West Deer native remembers trip to Woodstock

West Deer native Colleen Nelson remembers the crush of cars as she and her friends drove a crammed Volkswagen Beetle toward Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y., on Aug. 14, 1969.

They had almost made it to the site of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. But there was so much traffic that cars had simply stopped moving.

Nelson, then 21, was an artist who had brought her work to be exhibited. Fortunately, she had paid an extra $2 for a pass that allowed her to take her art to the staging area to be unloaded and hung.

As a policeman approached the car, he saw the stage ticket on the windshield and Nelson and her friends were given a police escort.

“Best two dollars I ever spent,” she said.

As the world observes the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, most people are remembering the music that brought over 400,000 folks to those farmlands from Aug. 15 to 17, 1969.

But Nelson has always thought of Woodstock as an art festival first. That’s why she attended.

“There were a lot of festivals to go to that summer. There was the Atlantic City Pop Fest, the Newport Folk Festival, but I chose Woodstock because they had an art show attached,” said Nelson, 71, who now lives in Holbrook, Greene County. “I wasn’t thinking music, I was thinking art, because I did art.”

Nelson, who attended the former West Deer High School, was a recent graduate of the Ivy School of Professional Art in Downtown Pittsburgh when she answered an ad in the Village Voice in the summer of 1969. The ad read: “Woodstock Music and Art Fair — an Aquarian Exposition.”

Brochure: ‘3 days of peace and music’

A brochure came in the mail describing “3 days of peace and music. Paintings and sculptures on trees, on grass, surrounded by the Hudson Valley.”

“I had a body of work. I had just sold a painting at the Three Rivers Arts Festival, so I had money in my pocket,” Nelson said. “I figured this would be a fun show to be in and some of the bands sounded pretty interesting like Crosby, Stills and Nash, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez. It was the kind of music I had been listening to, and I thought it would be nice to hear those guys live.”

Nelson tied a couple of her paintings to the roof of the Beetle and off she went to Woodstock.

She arrived the day before the festival started. By her estimate, 100,000 people were already there.

“There were people camping out,” Nelson said. “There were Christmas tree lights strung through the trees. I unloaded my paintings and they were hung in the trees. It was beautiful. I stayed up all night. It was just a trip.”

Speaking of trips, plenty of LSD was available. “One of the questions people often ask is why didn’t anybody fight, why didn’t street-fight stuff happen?” Nelson said. ”It’s basically because there was a ton of LSD there. It was just being passed around. Nobody was even charging for it.”

Nelson had her own psychedelic strategy.

“I’m a prudent person and I wasn’t going to eat the whole thing. So I tore it up into pieces and I ate a little bit of it, and it gave me a real nice edge and everything got twinkly,” she said. “And it stayed like that for days. It was three days of crazy stuff.”

Nelson was awarded an honorable mention ribbon for one of her paintings. She pinned the ribbon to her shirt, walked through the sea of people up to the stage and told security that she was with the art show. She pointed to the ribbon and was let on stage.

She stayed there through the entire Friday night lineup that included Ravi Shankar, Melanie, Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie.

“That’s when it started raining so I was saying to myself, ‘I sure picked a good time to get on stage and not get wet,’ ” Nelson said.

Realized then, a monumental event

Nelson realized she was part of a monumental event when she stood on the stage.

“It really drove home to me the power of live music,” she said. “When Melanie was on stage, they asked everyone to light a candle and the entire universe lit up. It stretched as far as you could see and it was dark. And that’s when I got a sense of how huge it is. It took my breath away. I said something like, ‘Oh, wow man!’ ”

Nelson’s friend, who owned the VW Beetle, decided to leave before Woodstock ended, but Nelson chose to stay through the morning of Aug. 18 when Jimi Hendrix played his famous electrified version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

She needed to find a ride back to Pittsburgh and came upon a white van with Kansas plates. She offered the easygoing inhabitants of the van a place to crash; they agreed to give her and her paintings a ride to Pittsburgh.

Half a century later, Nelson is a freelance writer and artist living in Holbrook after becoming part of what she describes as the “back to the land movement.”

She bought a farm, got married and raised a daughter, Elise, who also is an artist. Her grandson and granddaughter are artists as well.

She looks back on Woodstock as a transformative event.

“It was the beginning of the great adventure of my life,” she said. “I realized that I have the power to be an artist and that I could take the energy of Woodstock with me for the rest of my life.”