Surreal tales from the Woodstock medical tent: “Don’t take the brown acid!”
If you enjoyed Woodstock, you don’t remember it.
Which, in a bizarre way, checks out. It was one shocking, strange weekend of incredible music. Anyone who has attended an average Glastonbury will tell you that it’s such an insane sensory overload that one only really remembers a few, scattered snapshots. That’s Glastonbury as well, an experience that, compared to Woodstock, is as corporate and controlled as a day at Crufts. Woodstock was as big, if not bigger than, an average Glastonbury, with everyone gathered around one stage, and no one had ever done it before.
It was an intense headfuck of an experience without even taking the drugs into account. This is, however, Woodstock.
At no point should the drugs not be taken into account. There wasn’t a soul on that field in upstate New York who wasn’t fucked out of their head on something. As wonderful as the iconic documentary Woodstock is, there’s something faintly distressing about the sheer amount of people just staggering about witlessly. Dead to the world yet still pseudo-conscious, oblivious to the fact that some of the best live performances of the entire 1960s are happening mere metres away from them.
Needless to say, the medical team at Woodstock had their work cut out for them. There was a team to help anyone who needed it, but the issue was that said medical team was barely big enough to handle the planned crowd of 50,000 people. Perhaps they expanded it when they sold 186,000 tickets for the festival, but when nearly five times that many people actually showed up, it’s a miracle the medical team actually managed to help anyone at all, mainly because they had some truly horrific stuff to deal with.
What was happening to punters at Woodstock?
The medical tent at Woodstock had to be split into three sections; one was a chill-out slot for people going through bad trips.
The acid strains being shipped into Woodstock were notoriously awful, so one can only imagine the number of people streaming in at any given time. Not to mention the amount of them screaming bloody murder about spiders. The second, and biggest, is one that just gets worse the more you think about it. Y’see, this is the 1960s at the height of hippie culture. Shoes were for straights, maaan.
However, one can only imagine how many minds changed about that fact when you tread on glass. Thousands and thousands of Woodstock goers had to be treated for stepping on shards of broken glass in bare feet, then keeping on walking through mud and… whatever else you might find on the ground at Woodstock. Christ. However, the third and final section, the medical tent, was cordoned off for is truly bizarre.
Y’see, half a million people were staggering around, ripped to the tits on bad LSD. thousands and thousands of people just lay down and stared up at the sky. More specifically, they stared full on at the beating August sun. That’s right. Hundreds of people at Woodstock had to be treated for burning the retinas in their eyeballs.
You talk about a mind-blowing time, am I right?