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Woodstock tickets contain a big fat lie
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The facsimile tickets included in the newly repackaged version of the Woodstock movie have a factual flaw, but its importance depends on your point of view.
I lived in the town of Woodstock as a child, which is not where the festival was held. Still, the little burgh has benefited from the association and has built a substantial tourist empire as a result. On my last trip up there in 2006 I bought a few souvenirs, including a refrigerator magnet reproduction of the “original” festival ticket. Or so I thought.
Once on the refrigerator it radiated some seriously uncool vibes. It listed the start time for each day as 10 a.m., and I distinctly remembered that the first day kicked off several hours later than the other two. This was verified by the the original festival poster, which states the first day started at 4 p.m., and the others at 1 p.m. So the ticket, while a quaint keepsake, was incorrect.
Yesterday I bought the deluxe, limited edition of the Woodstock movie, which at the Costco price of $45 costs 2.5 times more than those tickets. The box set has a cute little iron-on patch, and a leather fringe trim representing the particularly obnoxious (and prohibitively expensive, at least for me) fashion that was big in those days. There is a copy of the Life Magazine special edition, a very cool curio that would have been even better if they had managed to include the original advertising.
Also contained is a ticket facsimile, that repeats the wrong times listed on my refrigerator version.
So how much do we care? Memories are fuzzy enough already. At the festival I remember an announcement that warned us to “stay away from the flat blue acid, because it is poison.” In the movie, the warning is for brown acid. I can’t swear they were passing out brown acid, or brown rice. But I remember things in a certain way.
I can’t argue that the time on the tickets or the color of the acid makes a lick of difference. It is the spirit of the gathering that sustains, from my memories and through all the subsequent repackages of the movie and the event. Even with all this profiteering, it’s still clear this was one heck of a paradigm shifter.
But you still wonder. If these little details are wrong, how many of the big ones are also incorrect? When you watch a Civil War documentary based on exhaustive research, how many of those details are based on erroneous souvenirs? Could some 19th century entrepreneur have made a bogus misprint of Abe Lincoln’s theater ticket, and he was actually assassinated on April 12?
In this case, the only important fact, like it says in all versions of the movie, is that a large group of people met for three days of peace and music and had nothing but three days of peace and music. But one day someone could get careless with the facts and the whole house of cards could tumble down.
