My Uncle Jock, Woodstock, and Unreliable First Impressions

Around the anniversary of 9/11, I always think of my Uncle Jock who died in October of that same year of a blood disease. The two tragic events are linked in my mind, and so it’s at this time of year that I miss Jock the most.

Jock was known best to his family for his kindness and humor and his joy of life. To the wider world, Jock was best known as the 24 year old kid who financed the 1969 Woodstock Music festival. In the book he wrote about his Woodstock experience, I’ve always had a favorite scene, because it includes my grandfather Alfred and my father Billy. This year, I realized for the first time that I am now the same age as Alfred was at the time of Woodstock. So, in the context of that scene, it is now Alfred who I relate to the most.

The unpropitious setting for the scene that I love takes place in a coffee shop after a funeral. Alfred, Billy, and Jock are wearing funereal black. Let’s also assume it was raining or at least gray outside. (Hold the improbable thought that you’re sitting at the table observing the three of them, a complete stranger knowing nothing about them.)

It was then and there that Jock revealed to Alfred his plan to hold a rock concert festival in a field in upstate New York, the scheme’s financial success predicated on the assumption that 50,000 people would pay good money to be there.

As Jock tells it, when it came to business ventures, his dad Alfred would always think first about the downside. If you told him you’d bought a stock, he’d say “Eh? How much have you already lost?” He made his curmudgeonly “quips” with an undertone of dry wit easily missed unless you were listening very carefully.

Grandpa Alfred once told me that my father had “stolen his golf swing,” transforming Alfred’s once glorious golf game into a duffer’s ignominy of short, errant shots. I was about ten at the time, and while I knew Alfred was kidding about the “theft,” he left me uncertain as to whether it was a serious grievance of his.

So, Jock was understandably nervous to tell Alfred about his concert idea. My father Billy, Jock’s older brother by eight years, was there as Jock’s wingman. Jock laid out the idea with a young man’s enthusiasm. Predictably, Alfred thought the idea was preposterous. There was no way Jock and his partners were going to find 500 people, much less 50,000, to pay good money to camp outdoors for three days to listen to a bunch of senseless noise.

When Alfred turned to my father to see whether he was endorsing his younger brother’s “madness,” my father abandoned his wingman duties and took on his natural role as conciliator, saying something to the effect of “I’m gonna let the boys handle this one on their own.”

Around that coffee shop table, I imagine lots of scowling and muttering from Alfred, lots of squirming and protest from Jock with a glare or two at older brother Billy, his absent wingman. Billy was probably trying to change the subject or put a positive gloss on whatever was going to happen.

As fate had it, Woodstock attracted 500,000 people, and it became an indelible icon of 1960s culture and music. As a business venture, however, it was an initial disaster. Jock and his partners were woefully unprepared for the crowds, and there was no gate “integrity,” so most did not pay.  Jock spent most of the Festival weekend ordering medical and other supplies with money he didn’t have. Bankruptcy was avoided, however, when Jock’s family came through for him with money to cover all the commitments he’d made and the checks he’d written. And eventually, the concert venture clawed its way back to breakeven through ancillary sales.

Although Alfred was as wrong as wrong can be about the concert’s potential, his skepticism about Jock’s ability to pull off a profitable rock concert adventure was on the money. All he had to know was a 24 year old with no experience was trying to pioneer a complicated entrepreneurial venture. The odds were with Grandpa.  

An endearing aspect of the book’s description of Woodstock was Jock’s expression of hope that if he was ever in some kind of distress, his family would do what it could to have his back. Of course, Jock didn’t think Woodstock would be a test of that hope, but when it was, his hope was justified by the family’s rescue of the venture. And, as far as I know, my father and grandfather were gratified to fulfill Jock’s hope of familial support. Immediately after the concert, my grandfather was quoted in a newspaper saying, “Jock’s a good kid.”

Leaving aside the financial aspect of Woodstock, on all other measures, the concert was a huge success, and our extended family was and is extremely proud to be associated with the concert through out kinship with Jock.

My last takeaway is this: if a stranger had indeed been sitting around that dismal, darkened coffee shop table, I don’t doubt that the stranger would have come away with an impression of a discordant and unhappy family. Alfred’s sardonic, cantankerous reactions, Jock’s disappointment in my father’s performance as wingman, and Alfred puncturing Jock’s enthusiastic bubble with his insistence that the concert would be a disaster all would have made the stranger see a family on the brink of many rifts.

That stranger would have been wrong. And as I think about that, I think about how I form initial impressions all the time based on observation and information far less comprehensive than my imaginary stranger would have been privy to at the coffee shop.

First impressions are inevitable, and I’m sure I’ll continue to form them. I think that’s human nature. But I’d like to try to remember just how shaky and contingent first impressions really are.

Finally, I’d like to be able to copy my grandfather and say that my son has stolen some of my tennis skills, but he and I both know I never had them!