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Not everyone buys into the myth of 1969's Woodstock festival as the zenith of the Sixties dream. As the 40th anniversary DVD of the film comes out this summer, Rolling Stone veteran David Dalton remembers it tersely as "a blatant display of greed, vanity, and gullibility"--arguably the death of the Sixties dream. Do you agree? Read on...--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Woodstock. August 15, 16, 17, 1969. Three days of peace, love and music. For the past thirty years, it has been touted as a new stage in the psychic evolution of the world, a mass celebration of what the 1960s was all about, the miraculous assembly of a new species.

The hell it was. The only miracle that took place at Woodstock was that a blatant display of greed, vanity and gullibility got turned into an edifying moment in late twentieth-century history. The only things transcended at Woodstock, as far as I can see, were common sense, humility and honesty. Have I mentioned the trivializing of all the causes we once believed in? Woodstock, if anything, amounts to the Disneyfication of the entire hippie enterprise--a just-so story about generational togetherness, a sort of temporary '60s theme park that (alas!) has become an annual institution.

Woodstock was an exercise in consummate narcissism committed by the most affluent generation of young people in the history of the world, a mass delusion of epidemic proportions wherein hundreds of thousands suffered total loss of the amygdala, an archaic brain function that allows higher primates to distinguish between fantasy and reality. How else are you going to explain--thirty years later!--people still mouthing soppy Crosby-Stills-and-Nashishisms about it? Aging participants endlessly regurgitating their retouched, mediated memories?

Woodstock was a hippie Disneyland, a triumph of public relations and old-fashioned merchandising perpetrated on unwitting, stoned trolls by a bunch of tie-dyed-in-the-wool hustlers of various stripes. It was an over-rehearsed costume musical with a cast of hundreds of thousands of weekend hippies, a kinky remake of The Sound Of Music. Like extras in some crass Hollywood apotheosis of the '60s, the participants wore the requisite outfits and regulation hair length and took the approved drugs--grass, tabs of acid--as if they were the dry martinis with olives of our parents' generation. All the occasion lacked was the mock psychedelic effects of a Chips Ahoy! commercial.

Nevertheless, whether I like it or not, Woodstock has entered the vocabulary as a symbol of the self-perpetuating cloud cuckooland of hippiedom, an emblem of what the '60s were supposedly all about. It's a myth of such dismaying dopeyness that it boggles the mind. This article will inevitably be illustrated with images of happy hippies frolicking peacefully with their headbands, peace signs, lovebeads, bells, paisley and other pollyannish malarkey. Naturally, photographers love this nonsense. Lots of nubile T & A, and all in the name of showing how free and unrepressed we all were. But what do these pictures suggest? Nothing so much as stills from a life-affirming, panoramic Coca-Cola commercial bearing some fiendishly ingenious piece of ad copy: "Woodstock: the outdoors inside you."

Actually, the milk of human kindness was in short supply at Woodstock. New Yorkers just don't know how to behave outdoors; and, despite the propaganda that has been fed us, the hordes at Woodstock were no better behaved than any randomly assembled mass of New Yorkers. It was a big, messy frat party in fancy dress more than any Be-In. Greedy, loutish, tacky, mindless, hostile, racist and boorish. What did you expect? That by transporting the masses to the country they would magically be transformed into holy men?

Many of the people who burble about how cosmic it all was are performers, like Richie Havens, who saw no more of Woodstock than the secretary of defense saw of Saigon. They were lifted from their motel parking lots by helicopter to the backstage helipad and then whisked back by helicopter. Then there are the extraterrestrial reminiscences of Garcia: "The thing about Woodstock was that you could feel the presence of the invisible time travelers from the future who had come back to see it." Jerry, what were you on--and can I have some?

But neither of these guys got down in the trenches and saw the kids freaking out from megadoses of acid or almost audibly buzzing from battery-acid crank like flies trapped in a soda can. Or Vietnam vets running for cover at the endless thrumming of the National Guard helicopters delivering celebrities backstage, desperate hash-eaters eating watermelon rinds, or headband-wearing hustlers selling glasses of water for a dollar.

Self-aggrandizement, rather than cosmic revelation, was the order of the day. Those who were there bought the dopey fairy tale about themselves and doomed us all to a perpetual twilight of self-parody and returns. Its cursed legend set in motion the rock festival as generational vibe center, the ultimate moveable mall, where the captive sons and daughters of America are lured into buying overpriced tickets to a hodge-podge of derivative bands with the promise of attending a "Woodstock for the '90s". They are sold diluted drugs, eat bad food and get ripped off for T-shirts and trinkets. A generation of self-styled rebels were more than happy to allow themselves to be portrayed in a giant two-part commercial and, out of foolish narcissism, allowed the most sacred values to be passed on in terms of clichés--talk about advertisements for ourselves!

And then, on top of it all, they wanted to be congratulated for being there? How hard was that? Two hours from New York City, one of the most widely advertised, media-blitzed events in history. It was hardly as if we had all marched out into the wilderness to rescue survivors of some disaster or had experienced some mystic revelation at Lourdes.

How farcical (and typical) that the children of the bourgeoisie would want to see themselves as part of some quasi-sacramental utopian adventure that encapsulates the possibility of human happiness and peace on earth instead of what it really was: a rock festival. No wonder Kerouac would have nothing to do with Hippiedom. He could see the ludicrous caravan of fools, lurching backwards into the same commercial morass from which they claimed to be escaping.

Woodstock was a vast brainwashing to which the participants willingly subjected themselves, and, having bought the big lie about themselves, they were now ready to buy any other lie that came along. Reeking of patchouli and mendacity, the event was perfectly tailored to advertising's fusion of surrealism and extravagant promise. A Kahlua Mud Slide commercial with a Hendrix track.

Woodstock really was the end of the '60s, not because it was the apex, the moment of crowning glory it shamelessly trumpets itself to be, but because at that moment all the dreams and aspirations of the '60s turned into travesty and spectacle. It's true that Woodstock represented some sort of turning point in American consciousness; not the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, but its death knell--the end of the aspirations of the Haight-Ashbury, of radical politics, mystic visions and any hope of ever levitating the Pentagon.

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