"I saw some geezer shouting into Pete’s microphone, saying we were a load of crap, which got up all our noses."

"Then I saw Pete come up — I’m not sure whether he hit Abbie Hoffman with the guitar, I think he pretended to hit him. Pete yelled, 'Do it again and I’ll kill you.' He wouldn’t have recovered if Pete had hit him on the head with a Gibson guitar. And Pete was never tried for murder, so I gather he didn’t actually do it. It was a kind of a stunt move.... Woodstock wasn’t peace and love. There was an awful lot of shouting and screaming going on. By the time it all ended, the worst sides of our nature had come out. People were screaming at the promoters, people were screaming to get paid. We had to get paid, or we couldn’t get back home."

Said Roger Daltrey, quoted in "WOODSTOCK AT 50/The Who’s Roger Daltrey Is Not Nostalgic for Woodstock/The singer remembers the endless waiting and how 'the worst sides of our nature had come out'/(But also how great Creedence Clearwater Revival was" (NYT).

There's no film footage of Abbie Hoffman barging onto the stage with The Who (who were famously terrible at Woodstock, playing at 5 in the morning), and the NYT tells us Hoffman said "that the focus shouldn’t be on music, but on the MC5 manager John Sinclair, who was in prison on a minor marijuana charge." But there is a sound recording, and it's possible to give a verbatim quote. I'll transcribe for you: "I think it's a pile of shit, while John Sinclair rots in prison." That's as far as Hoffman gets, before Pete Townshend does whatever he does, and the big crowd cheers.

Here's what Hoffman wrote about it in his autobiography:

If you ever heard about me in connection with the festival it was not for playing Florence Nightingale to the flower children. What you heard was the following: “Oh, him, yeah, didn’t he grab the microphone, try to make a speech when Peter Townshend cracked him over the head with his guitar?” I’ve seen countless references to the incident, even a mammoth mural of the scene. What I’ve failed to find was a single photo of the incident. Why? Because it didn’t really happen. I grabbed the microphone all right and made a little speech about John Sinclair, who had just been sentenced to ten years in the Michigan State Penitentiary for giving two joints of grass to two undercover cops, and how we should take the strength we had at Woodstock home to free our brothers and sisters in jail. Something like that. Townshend, who had been tuning up, turned around and bumped into me. A nonincident really. Hundreds of photos and miles of film exist depicting the events on that stage, but none of this much-talked about scene.