Something’s Happening Here: A Sixties Odyssey from Brooklyn to Woodstock by Mark Berger (review)

Historians have often bemoaned the subjectivity inherent in the writing of memoir, a tension that, as historian Louise W. Knight suggests, erupts “most intensely in the form of history’s grumpiness about memoir’s relationship to objective truth” as “history wants memoir to serve its purposes and finds memoir’s frank subjectivity and notorious unreliability irresponsible.”¹ Yet, there is much historians can and have extracted from memoirs if they are but willing to ask the right questions. “Because memoir is first and foremost a text written by a living human being about her past and read by another human being,” Knight explains, “the truths it is best equipped to reveal are either cultural or interpersonal.”²

Which brings us to first-time author Mark Berger’s memoir of his life in the 1960s. Berger was born and spent much of his life in Brooklyn and during the 1960s was very much a part of the countercultural upheaval taking place. In many ways representative of the larger ’60s counterculture, Berger is the white son of working-class parents who rebelled against his conservative upbringing in the early ’60s by first hanging out at black R&B clubs, drinking and smoking pot, and taking joy rides in stolen cars. This youthful rebellion morphed into something different as the ’60s progressed, and by the summer of 1969, Berger found himself living in a commune that was serendipitously invited by the Hog Farm to help set up the comfort facilities, such as they were, at the Woodstock festival.

Berger’s memoir is organized into five sections made up of short “chapters” that relate to the theme of the sections. Some of the sections are nonchronological, and the reader very much gets the sense that they are experiencing the remembrances of the author as he remembers them, not as they happened. Berger observed or took part in many events of interest to historians of 1960s New York, and his memoir has much to reveal about the culture of the times as he experienced it. Berger took part in the civil rights movement through Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and attended fundraising concerts for the organization where the likes of Odetta and Pete Seeger performed, dropped LSD, hung out with the psychedelic researcher Peter Stafford and poet Allen Ginsberg at Ginsberg’s apartment, was thrown out of East Tennessee State University for possession of marijuana, lost his draft deferment and barely avoided being sent to Vietnam, then ended up living with the Catskill Mountain–based Ohayo Mountain Family commune on the eve of the Woodstock festival.

The section on Woodstock is the largest in the book and timely considering 2019 is the fiftieth anniversary of the concert. The story of how the Ohayo Mountain Family (and Berger) came to attend Woodstock is of interest and directly related to the concert’s promoters asking the Hog Farm commune to take part in the festival by building trails and fire pits at the site. The Hog Farm’s de facto leader Hugh Romney (later known as Wavy Gravy) convinced the promoters that the concert would need a free kitchen as well as other comfort facilities due to the enormous number of attendees he knew would come. Once on site, Romney quickly realized the Hog Farm was undermanned and reached out to other communes in the area for assistance, including the Ohayo Mountain Family. Berger and the rest of his communal colleagues arrived at Max Yasgur’s farm, the Woodstock concert site in Bethel Woods, on August 11, 1969, four days before the first act (Richie Havens) went on at 5:07 p.m. on the evening of Friday, August 15. Berger spent the days leading up to the concert clearing rocks and brush to make paths, unloading supplies, helping to build the free kitchens, and generally making himself useful. While the...