Woodstock lives in the imaginations of any rock fan who wasn’t there.
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It featured a legendary lineup, including Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and others. But it was especially pivotal for The Who.
After their festival performance, The Who’s popularity exploded in the United States. They were touring to promote the newly released rock opera Tommy, which also changed the course of rock history. Though Woodstock remains a totem of the era’s counterculture, not everyone loved the experience. The Who’s Roger Daltrey hated it.
Pay the Band
The Who were scheduled to perform on Saturday night, August 16, and left the hotel early to beat traffic. However, when they arrived, they learned the venue had stopped charging for tickets. And they weren’t getting paid.
Woodstock didn’t begin as a free concert, but the promoters were overwhelmed by the swelling crowd and gave up trying to sell tickets.
So the band refused to take the stage until they received a cashier’s check. With the banks closed, promoters frantically searched for money. While The Who waited, the situation grew more precarious.
Keith Moon and John Entwistle dropped acid. Pete Townshend did not, but his coffee was spiked with it, so he ended up in the same hallucinatory space. Meanwhile, Daltrey poured a cup of tea. Acid must have been inescapable because Daltrey also ended up in the sky with Lucy and her shiny diamonds.
As the hours blurred into each other, The Who finally went onstage early Sunday morning. But the activist Abbie Hoffman crashed their set and Townshend dealt with him by nudging him with his guitar and screaming, “F–k off my f–king stage!”
The 1969 music festival became historic for many reasons, but Daltrey called it “the band’s worst set.”
Worst Gig Ever
Daltrey remembers waiting around for 14 tedious hours before The Who finally played. He also remembers the mud. Lots and lots of mud. Though the singer may not have fond memories of Woodstock, The Who’s energetic performance finally broke the band in the U.S.
Still, he thinks it was The Who’s worst gig. “It was a particularly hard one for me, because of the state of the equipment. It was all breaking down. I’m standing in the middle of the stage with enormous Marshall 100-watt amps blasting my ears behind me. Moon on the drums in the middle. I could barely hear what I was singing,” he told The New York Times in 2019.
When asked about the Townshend and Hoffman scuffle, Daltrey said he wasn’t sure if his guitarist actually struck Hoffman or pretended to. “He wouldn’t have recovered if Pete had hit him on the head with a Gibson guitar,” he said.
Give Peace a Chance
Many remember Woodstock for peace and hippies, but Daltrey disagrees with that assessment. “By the time it all ended, the worst sides of our nature had come out,” he said.
Not one for nostalgia, Daltrey said, “Woodstock wasn’t peace and love.”
Photo by FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images
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