Woodstock: How Does It Sound 40 Years Later?

Lots of people never made it to Woodstock, in part because the 400,000 who did caused the most famous traffic jam in New York history.

But for those of us who missed it because of the inconvenience of having not yet been born, the concert's 40th anniversary is instinctively less a cause for celebration than an excuse to plug our ears.

We know the basics or think we do. It was three days of music, peace, love and nudity remembered with greater clarity by those who weren't present than those who were. For decades, our boomer elders have wielded that muddy weekend at Max Yasgur's farm as a signature accomplishment. To have not been alive during Woodstock, we're told, was to have missed the freest moment in American history.

It might not have been an epic music event, but Woodstock was a defining coming together of a generation.

Boomers do this regularly, of course make up stuff about how great they are. They're also eager consumers of goods that jog the memory of their greatness. This explains the current avalanche of hagiographic Woodstock products DVDs, oral histories, “40th Anniversary Flashback Edition" paper dolls which is not the most apt way to recall a moment supposedly unbound from commercialism. (The promoters tried to charge $24 for a three-day ticket, but the booths and turnstiles were never set up.) But picking one's way through the mess is worthwhile, if only to find Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm (Rhino Entertainment Co.), a six-disc collection of 77 tracks, many of which were thought lost, that strips out the mythology and reconstructs Woodstock as it was intended: a musical event.