Museum revisits Woodstock, ‘60s

Jimi Hendrix’s dive-bombing guitar runs on “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Rain chants. Joe Cocker’s chicken strut. The love, mud and three days of music.

The Woodstock experience is a museum piece now.

The Museum at Bethel Woods opens Monday on the site of the old dairy farm northwest of New York City that was trampled under by some 400,000 people on the wet weekend of Aug. 15-17, 1969. Part of a $100-million music and arts center, it tells the story of Woodstock.

Mocked recently by conservatives as a “hippie museum,” the exhibits actually give a thorough look at the generation-defining concert and the noisy decade that led up to it.

Displays include a run of the chain link fence placed around the concert site in a futile bid to keep out freeloaders and a plaque telling the story of Leni Binder, a local woman who made peanut butter sandwiches for the concert kids.