Barry Shapiro

Scarlet Disko: How old were you during Woodstock? Barry Shapiro: 18. S: What were you doing at the time? B: I had graduated high school in June. The following fall I would be going to film school at the School of Visual Arts in New York. After graduation I had been living with a bunch of people in a house in Rego Park, Queens (New York), Bobby [Torres], then the conga player in Joe Cocker’s Grease Band was one of them. He wasn’t around that often since he had been on the road with the band, but he had a room there. It was a house full of musicians and there was always music going on in the basement. S: How did you get to Woodstock? B: I went with my friend David who was a best friend at the time. We went in the back of a friend of David’s car. I didn’t know them and we didn’t stay with them during the festival. We were driving up Friday night when all of a sudden we’d reached a point where traffic had completely stopped. After awhile, out of nowhere, this guy in a pickup truck shows up and he gathered together a caravan of vehicles and said, “Follow me, I will get you there.” He had been doing this all evening, going back and forth from where he got us to where he took us. When he dropped us off as close as he could get us to the festival he told us, “Sleep here tonight, and when you wake up just follow the music.” (I think it was about a 3 mile walk from there.) If it weren’t for that guy in the truck we might not have ever made it to the festival. We followed the music in the morning. At some point I got separated from David and didn’t see him again until after we got home. I wound up getting into the festival and eventually I came upon 10 or so people I had just graduated high school with…it was perfect. I spent the next two days with them. We were directly in front of the stage up the ridge of the bowl, in other words not all the way in the back but certainly not near the front of the stage. It was a good spot, the sound was really good, and it...