(via SACRAMENTO’S K-ZAP)
Grace Slick explains why Joni Mitchell got Woodstock all wrong:
Jefferson Airplane were billed as the Saturday night headliners, but the festival was famously marred by major delayed due to a huge rainstorm in the middle of the day.
Santana was due to perform at 1pm on Saturday, but was too busy tripping on mescaline and wasn’t mentally there yet. So instead, they brought in someone else, shuffled him to 2pm and thus began a whole day of push-backs and hold-ups, eventually leading to bands playing throughout the night and Slick only hitting the stage as the sun was rising.
The only thing bands could do was surrender, and so that meant one thing: drugs. “Our road manager had a box with about 16 little segments in it, and he had different drugs in each of the little segments. And we took what we thought was cocaine — snorting it, not shooting it — snorting it backstage just before we went on,” Slick recalled as the band thought they were doing their typical routine.
They were mistaken, though, as they quickly realised that the white substance was the wrong one. “We took it out of the wrong box, and we took LSD. So, about 15 minutes into the set, we looked at each other and went, ‘Oh boy. Oops.’”
With way more people than planned for, the facilities weren’t up for the job either, meaning that there was just mass filth everywhere from leaking toilets and overflowing bins. A lack of clean water was the cherry on top, too.
“We are stardust, we are golden,” Mitchell sings on her theme tune for the event, claiming “Everywhere was a song and a celebration.” However, Mitchell wasn’t there.
“Joni Mitchell got all, you know, sugary about it and said we got to get ourselves back to the garden, and we’re stardust, and we’re golden and all that kind of stuff, which is a little bit over the top,” she said in 2019 when her own real memories were of dirt and drugs.
To her, Woodstock was as sleazy of a scene as any other chaotic festival, adding of Mitchell, “I’m surprised that her take on it was so sweet.”
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Every Moment Has A Song 