The crowd was smaller, the musicians amateur and Saabs replaced sandals as the favored form of transportation, but hundreds of people donned tie-dyed shirts to conjure the spirit of Woodstock anyway.
Twenty years after Richie Havens opened the Woodstock festival before 400,000 people, the late Max Yasgur's old farm filled with revelers Tuesday to celebrate one of rock 'n' roll's most sacred anniversaries."It was a deeply spiritual experience, and certainly people would want to come back," said comedian Wavy Gravy, the only one of Woodstock's original performers.
Gravy, wearing a beanie with a propeller and carrying a walking stick topped with a pig's snout, waved to festival veterans before being ushered into a forest of satellite dishes for one of dozens of interviews.
More free enterprise than free love was evident at the upstate New York meadow as tourists could choose between T-shirts emblazoned with "I survived the Woodstock Reunion" and "Was I Late?"
"I really honor the people whose spread this is for allowing this to take place," Gravy said. "It's very folksy."
It wasn't without a price. A man who said he was a relative of the field's new owners, Louis Nicky and June Gelish of New York City, asked a $5 "field restoration" donation from each carload. Police said the owners squabbled with merchants who tried to sell their wares.
True to the spirit of the original Woodstock, when fans swarmed over fences to turn it into a free concert, some motorists just waited until the landlord looked the other way and drove their vehicles onto the field.
Police were on hand to make sure traffic kept moving. There were no arrests, said Sgt. Charles Kulick of the Sullivan County Sheriff's Department. He estimated the crowd at about 600, the largest in a celebration that has been building for a week.
The most tension came when television reporters, nervously approaching 6 p.m. deadlines, competed for space near the commemorative plaque that is the only permanent fixture on the alfalfa field.
On the same corner where Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead performed 20 years earlier, a makeshift stage was built for stray amateur guitarists.