Book Review: After Woodstock
The True Story of a Belgian Movie, an Israeli Wedding, and a Manhattan Breakdown by Elliot Tiber
The Stonewall uprising and the Woodstock festival are both well past fifty and both remain enshrined in the American memory — cataclysmic events in a cataclysmic year (1969) that transformed American culture and society. They also inspired endless creative works, some hazy with nostalgia and idealism, others grittier, hyper-detailed chronicles. After Woodstock: The True Story of a Belgian Movie, an Israeli Wedding, and a Manhattan Breakdown (Square One Publishers), falls into both camps — and campy it is. This memoir by gay icon, screenwriter and artist Eliot Tiber is a must-read if you’re looking for a great, rollicking firsthand account of those times, and what happened next.
In 1969, Tiber was a young man from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn whose parents, striving for a better life, had bought a rundown motel in Bethel (the grandly named El Monaco). When the Woodstock festival nearly tanked for lack of a space, Tiber helped land them on Max Yasgur’s farm. Exactly what his role was — either directly introducing Michael Lang to Max Yasgur or to the local realtor who introduced Lang to Yasgur — depends on who’s talking (Lang said the latter, according to the NYTimes), but Tiber did hold the permit that enabled the festival to go on, and his family’s motel housed participants. There’s no doubt that Tiber was instrumental in the festival coming to life, or that the festival brought Tiber to life as well.
Tiber’s bestselling Taking Woodstock (2007) was turned into a movie by Ang Lee and kept him on the countercultural map for a whole new generation. After Woodstock picks up with Tiber on the road in his Cadillac, flush with cash from the motel’s profits and heading to seek his fortune in California. As a writer, he’s bold and maximalist, and he goes for the obvious with gusto: as he discards the chicken soup and dry rye bread his parents gave him for the trip, it’s clear he’s shedding the constrictions of his boyhood. It’s also clear he found his mother beyond overbearing: She had instructed him to find a nice Jewish girl and start a family immediately upon arrival; what he does instead is find plenty of wildly colorful lovers (there’s even a hunk named Thor). Good for him.
As this exuberant memoir continues, there’s an incredible sense of a life well lived. His relationship with longtime partner, Belgian playwright and director André Ernotte, was turbulent, intense, and productive, resulting in a bestselling novel in Belgium (Rue Haute) and a film adaptation directed by Ernotte. The love between these two veers from serene to tumultuous and back again, a roller-coaster of attachment and need. As one succeeds, the other struggles, and Tiber writes with great perceptivity about the dynamics of two brilliant, vulnerable, ambitious people trying to be one.
Suffice to say that the title delivers on all of its promises, with great expansiveness and energy. There’s so much happening in these 461 pages that to say Tiber’s live was well-lived seems like an understatement. Tiber died at the age of 81 in 2016, and Square One, his publisher, has done well to keep his memoirs and his memory alive.
