Forty years later, Woodstock’s music, mud still venerated

And this weekend some have come back, old Woodstockers like Teach and Groovy and Debby, to try to relive the experience through the retelling.

At least one other, Duke, never left. In 1969 he hitchhiked here from Texas, stayed on to help with the cleanup, landed a job on a dairy farm and now works as the “site interpreter’’ at the museum and arts center erected at the location of the original event, helping explain to those who weren’t here what it was all about.

“Something took place here, and it’s still happening,’’ said Duke Devlin, 66, speaking from behind his thick, chest-length, snow-white beard. “The sense of community we had was really overwhelming. I’ve never really experienced a weekend like that again.’’

This weekend is probably as close as he’ll get. While there have been, of course, other youth-centered Woodstock concerts over the decades - including one in 1999 in Rome, N.Y., that was marred by violence and vandalism - the 2009 jamboree is specifically designed as a kind of old-timers game.

The sense of community Devlin mentioned, forged out of four days of chaos, is what keeps the Woodstock veterans tied to this place. “It was cool,’’ said Debby, 58, who came down from Vermont and asked that her last name not be printed, explaining, “I did some time in the front lines of the drug war.’’

“It was just peace and love,’’ said Debby, whose long hair is now white. She’s lost most of her teeth, and walks with a cane. “Everybody cared for everybody. Nothing else happened except peace and love and music.’’ This is her sixth time back to the site, and she had to be here this time, she said, because with her ailments, “I probably won’t live to see the next big anniversary.’’

Some come here every year. Gary Rupp, known as Teach because he is a high school teacher, comes up from Carbondale, Pa., often toting with him some of the Woodstock memorabilia he has collected. This time he was showing off the perfectly preserved red T-shirt he got autographed by many of the top musicians who performed then.

Asked what Woodstock means today, Rupp paused and said, “You’re looking at a generation of music that people all over the world still follow.’’

“You have kids that still follow this music, even though they call us old hippies,’’ Rupp said. “We understand what peace, love and music is all about. We understand how to live in harmony, not like today’s world.’’

“None of this stuff was here,’’ said Groovy, now 61, who also asked that his last name not be used. He came from close by in 1969 and worked as a stagehand, building the giant stage and helping the musicians. “Jimi Hendrix was the best,’’ Groovy recalled. “He was just like normal people.’’ Others speak wistfully about Sly and the Family Stone or the Who or the Grateful Dead.

The Woodstock site, originally Max Yasgur’s farmland, is now a place of manicured green lawns surrounded by wooden fences, with a performing arts center and a museum dedicated to the 1960s and to Woodstock.

What made Woodstock special, these veterans insist, is that it happened almost accidentally, spontaneously - far more people showed up than planned, the traffic came to a standstill miles away, the rain turned the hills into mud, the limited toilets soon overflowed, and there was little food.

But it was that shared experience that formed a common bond among those who were there. “You could feel that this was something special,’’ said Duke Devlin. “We had issues - the war in Vietnam, civil rights, women’s rights. . . . Our main thing was to show everybody how we could live in harmony.’’