Three days of peace and music

With the currently available director's cut weighing in at about three and a half hours, you can't accuse Michael Wadleigh's WOODSTOCK of skimping with the material. At that length, your willingness to sit and watch may well depend on your opinion of the music - most of which I love - but that's a shame because in between songs it paints a fascinating portrait of the hippie ideals that were sweeping America's youth in the late sixties.

Putting the music to one side, the film stands as more than just a document of a concert, but that is largely to do with the fact that Woodstock was no ordinary concert.

While originally ticketed, the organisers had to eventually give in and make it a free concert by virtue of the number of people who turned up - estimates always vary but there were certainly well in excess of half a million people in the crowd. One of the most stunning sights in the movie is when you see the crowd from outside or from on stage and realise that you can't actually see where it ends - there are literally people as far as the eye can see.

Of course this popularity brought its own problems. Roads were blocked, people died, other people gave birth, food was dropped in from the sky as the whole area officially became classified as a disaster area. Injuries and bad trips aside (they were actually doing drugs, can you believe it?) it certainly didn't look like a disaster from the inside.

The highlights for me, from a musical perspective, are almost too numerous to count - the concert exploding into life with a fine performance by Richie Havens; Joan Baez being on fine form with the song Joe Hill; the madcap energy of rock'n'roll outfit Sha-Na-Na; Arlo Guthrie, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin all performing at the top of their game; the hilarious though biting performance of Country Joe McDonald and his anti-Vietnam ditty I Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag (if that performance doesn't raise a chuckle and have you tapping your feet, it's probably worth checking for a pulse); and the Lovin' Spoonful's John Sebastian coming on stage to perform, clearly having indulged in a little too much of the Woodstock spirit and exclaiming various messages of love and "far out" style shenanigans (but still delivering a memorable performance of Younger Generation).

The only weak points in my opinion (and these are solely a reflection of my musical tastes) are those that other people might well afford "legend" status. The Who were typically Who-like but I just don't rate their cover version of Eddie Cochrane's Summertime Blues; and the legendary performance of Jimi Hendrix (particularly his Star Spangled Banner rendition) when half the crowd had gone home, which has passed into legend but doesn't impress me particularly. I appreciate that it's very clever being able to play the guitar with your teeth and make it perform all manner of weird noises, but I'm one of those traditional folks who would rather hear someone simply play a tune, and when his rendition of the American national anthem descends into a cacophonous racket designed to showcase his technical skills I find it hard to keep paying attention.

The film captures the event like no other movie had ever done - Wadleigh (with assistant director Martin Scorsese - there's that man again) employed a groundbreaking split-screen technique that not only allowed coverage of the music acts from different angles simultaneously but also allowed him to show one of the acts at the same time as some of the crowd, or to show two opposing sides of the same scene. It's here that it becomes particularly useful as the film employs fascinating documentary footage not just to show the behind the scenes manoevres at the concert but also the divided opinions of the youths attending the gig and the locals who had to put up with it (some of whom were very understanding while others were very much of the stereotypical "you're a disgrace" kind of attitude).

It might be a long movie but it's worth sitting through from both a musical perspective and a historical one - there had never been an event quite like Woodstock and there never would be again... and you could argue the same thing about the movie itself.

It's also significant because the "peace and love" ideals of the flower children were to turn sour very soon - as we'll see very shortly...