Bethel, N.Y., event celebrates 40 years since Woodstock

BETHEL - There'll never be anything like Woodstock again. But there could be.

Participants and others who gathered Friday to celebrate the legendary music festival's 40th anniversary were divided on whether such a groundbreaking concert could occur once more.

"There's absolutely no way it could happen again," insisted Leni Binder, a Sullivan County legislator who campaigned to preserve the site from development and helped erect a monument on it. "Woodstock was a place in time. Today everybody would be stopped [far from the site] because of the traffic jam and the public safety hazards. You can't repeat it because the people have changed, the mood has changed."

Sam Yasgur isn't so sure. The son of Max Yasgur, who owned the dairy farm where the concert took place, said, "It was an organic event. It just came together. You couldn't produce it to come together that way." Then again, he added, "It might come again someday. Who can tell?"

On Friday, a steady stream of concert veterans and others who missed it visited the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts and its Woodstock museum, which now occupy the concert site. Singer Richie Havens, the festival's opening act, and others involved in the 1969 event spoke to dozens of media representatives from around the globe.

Havens sang "Freedom" - the song he made up on the spot in '69 at the conclusion of a 2-hour-and-45-minute performance - for the gathered media at the top of the natural amphitheater before performing in concert at the new museum Friday night.

There "absolutely" could be another festival like Woodstock, said Havens, who added that one was held in Brazil later the same year.

Nick and Bobbi Ercoline of nearby Pine Bush, who became instantly famous when a candid photograph of them huddling under a sleeping bag on the muddy field became the cover of the Woodstock documentary soundtrack, differed on the question.

"They tried twice," said Bobbi, 60, referring to previous anniversary concerts upstate in Saugerties and Rome that, for her, didn't match the vibe of the original.

"I think it's possible," Nick countered. "But it can't be a planned thing. It was the ultimate happening."

Mary Ellen Landi, 59, of Merrick came back to Bethel for the first time since '69 with the same friend she attended the original festival with, Gary Hoffman of Rocky Point. "We had to," she said. "It's surreal."

Asked if she thought someone could replicate Woodstock, she said, "Absolutely not, because of the mentality of the human condition today." She said the two subsequent anniversary concerts were not the same because "you had to buy water."

Havens remains unabashedly upbeat about the ongoing potential of what Woodstock set in motion. Thanks to the political and cultural movement launched here four decades ago, he said, "We can definitely stop some things we are doing to the planet."