"People were walking around with water guns full of acid, squirting them in your face": What Aerosmith's Steven Tyler saw at Woodstock

Two bathers in a pond at Woodstock with (inset) Steven Tyler

(Image credit: Steven Tyler: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc via Getty Images | Woodstock bathers: United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo)

A cancelled gig back in August of 1969 allowed Aerosmith's Steven Tyler to be part of the hordes at the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair 55 years ago this week.

As Aerosmith was preparing to perform at Woodstock '94 – 40 years ago this week – he told this writer that the band he was playing in at the time had a show scheduled in New York's Greenwich Village during the festival weekend. But when it was scratched, Tyler – who was 21 at the time – and a friend grabbed a tent, hopped in a car and headed straight for Bethel, N.Y., to be part of the festivities.

"I came, I saw, I conquered," Tyler said. He even ran into future Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer on the grounds but was "so high I couldn't speak."

"I remember it was a great place to get fucked up," he recalled. "People were walking around with water guns full of acid, squirting them in your face. You'd be tripping in a matter of minutes.

"See, it was another generation," he continued. "Drugs was really the thing to do...There were 450,000 people just floating around the air, running around naked laughing and screaming."

Tyler did remember pitching the tent in the area occupied by the Hog Farm and taking a path labelled Groovy Way to the stage each day. And what he heard there stayed with him as well. "I remember Country Joe & the Fish, Janis Joplin, Santana, The Who...," Tyler said. "Music was the saviour."

Tyler wound up being in Bethel longer than expected, too. The weekend's heavy rains soaked into his car's gas tank. So he and his friend spent an extra day and a half at the site watching the massive clean-up effort. They even grabbed a Coca-Cola cooler that he was still holding onto as of 1994.

Aerosmith was the next-to-last act to play the Saturday night (Aug. 13) at Woodstock '94, going on just before Metallica on the festival's north stage. The 24-song set including eight songs from the then-current Get a Grip album, along with covers of Jake Holmes' Dazed and Confused, Henry Mancini's Peter Gunn theme, the Beatles' Come Together, James Brown's Mother Popcorn and a Joe Perry-sung rendition of Fleetwood Mac's Stop Messin' Around.

The band's then-manager Tim Collins famously got into a fight with co-producer John Scher backstage after watching Metallica do some things that Aerosmith had been told it could not.

Tyler and Aerosmith have been in the news again recently when the group announced it was retiring from touring, and cancelling all dates on its Peace Out farewell tour due to the vocal cord injury Tyler suffered in September 2023. The band said in its statement that Tyler "spent months tirelessly working on getting his voice to where it was before the injury. We've seen him struggling despite having the best medical team by his side. Sadly, it is clear, that a full recovery from his vocal injury is not possible."

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Gary Graff is an award-winning veteran music journalist based in metro Detroit, writing regularly for Billboard, Ultimate Classic Rock, Media News Group, Music Connection, United Stations Radio Networks and others. Graff’s work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Guitar World, Classic Rock, Revolver, the San Francisco Chronicle, AARP magazine, the Detroit Jewish News, The Forward and others. Graff has co-written and edited books about Bob Seger, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. A professional voter for the Grammy Awards and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Graff co-founded the Detroit Music Awards in 1989 and continues as the organisation’s chief producer.