I paid a visit a few weeks ago to Bethel, a very small town in upstate New York where I had been once before. As soon as I got there, it started raining. I wasn't surprised. The last time I was there it also rained quite a bit. That was in August 1969, when I was one of the 400,000 or so people who converged on the place to attend something called the Woodstock festival. I had headed there that time by instinct, like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, because I was 17 years old and anything involving guitars or hippies demanded my immediate attention. The opposition of my parents, the discouraging weather forecast and traffic so heavy it closed the New York State Thruway meant nothing compared with my need to get in on whatever this thing was going to be.
What it turned out to be, of course, was something none of us foresaw: not just a concert but a spontaneous utopian community. Now I was back, 39 years later--cue the wistful music--to visit the Museum at Bethel Woods, which is perched on the edge of the festival site and dedicated to telling the story of Woodstock and of the 1960s generally. A museum about Woodstock was probably inevitable. Those three days of peace, love and mud have become the baby boomers' version of the Trojan War, their collective foundation myth. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing was commemorated with interactive displays, a replica hippie bus and a gift shop.
The museum, which opens June 2, has been a consuming project for Alan Gerry. Long ago, he was a high school dropout who ran a business selling and repairing televisions in nearby Liberty, N.Y. But eventually he founded Cablevision, which he sold in 1996 for $2.7 billion to Time Warner. At 78, he's a venture capitalist who wears an American-flag pin on his lapel--which makes him an unlikely guy to devote himself to the legacy of a place that had a freak-out tent. But he does have a daughter who attended Woodstock (against his wishes). And another who missed out but persuaded him much later to buy the land where it all happened.
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