Remembering Woodstock five decades later

Fifty years ago this weekend, Elise Evans was hoping to hear the Rolling Stones and the Beatles when she attended a music festival in New York. They weren't part of the all-star line up, but little did she know she and her friends would be witness to of one of the most legendary music events in history.

Evans, a longtime Orland Park resident, was a student at Boston University when her brother asked her to get tickets to a concert in New York. She obliged and bought two three-day tickets. “It cost me $36 for the tickets, and you know, 36-bucks for someone who was a student and working to support themselves was really big,” she said.

“My brother tried to talk me into going. He was living in Cincinnati and he’s a real music nut. He told me about this incredible music festival in Woodstock. He said he would come up there and at the last minute he couldn’t come,” she said. Instead, she got a friend of a friend to take the ticket.

“I was the only one who had a car. It was a Zodiac—an English Ford. We packed up the car with our sleeping bags, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, chips and milk gallon jugs filled with water.,” Evans said. Traffic became snarled and as they got nearer to the venue they could see they weren’t going to be able to drive any closer.

“We just pulled over to the side of the road and started walking,” she said. “I thought at the time it was about two miles. It probably was longer than that. But it was just incredible to see all the people walking everywhere—it was just like a sea of people. It was so cool.”

Evans and her friends stayed for the whole weekend. “I read a story that said there were only 30,000 people left on Sunday, but we stayed Sunday to hear Jimi Hendrix,” she said. “We were getting our stuff together—it was in the morning and all of a sudden you heard these notes from the Star Spangled Banner and it sent chills down my spine and it still does today. It was unmistakably Jimi Hendrix. We had been waiting all weekend to hear him so we started running toward the music.”

Reminiscing about the event, Evans reflects back on her parents, who were living in North Carolina at the time. “My poor parents. They knew I was going there and they kept hearing on the news about these orgies and people overtaking the area. When I think about it now, I can’t imagine what they were going through,” she said.

Evans said the people who lived near the festival’s location were very hospitable. “The people of Bethel, New York, were incredible. There were these residents who came out of their houses with hoses and were filling up cups and whatever containers we had with water. There was another woman who had a plate of sandwiches, all neatly cut. They were just incredible. They were really the stars of the whole thing,” she said.

Despite all of the news accounts, Evans said she personally didn’t witness anything that was too outrageous. “Overall, people were very calm. Not one violent incident was recorded. There were a few drug overdoses and there was a guy killed because he was run over by a tractor, but otherwise it wasn’t violent,” she said.

“I never saw any of the stuff that was all over the news until I had gotten home. And again I thought of my poor parents,” Evans said. “We were there to hear the music. It was an incredibly fun experience. It was astounding to me then as it is now that there were all those people and there wasn’t hostility.”

For many years, Evans didn’t tell many people she had been at Woodstock. “I didn’t want to let people know that I was there because the press about it was just so awful. It was a mess but a lot of people stayed behind to clean up the farm. But the whole thing about it being just a big drug fest and all the orgies—well, it didn’t happen by me. And I was there for three days,” she said.

Like she said, she and her friends were there for the music. “Seeing Joe Cocker was amazing. We weren’t real close but we could still see. The sound was wonderful and you could see him doing all the moves he always does,” she said, noting they also enjoyed music by Janis Joplin, Country Joe and the Fish; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Jefferson Starship. “We kept waiting hoping the Rolling Stones or the Beatles would be there, but they weren’t.”

Evans hasn’t gone to a large music festival since, but she finally this year did get to see the Rolling Stones. “That’s been on my bucket list for years and the concert was outstanding.”