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Lund couple recalls Woodstock experience

50 years ago, Powell River doctor was in charge of iconic festival’s ‘Bad Trip Tent’

“The brown acid that is circulating around us is not specifically too good. It's suggested that you do stay away from that.” ~  Chip Monck, MC, Woodstock Music Festival, August 1969.

Fifty years ago this weekend, the Woodstock music festival forever changed popular culture. It was an event that would not only come to define a generation, but become a zeitgeist touchstone for music festivals ever since.

Peter and Ronnie Uhlmann have lived in a homemade cabin in the forest near Lund for the past 47 years. They were very much a part of the hippie movement. Before the disillusioned American couple found the end of the road, they went to Woodstock.

In the late 1960s, Peter, originally from Chicago, had graduated from medical school and completed his internship and enlisted in the Public Health Service to avoid being drafted to Vietnam.

In the summer of 1969, Peter and Ronnie were in New York visiting Ronnie’s parents. Ronnie’s younger, teenage sisters saw an ad in the paper for a music festival upstate, something officially billed as “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music.”

The festival promised live performances by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and dozens of others on August 15, 16 and 17, 1969.

“Ronnie’s sisters were only 14 and 16 or something like that so Ronnie’s mom said they could only go if we chaperoned them,” said Peter, who was 28 at the time.

“So that’s how we ended up at Woodstock,” he added. “Nobody knew it would be anything special.”

That seems evident by the number of A-listers who passed on Woodstock, including Joni Mitchell, The Byrds, Led Zeppelin and The Doors, many of whom regretted missing it when news spread of what was going down on Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm.

“Ronnie, myself, the teenagers, and our two Siberian huskies drove up in our Volvo station wagon,” recalled Peter. “We arrived early, and we were lucky we did, because the roads became jammed with hundreds of thousands of people flooding in.”

Woodstock was originally intended to draw upwards of 150,000 fans. More than 400,000 showed up.

“What made Woodstock a monumental experience was all the people arriving,” said Ronnie. “Tickets were sold, but when all those people started showing up, it became a free festival. There was no antagonizing security, they just took down the barriers and let everyone in. It felt like the hippie dream come true.”

Festival organizers were famously unprepared for the onslaught, and Peter was soon swept up in it.

“We were sitting way up from the stage, mostly because of the dogs, when someone behind us had a seizure,” said Peter. “Since I was a doctor, I attended to this person, and took him to the only medical tent we could find, which was being run by two people: a local family doctor and a resident in psychiatry from Iran. That’s it! They asked me ‘are you a doctor? Can you help us?’ They were being inundated, so I joined in.”

Almost all of their patients were festival goers having bad trips, likely from that brown acid Chip Monck warned about from stage.

“I had done an internship in Oakland and had lots of experience with drug trips,” explained Peter. “I had also done a lot of imbibing myself, so the family doctor put me in charge of the ‘Bad Trip Tent.’ And so that’s where I spent the rest of Woodstock, talking people down. I never even saw the show.”

Meanwhile, Peter’s wife Ronnie and her two teenage sisters loved the experience.

“Before Woodstock, it felt like the hippie dream had died with the deaths of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King,” she said. “But as Woodstock grew, it felt like things could be transformed and get better. It was like a light rising on the horizon.”

There was literally a light rising on the horizon for many bleary-eyed hippies that weekend, since acts like The Who and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band performed at sunrise, with the show going on all night long on both Saturday and Sunday nights.

“I remember Arlo Guthrie playing the first night in the pouring rain,” said Ronnie. “He could have been electrocuted at any moment but he just kept playing. Janis Joplin was also wonderful.”

Back at the Bad Trip Tent, Peter was under the impression that they could be the only medical centre at the festival, but found out later there were others, including a crisis unit in another area, “but it was nowhere near us.”

About six months after Woodstock, Peter received a letter in the mail.

“It was from that family doctor in the medical tent,” he chuckled. “He thanked me and slipped in a refund for my ticket, which I thought was nice.”

Later in 1969, the Uhlmanns moved to Vancouver, where Peter studied psychiatry at UBC. By 1972, they settled in the Lund area with friends, where they built the home they still live in to this day, and where they raised three children. Their daughter, Tai Uhlmann, chronicled her parents’ story, as well as many others in the Lund area, in the 2018 film The End of the Road.

“I’ve worked as a physician and psychiatrist for five decades, I’ve studied tai chi for over three decades, and I’ve been married for over 55 years with a great family,” said Peter. “Andy Warhol said we get 15 minutes of fame. My fame is being at Woodstock by accident.”

Powell River’s own Sunshine Music Festival has been occurring for more than 35 years, and will once again be at Palm Beach Regional Park on Labour Day weekend with artists such as Jim Byrnes, Luke Wallace, Sister Speak and many more.