Waaayy back when I was a Texas college student I had a roommate who was actually at Woodstock when he was a small child.
His parents were grad students at Syracuse and were into the folk music of the period.
All he remembered was the awful smell and the dirty hippie that dropped his pants and crapped on the ground next to him. And that he never wanted to go in the first place and missed Saturday cartoons.
He and his sister were at the medic area setup by the National Guard after that and they had priority to be evacuated.
Don’t forget, that long awful movie was the ‘best’ of the musical performances. There was a lot of silence and awful bands that no one ever heard of that filled those days that never made the film.
It truly was a disaster area like Katrina or Sandy despite the hype.
Woodstock was the year I started full time work. I was at Basic and AIT the next year. In ‘74 however, I had some friends that called and said they were going to the Ozark Music Festival. It was a three day event and they were taking their VW camper.
We went. 350,000 also went. Wow what an event. Couple next to us had a grass vending set up. Saw window pane acid sold by street hawkers. One birth - one death.
The movie omits a lot of the rock and roll from the fest. There’s 100 hours of footage, when screened concurrently (multiple angles of the same songs/scenes) it runs 18 hours.
Around 6 hours of footage has been officially released after all of this time.
There was a documentary/concert series that filled in some of the rock and roll gaps, it also had contemporary interviews with the investors.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0208579/combined
Woodstock Diary (1994)
Runtime:
Finland:172 min (3 parts) | Germany:115 min | Australia:174 min
It’s available on DVD.
There were also a couple crews with videotape systems at the show (two roaming through the crowd, one stationed at the stage during the Who, Jimi, Sly Stone, and Janis Joplin among others).