodstock Nation, the American attention span would shrivel like the unwanted fruit it was. But that would come later. For now, in Yasgur’s field, the channel had been changed.

 

6

 Townshend did indeed lead with the guitar’s headstock, thrusting it, bayonet-style, into the back of Hoffman’s neck, not cutting the skin but landing the weapon plenty hard, delivering what Henry Diltz thought, at first, was “a fatal blow.” As the festival’s official photographer, Diltz had an on-stage view, and he watched with shock as Hoffman went down. The moment, for him, was electrifying, “almost like a ringing in my ears.” If he failed to snap a picture, it was only because, in that arresting instant, “my instincts as a photojournalist gave out. I was more of a guy hanging out just digging this stuff.” He was, he says, “transfixed.”

 Who wouldn’t be? Woodstock, the whole thing, was sprawling and glorious, absorbing even in its messiest moments, and maybe because of them. The preposterousness was half the point: a colossal music festival for young people, at a time when young people were a known hazard, especially in groups. Hadn’t they rioted at the Democratic convention, in Chicago, a year earlier? Hadn’t they stirred up trouble at the Newport ’69 festival, in Northridge, California, just months earlier? And yet, Woodstock worked. Despite the community resistance (“Buy No Milk. Stop Max’s Hippy Music Festival,” went a famous sign), the bitchiness of the newspaper coverage (“a morass of mud, music, and misery,” groused the Daily News), and the widespread sentiment, not unjustifiably held, that apart from moon landings, nothing could go quite right in 1969, the damn thing succeeded. The true infuriation of Woodstock, to its detractors, is the accuracy of its so-called mythology: they really did gather peacefully, sharing food and tent space (and drugs), neighbor beside neighbor; they really did party safely, logging just two deaths, making Yasgur’s farm one of the most unhazardous metropolises in America. The spirit of Woodstock found perhaps its greatest expression in the medical tent where Hugh Romney, the puckish commune leader later known as Wavy Gravy, treated LSD-induced freakouts by creating a human chain of practitioners: an entrant was calmed and comforted—soothing words and light body contact were the tools of choice—and then, upon recovery, recruited to render the same aid to the next incoming tripper.

 “I think you people have proven something to the world,” Yasgur said to the crowd in his famed speech. He was almost fifty years old, hale-looking, but a fuddy-duddy in dress and demeanor, undoubtedly an old-timer by the audience’s reckoning. When he flashed them the peace sign, smiling the proud and satisfied smile of a father, something fundamental was surely won. The future, in its proper and truest form, had started.

 

7

“It didn’t really happen,” Hoffman explained in a later memoir. The altercation with Townshend, which by that point had accumulated more than a decade’s worth of dusty legend, was, he assured readers, a misunderstanding. True, he had commandeered the microphone and offered a few words about Sinclair—an unexceptional gesture in the freewheeling environment of Woodstock—but the act hadn’t elicited Townshend’s fury. Rather, Townshend, who had been occupied tuning his guitar, turned and harmlessly bumped into Hoffman. The “nonincident,” of which, Hoffman hastened to add, no photos or footage existed, had transmogrified over the years, taking on the burden of inaccurate retellings (including, apparently, Hoffman’s own) and finally assuming the rickety shape of truth.

Of course, Woodstock itself never happened. The known event lives only in the minds of its enthusiasts. Beneath a peace-and-love exoskeleton, the celebrated Aquarian Exposition was pure business; its sponsors dreamed, first and foremost, of making a killing. Lang, for one, was unafraid to enjoy the spoils even before the war had been waged, roaming the Catskills not only by horse and motorcycle, but by helicopter and Porsche. Yasgur, canonized for saving the festival by offering his farmland, drove a fierce bargain, and peskily saw to it that his contract was honored in full. Viewed in plain light, the facts about Woodstock dissolve quickly. It was not the largest assemblage of people in human history (nor even that year, factoring in the funeral of Tamil politician C.N. Annadurai). It did not cause the wholesale closure of the New York State Thruway. It was not held in, or particularly near, the town of Woodstock.

“We are stardust,” Joni Mitchell wrote in her anthemic song about the festival, capturing, if nothing else, its gauziness: the spectral and uncertain realm in which, like all cherished memories, it resides. Mitchell herself did not attend Woodstock.

