Half a Million Strong by Arnold Gina

Author:Arnold, Gina [Arnold, Gina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Distribution Center (CDC Presses)
Published: 2018-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Girls Gone Wild

I ONCE MET AN ELDERLY MAN at a grunge party in Seattle who had in the long-distant past attended the Sky River Rock and Lighter Than Air Festival, a pre-Woodstock-like gathering held near Chehalis, Washington, over several rainy days in August 1968.

Today, organizers proudly recall that the Sky River Rock Festival is notable for being the first multiday rock festival on an undeveloped site and note that (unlike Woodstock) all profits were earmarked for donation to the Mexican American Federation of Washington, the Foundation for American Indian Rights, and the Central Area Peace and Improvement Cooperative.1 However, this man’s main memory of the festival was of spending the night in a teepee and waking up with a strange, naked woman leaning over him. Her breasts were therefore thrust into his face, and this, he said, was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him before or since.

Nothing sexual occurred during this encounter. She just got up and left the tent. But even so, the gesture was incredibly powerful. “You just can’t imagine what it was like,” he said. “We lived in such uptight times, and nakedness, open sexuality, women being available . . . it was this amazingly powerful thing, this completely transformational moment.”

This story is a good reminder of the groundbreaking feeling of liberation that festival culture seems to have generated among its earliest attendees. Thanks to the invention and circulation of the Pill beginning in 1959, the 1960s were inevitably going to be a time when sexuality would be redefined: the utopian dream of a sexually free society was one that festivals were supposed to make flesh. The Sky River Rock Festival, like so many festivals of that era, exemplified utopianism, optimism, and hope, charging attendees with a long-lasting belief in the counterculture as an agent of societal change. But at the same time, it is both disturbing and inevitable that fifty years later, the single thing that this festival attendee remembers most clearly are a woman’s breasts. It’s especially weird since, although nudity is definitely one of the images most people associate with Woodstock, the cinematic record of the event doesn’t contain much evidence to that effect. A few long-distance shots of people bathing in ponds during rainstorms earned Woodstock an R rating, but it’s not titillating, and it’s definitely misleading: according to an Associated Press article from 2009, most of the five hundred thousand attendees at Woodstock never saw a naked person. In the Life magazine special issue devoted to Woodstock, there is only one shot of full frontal female nudity; throughout the rest of that magazine and in other photo essays on the event, people are shown clothed.

And yet, the historical record of the counterculture in general and of Woodstock in particular generally includes the acceptance of public nudity as one of the festival’s main features. Indeed, most people today agree that early rock festivals were able to concretize the concept of free love in a congenial public setting: as the

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