“Mark Berger’s memoir of the 1960s and its climactic event, the Woodstock Music Festival, is so richly evocative in its detail and presence, you’ll swear you were there.”
– TC Boyle, author of Outside Looking in: A Novel
“In concise and thoughtful episodes, Mark Berger has recreated his entrancing and eye-opening experiences through the years that culminated in the extravaganza of Woodstock. Fresh, honest, by turns gentle and wry, this is a rare and engaging first-hand look at an important time in our cultural history, with all its delirious ideals and sheer energy.”
– Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t
“The meadow outside Bethel, New York, is eerily empty and silent. Yesterday it held half a million cheering people, and only a few hours ago, the closer, Jimi Hendrix, recast the “Star Spangled Banner” as a firefight in the Mekong Delta. Mark Berger’s been here the whole time. Arriving four days early, he helped set up kitchens and paths. During the festival, he worked to calm kids tripping out on bad acid, maneuvered a water truck through a sea of spectators, and fell in love, twice. Woodstock was the Sixties condensed into seventy-two hours, and proof that peace and love could turn a potential disaster into a mythic celebration of life. Now, it’s decision time: Does he drop out and move to a commune in New Mexico or return to Brooklyn and become a teacher?
Something’s Happening Here begins in Brooklyn eight years earlier, in 1961, where Berger, determined to be true to himself, pledges to live his life boldly. With buddies like Zooby, Bird, and Spider, he experiences the thrilling fear of joy rides and the roller coaster of mind-altering drugs.
He’s swept up in the energy of revolutionary writers and musicians and connects with the counterculture’s spirit. Scenes abound, from catching the Coasters at a Brooklyn R&B club to digging Allen Ginsberg reading his poetry in a Tennessee steak house to having only a second to talk his way out of being sent to Vietnam.
At Woodstock it all comes together—who he is, what he believes, and which path he has to take. Berger’s vivid storytelling brings the moments to life with an immediacy that show you why something’s happening here.”
– Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press
“Mark Berger has a Zelig-like quality, being in exactly the right place in which America is changing at exactly the time, it is doing so. He writes from the streets of a hellish New York during Brooklyn’s last days as the land of the tough kids; from the coffee shops and bare apartments where the Beat Poets gathered before their voices rose to try and save us; the deep south during the worst of our suspicious times; peering into the abyss of the national draft, the art scene of the sixties, and the insistent experimentation of the seventies that tore at the heart of marriage and family. He writes clearly and with a great eye, and the book feels like nothing less than the story of the America we sowed that we are now reaping today.”
– Marion Roach Smith, author, The Memoir Project, A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life
“Historians have often bemoaned the subjectivity inherent in the writing of memoir, a tension which, 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 it purposes and finds memoir’s frank subjectivity and notorious unreliability irresponsible.” Yet, there is much historians can and have extracted from memoirs if they are but willing to ask the right questions…
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 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 50th 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. Once on site, [Hugh] Romney (later known as Wavy Gravy) 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 11th, 1969, four days before the first act (Richie Havens) went on at 5:07 pm on the evening of Friday, August 15th.
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 concert’s music is noted and he was able to catch sets by Creedence Clearwater Revival and Joe Cocker, Berger’s focus was more on the infrastructure of the festival and the people who attended, not the bands.
Summarizing his thoughts on the phenomenon that Woodstock was as a mass-gathering, Berger recounts that, while watching Joe Cocker perform the Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends,” the song became an anthem “about all of us here at Woodstock. How has everyone gotten through all the bummers—the chaos, traffic jams, thunderstorms, the hunger, the heat, all of the rotten conditions? How? With a little help from our friends—a shared sandwich here, a laugh, a sip of water there, a toke, a free meal, a smile, a kiss, a hug.”
…Something’s Happening Here is a valuable addition to the study of New York State in the 1960s as it presents a well-written and historically accurate account of the cultural and interpersonal experiences of its author.”
– Review by Devin R. Lander, the New York State Historian and coeditor of the journal, New York History, 2019/2020.
“He writes about it with a well-wrought charm and poignancy that rings true if you went through those years like I did.
Berger trips through everything for us–through hanging out, getting an education, and finding a life path…
Mark’s innate and pronounced “easy writer” brilliance makes this read absorbing and moving.
He was paying attention and face it, not everybody understood like Mark obviously did.
For anyone who lived through the ’60s it will make you smile and remember and for those who did not you will get a feeling for some of how it felt.
Read this and appreciate some focused prose, do!”
– Grego Applegate Edwards, Grego’s Yakety-Yak
“The author, who lives in Nassau, has written a joyful memoir about the rollicking days of the 1960s. The story begins in 1961 when he joins up with his three friends Zooby, Bird and Spider and together they determine they are going to live an exciting life. It’s a great time to be young and alive in New York City where he encounters revolutionary writers and musicians and gets caught up with the spirit of the counterculture. The story concludes with his four days at the Woodstock music festival in 1969. The strong writing allows the reader to relive those culturally important and historic days.”
– Jack Rightmyer, Albany Times Union / Unwind: Roundup of Local Books, Sunday, May 8, 2012