Nine Variations on Pete Townshend and Abbie Hoffman

Nine Variations on Pete Townshend and Abbie Hoffman David Susman (bio) 1 On August 17, 1969, Abbie Hoffman stood stageside at Woodstock. He was high but not at all happy. The festival, it seemed to him, had failed to fulfill its promise as a political event, and had instead devolved into a burlesque of commerce and self-congratulatory entertainment. By the end of the second day, as The Who played their late-night set, Hoffman had had enough. He was determined to address the crowd, and in particular to advocate for John Sinclair, a leader of the White Panther Party, who had recently been sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of marijuana. Just after the band finished "Pinball Wizard," Hoffman made his move, rushing to the stage and seizing Pete Townshend's microphone while the guitarist was adjusting his amplifier. "I think this is a pile of shit," Hoffman bellowed, "while John Sinclair rots in prison!" Townshend, returning from his amp, wasted no time in his rebuttal. "Fuck off my fucking stage!" he barked, and bashed Hoffman with his guitar, knocking him into the photographers' pit ten feet below. Thus foiled, Hoffman righted himself, cursed at Townshend, and fled into the crowd. The incident was not captured on film. 2 Michael Lang, the twenty-five-year-old visionary behind Woodstock, later clarified the nature of the Townshend-Hoffman fracas: Townshend aimed his blow specifically at Hoffman's head, stunning him but not propelling him from the stage. Hoffman then leapt into the photographers' pit, nimbly hopped a fence, and "vanished into the crowd"—an exit, in Lang's view, more dramatic than cowardly. Lang had been sitting beside Hoffman just before the incident, trying to calm the volatile activist, who had been complaining repeatedly about the injustice done to Sinclair. "Chill out," Lang advised him, not realizing that Hoffman, who was famous precisely for his uncooperativeness, was also tripping on LSD. Hoffman sprang up and made for Townshend's microphone before Lang could stop him. [End Page 63] It was a rare moment of failure for Lang, a plucky go-getter for whom things tended to work out. He hadn't organized Woodstock so much as conjured it: traversing the Catskill Mountains by car, motorcycle, and horse, he'd found the perfect location in Max Yasgur's six-hundred-acre dairy farm, then put together an improbable coalition of hippies, municipal officials, and won-over locals, who assembled the event in a matter of months. When the turnout exceeded even Lang's expectations—exceeded it wildly, wonderfully, with half a million arrivals rather than the predicted one hundred thousand, all of them suffused with a beatific energy, more like adherents than concertgoers—he pronounced the event free. Townshend's brief scrap with Hoffman was the festival's rare instance of violence, and by the behavioral standards of rock concerts, it was nothing notable. Woodstock turned out to be, as Yasgur proclaimed in a commemoratory address to the crowd, the largest assemblage of people in human history, and almost inexplicably peaceful. It galvanized a generation and sustained it through the battles ahead. Without Woodstock, even more young men would have died in Vietnam. The excesses of the Reagan years would have gone unchecked. In the absence of Woodstock, LGBTQ+ rights would not be part of the public conversation. Black lives would not, in quite the same way, matter. 3 Strictly speaking, Hoffman was dispatched not by Townshend's guitar, but by a swift kick in the backside, according to Who chronicler Dave Marsh. Townshend, in Marsh's account, "put one of his Dr. Marten boots squarely into Hoffman's ass," then, using his Gibson SG as a secondary tool, "swatted" him off the stage—a description that paints Townshend as more exasperated than outraged. In truth, Townshend hadn't wanted to play Woodstock in the first place. Like his bandmates, he didn't enjoy festivals, and this one had been miserable even in its pre-performance hours: they'd had to wrest their promised money from Lang, who, at the last minute, was trying to avoid paying the acts—the festival was now free, he rationalized—and logistical mishaps...