Different paths carried Oklahoma attendees to Woodstock
BY GENE TRIPLETTPublished: August 16, 2009
Nearly half a million people journeyed to a 600-acre field on a dairy farm in upstate New York in the psychedelic summer of ’69, seeking fulfillments as varied as the colors in a tie-dyed T-shirt.
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, billed as "An Aquarian Exposition in White Lake, N.Y. — 3 Days of Peace & Music,” drew people from all over the country, most of them young and longhaired, some eager for a show of solidarity against the Vietnam War, others ripe for a long weekend of anti-establishment music from some of the hippest acts on the hippie scene, many hungry for both.
A few hapless innocents just stumbled into it.
And then there were those who simply came to party, reveling in an atmosphere of uninhibited free love and unlimited smoke, drink and mind-altering drugs.
No one knew what they were really getting into.
Ronnie Prevost, the party
"I don’t even know that we even knew we were gonna go until the last minute,” said Prevost, who was a 20-year-old Northwest Classen High School graduate. "I said, ‘Well, let’s just go up there and see what this thing’s about. Nothin’ goin’ on here.’ So we just took off and went. There was no planning because the dune buggy didn’t have a top to it and there’s no real trunk, so we took the clothes on our back and maybe a backpack and that’s about it.”
Consequently, Prevost and his friend Freddy were thoroughly rain-soaked on the trip from Oklahoma City to White Lake, but on Friday afternoon, Aug. 15, 1969, when they hit the miles-long traffic jam leading into the festival on Highway 17B, the dune buggy enabled them to go off-road and drive all the way up to the perimeter fence, which by that time had been torn down.
"It was a free concert at that point,” Prevost said. "We didn’t have tickets or anything. We just went up there not knowing what the situation was.”
Now living in Santa Monica, Calif., and selling insurance, Prevost remembers the abundance of drugs and the music more than the peace-and-love atmosphere.
"I don’t remember that much going on about the war in Oklahoma,” he said. "We were just longhairs. Whether we were hippies or not, I don’t know. We were just partying, and that was what was happening, and the music was goin’ on, and that’s what we were into more than anything.”
Linda Meoli, the camaraderie
Meoli, vice president of corporate affairs for the Tierra Media Group in Oklahoma City, was 22 and working for a New York ad agency, where she and three co-workers scored free tickets and hotel rooms in Monticello from client Elektra Records. They dropped their belongings at the hotel, which they wouldn’t see again for three days. Roads were jammed with parked cars and the massive festival crowd made coming and going impossible, unless one had a helicopter.
"Nobody knew how ridiculous that was,” she said. "Thank God we had blankets.”
Meoli was anti-war at the time, but she said Woodstock became less about politics and more about "the camaraderie of the whole event. I mean everybody was stuck there, and it was dirty and it was muddy and you were stepping on each other and it probably could have been a really ugly scene.
"And I think everybody just collectively said, ‘Let’s have fun with this thing,’ and we really did. There wasn’t any kind of animosity there at all. Everybody was just there to have fun.”
Gwendolyn Farrell, the surviving
Farrell was 18, just out of high school in Milford, Conn., when her "very eclectic crew” of friends invited her on a weekend "camping” trip. Expecting a "posh resort type thing,” she found herself trapped in a vast, rainy "oil slick of thick, slimy mud.”
"We had no food, there was nothing that was prepared,” she said. "The people I went with were all sort of druggies and I went with one girlfriend who wasn’t, and I wasn’t, so the people we went with, the guys, were totally useless ... I would walk over bodies that were, you know, fornicating, doing their thing. You became immune to it. Once you were there you were in a survival mode because there was nothing set up for anybody.”
Now a housewife, designer and grandmother, Farrell does remember the crowd was "very well behaved ... We were all there and we had to survive within ourselves.” She said the "incredible” music of acts such as Richie Havens and Jefferson Airplane made things more bearable, too.
Dan Gutekunst, the music
Gutekunst, 58, with the mail services department at The Oklahoma Publishing Co., reports having a much easier time of it, and the music was all that mattered to him. Then a recent high school graduate living in Moberly, Mo., he took the Woodstock trip (without the aid of drugs) with two classmates in an old Ford Galaxy stuffed with camping gear and food. They even bought tickets, which drew chuckles from other concertgoers who were waiting for the fence to come down.
"I was pretty straight,” he said. "I ran track at the time, had pretty short hair.”
Consequently the small-town boy was shocked at the open use and sales of drugs and the nudity, but the music made it all worthwhile.
"Pretty diverse batch of musicians there,” said Gutekunst, who still has his three-day ticket. "It was music that’s still good today. My kids grew up listening to that same music, and they still enjoy it. That’s still what surprises me.”
Jack Ingraham, the peacenik
Tulsa attorney Ingraham, 61, was a college student living in Long Island at the time, and remembers meeting his companions at a friend of a friend’s house, where they were shown a back road to the festival that avoided the huge traffic jam. They found parking in a cow pasture, walked over a hill, and there was Woodstock spread out before them.
"So we actually could go in and out during Woodstock, which nobody could do,” Ingraham said.
He wasn’t a hippie, he said, just a "peacenik” music lover who actually spent the duration of Woodstock "straight and sober.” But he does recall one mind-blowing moment.
"Coming over the hill and seeing about 300,000 people sitting there, was really kind of awe-inspiring,” Ingraham said. "You did have the sense of, here are all these people together and nothing bad is happening. Nobody’s hurting anybody. Everyone is feeling kind of solid. And that did give you a sense of identity with your generation.”
Richard Charnay, the memories
Charnay, 57, now the Civic Center Music Hall events director, is another former Long Islander who "wasn’t much of a hippie” but very much opposed to the Vietnam War. He attended Woodstock with three of his friends.
"It became a very communal feel,” Charnay said. "I remember sitting in the rain watching Country Joe and the Fish and singing along to ‘one, two, three, what’re we fighting for,’ Richie Havens playing so hard that he broke the strings on his guitar, hearing the warning about the brown acid ... The four of us had a great time and I’ll always remember it.”
Couldn’t happen again
Woodstock is widely considered the crowning moment in the late-’60s counterculture movement against the war in Vietnam and social strife in general — and a rock ’n’ roll milestone. Four months later, the death and violence in northern California at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival — which was supposed to be "Woodstock West” — seemed to signal the end of a hopeful era.
Most of the Woodstock veterans who talked to The Oklahoman agreed: the "Aquarian Exposition” couldn’t happen today.
"It wasn’t contrived,” Farrell said. "It was something that happened. It was a happening. It happened without anyone knowing it was going to happen ... The people that went, being all hippies and in that generation of love and peace, that’s the way they were.”
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