 

8

 Townshend walloped Hoffman, all right, sending him fully off the stage. But the blow didn’t come until after Hoffman had left the microphone. In fact, Hoffman hadn’t interrupted The Who’s set at all, according to Jack Hoffman, Abbie’s younger brother. The band was still setting up when Hoffman the elder seized the opportunity and “started rapping,” offering twenty-or-so minutes of political commentary to the crowd, which, so far as is known, received it without complaint. Then, abruptly, someone turned off the audio. An angry but unmolested Hoffman kicked over the mike stand and huffed away. It was then that the chronically ill-tempered Townshend, passing by as he took the stage, whacked Hoffman with his guitar.

 But Hoffman had had his say. This, in the end, was all he wanted: to speak his mind—or, rather, to speak everybody’s mind, the mind attendees would have had, if the festival hadn’t indulged their ludicrous belief that music alone could solve anything. Woodstock was officially non-political—the more civic-minded of its patrons were welcome to distribute literature in Movement City, a set-aside territory—but Hoffman didn’t buy it. The issues of the day were undeniably there, in attendance, wafting in the air like weed: Vietnam, Chicago, police brutality, capitalism, racial injustice, the coming Revolution. Someone had to speak the words. In recent years, louder than anyone, it was Hoffman. His antics by now were familiar—throwing dollar bills from the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange, causing brokers to scurry after the goods like game-show contestants; courting trouble on the morning of the Chicago march by writing “FUCK” on his forehead; leading the effort to levitate the Pentagon and exorcise its evils—but he was no mere goofball. The performances, the planned ones, were as considered as military campaigns, and he had a deep-seated practicality. He knew how to roll up his sleeves. With his tribe, he’d lugged a printing press to Woodstock, and they used it to produce a daily survival sheet for greenhorns. He organized food- and blanket-sharing, and saw to it that people found their way to clean water. Seizing ungranted authority, he helped convert press tents into a field hospital. It was there, at a medical facility of his own fashioning, that Hoffman put in a twenty-four-hour shift, tending to the concertgoing wounded, before joining Lang stageside to watch The Who.

 And for twenty minutes, he spoke to the crowd. From the stage, the farmland, blanketed in darkness, must have felt infinite, and the fabled future must have seemed within grasp. A generation had gathered—happily, naïvely, dopily, selfishly, open-heartedly. They stood to gain their freedom. A prophet at last, Hoffman spoke, and they listened.

 

9

 After the incident involving Hoffman, The Who continued their set, working through the rest of their rock opera Tommy. As they reached the finale, the sun rose over Yasgur’s field, conferring its blessing on Woodstock’s children. The moment was beautiful enough to impact even Townshend, who played the climactic songs with renewed spirit. He would never speak fondly of his time at the festival, but he would one day express regret at having ushered Hoffman so ignominiously off the stage.

Hoffman himself would press on, jesting and agitating, writing and protesting, mouthing off, doping, spending time on the lam and briefly in prison. He would commit acts far more interesting and outrageous than the one he’d pulled off at Woodstock. Eventually, his brand of activism-cum-melodrama would fall out of fashion, and battles with depression would catch up with him. The world he’d hoped for was far from realized when he took his own life in 1989.

Lang would organize other festivals, including two Woodstock anniversary concerts: a mediocrity in ’94, a disaster in ’99. They would be marred by, among other problems, uncontrolled sewage and inadequate gatekeeping. And of course, both events lacked the wide-eyed gaze of the original—the wonderment of a generation struggling to understand its astonishing present and its uncertain future. The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, it became clear, could exist only once, briefly and mysteriously, like a particle of antimatter, before self-extinguishing.

If Woodstock was—as its celebrants often claim—about the music, then its celestial sphere is the audio recording, where its ghostly presence lingers. More than fifty years later, the guitars growl and screech; voices, beautiful and not, sound themselves without restraint; an audience roars. In that sphere, too, lives the encounter between Hoffman and Townshend. Hoffman’s voice is full-throated and jarring (“I think this is a pile of shit!”); Townshend’s is distant and furious, like a nearing storm (“Fuck off my fucking stage!”). There is the hint of a scuffle, a discordant guitar string, a thunderous cheer. Incontestable truth isn’t found, but that hardly matters. With each press of a button, they fight anew, and a fresh story is told. Digital eternity is their rightful place. Heralds of their time, angels of the future—combatants for the frivolous and the noble—Pete Townshend clobbers Abbie Hoffman, and Hoffman falls.

~

David Susman’s essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Journal, Concho River Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Cumberland River Review. He lives and teaches in southern Maine.  

NDQ 91.1/2