Seniors get special rates at new Woodstock museum

By Steve James

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - By the time we got to Woodstock ... they'd built a museum.

The Museum at Bethel Woods brings the Age of Aquarius into the age of the Internet for $13 a ticket. Seniors over 65 -- which would account for many of those who attended the August 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair -- pay $11.

Four decades after hippies, yippies, flower children and freaks camped out on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y., future generations can now learn what the three days of music, peace, love and mud were all about.

"In 1969, one of the seminal events in our nation's history occurred right in our backyard, and today ... thousands of people still come from all over the world to visit the site of the Woodstock festival," said cable TV entrepreneur Alan Gerry.

His Gerry Foundation developed the museum and the nonprofit Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.

The museum is "an immersive and captivating multimedia experience that combines film and interactive displays, text panels and artifacts to explore the unique experience of the Woodstock festival .." according to the Web site www.bethelwoodscenter.org.

"WE ARE STARDUST, WE ARE GOLDEN"

There are lots of exhibits, including a full-size psychedelic hippie bus, and films and photographs taken by some of those who went there "to lose the smog" as Joni Mitchell wrote in her song "Woodstock."

The museum also includes a surround-sound movie theater showing "Woodstock: The Music." Located 90 miles (145 kilometers) north of New York City, it also addresses the ideals of an era when opposition to the Vietnam War divided the country -- community, diversity, civil and individual rights, drugs, activism and peace.

Woodstock, featuring The Who, Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, Sly and Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Grateful Dead, is an enduring symbol of the 1960's counterculture and was listed on Rolling Stone magazine's "50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll."

They were heady days and despite the joke that anyone who remembers the 60s, couldn't have been there, John Sebastian still recalls the festival where he played a solo set.

"My memory of walking on stage is of the sheer size of the crowd, people as far as the eye could see," said Sebastian, whose band the Lovin' Spoonful had broken up the year before.

Sebastian arrived at Woodstock by helicopter.

"We flew for miles and all we saw underneath were VW buses and tents and people on blankets. The closer we got the denser the people and you couldn't see the grass," he told Reuters.

"AND WE'VE GOT TO GET OURSELVES BACK TO THE GARDEN"