(Credits: Far Out / RCA Records)
Sun 28 December 2025 2:00, UK
There is perhaps no event in musical history quite as mythologised as Woodstock Festival. It feels biblical, iconic – looming in a way where it’s hard to even see a clear picture of the event through the glow of the rose tint. Every music fan wishes they were there, but Grace Slick actually was.
She was there, and she’s not even sure if she’d recommend it. “Woodstock was fun. If you’re 18 and you don’t care about sitting in the mud, it’s fun,” Slick famously said once as her band, Jefferson Airplane, were on the iconic lineup. However, by now, it’s unlikely any group would be willing to play a festival set at 8am on a Sunday morning after no sleep.
It wasn’t meant to be that way, though. Jefferson Airplane were billed as the Saturday night headliners, but the festival was famously marred by major delayed due to a huge rainstorm in the middle of the day. Or, more realistically, things were delayed due to the looseness of the entire operation.
Santana was due to perform at 1pm on Saturday, but was too busy tripping on mescaline and wasn’t mentally there yet. So instead, they brought in someone else, shuffled him to 2pm and thus began a whole day of push-backs and hold-ups, eventually leading to bands playing throughout the night and Slick only hitting the stage as the sun was rising.
The only thing bands could do was surrender, and so that meant one thing: drugs. “Our road manager had a box with about 16 little segments in it, and he had different drugs in each of the little segments. And we took what we thought was cocaine — snorting it, not shooting it — snorting it backstage just before we went on,” Slick recalled as the band thought they were doing their typical routine.
Woodstock Festival 1969. (Credits: Far Out / YouTube / James M Shelley)
They were mistaken, though, as they quickly realised that the white substance was the wrong one. “We took it out of the wrong box, and we took LSD. So, about 15 minutes into the set, we looked at each other and went, ‘Oh boy. Oops.’”
That was very much the vibe of Woodstock. While recalled as one of the most important musical events in history, the actual event was pretty sloppy, and by all accounts, apart from a few bright moments, the music itself was almost too loose to be good, as a heavy majority of the acts were busy tripping out of their minds.
As Slick remembered, it was a mud bath. The national guard had to be brought in to bring supplies, as the festival hadn’t expected this many guests and was wildly unprepared. With way more people than planned for, the facilities weren’t up for the job either, meaning that there was just mass filth everywhere from leaking toilets and overflowing bins. A lack of clean water was the cherry on top, too.
At the end of the day, this was a festival – and a completely and utterly overrun one. So when Slick heard Joni Mitchell’s take on the event, writing of Woodstock like it was a glorious, spiritual, and clean event, she was confused.
“We are stardust, we are golden,” Mitchell sings on her theme tune for the event, claiming “Everywhere was a song and a celebration.” However, Mitchell wasn’t there.
Instead, she’d famously had to turn her invite to play down due to other commitments and only came to regret that after seeing clips of the event on the news. Writing solely from that, rather than from first-hand experience, Slick heard the saw and thought it couldn’t be more false.
“Joni Mitchell got all, you know, sugary about it and said we got to get ourselves back to the garden, and we’re stardust, and we’re golden and all that kind of stuff, which is a little bit over the top,” she said in 2019 when her own real memories were of dirt and drugs. To her, Woodstock was as sleazy of a scene as any other chaotic festival, adding of Mitchell, “I’m surprised that her take on it was so sweet.”
Related Topics