Everybody ready? Just a few more days 'til the 40th Anniversary of

Woodstock.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/arts/music/09pare.html?hp

The sine qua non of rock concerts.

The Vietnam war was at its peak, and after the Kennedy & Martin Luther King assassinations and the police riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Woodstock was one of the few happy moments of the late 60's.

No, I wasn't there. I was working that weekend but a bunch of my friends headed down.

I'm sure their stories grow with the telling.

When the hippie subculture surfaced en masse at Woodstock, two years after the Summer of Love, it was still largely self-invented and isolated. There were pockets of freaks in cities and handfuls of them in smaller towns, nearly all feeling like outsiders. For many people at the festival, just seeing and joining that gigantic crowd was more of a revelation than anything that happened onstage. It proved that they were not some negligible minority but members of a larger culture — or, to use that sweetly dated term, a counterculture.

And four months later came Altamont.

 

"By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong, and everywhere was a song and a celebration ..."

 

Mud, rain, drugs and the idiots who organized it. It wasn't as much of a party as people romanticize it to be now.

 

This is one event that's been anniversaried to death with the same shit about it repeated over and over every 5-10 years. No thanks.

 

The story I'd like to see is of 10 kids who were conceived at Woodstock. Who are they, what are they doing at age 40, are any of their parents still alive, etc.

 

Trust Hondo to take one of a generation's most memorable moments and come up with his patented, "Hey, you kids, get off my lawn"

Did you come out of the womb a grumpy old man?

 

A few weeks back the Daily News had a story about the couple who became the symbol of the Festival and whose photo appeared on the album cover. Still together after forty years.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/2009/07/07/2009-07-07_woodstocks_undercover_lovers_.html#ixzz0Loo79kGk

 

Snoopy smiles.

 

Here's a link to the trailer for "Taking Woodstock" by Ang Lee which comes out at the end of the month:

 

Great story, I'm sure. But that picture's fucking disgusting.

I went to Bonaroo a few years back, and wasn't impressed there, either.

Same people. Same smell, I'm sure.

 

I was there. Had a good time, too. Left when it rained on Sunday, so I missed the mud part. Not too sorry.
Many great performances, and a few clinkers (Grateful Dead had major equipment problems, 7 a.m. EDT was really not a time when Jefferson Airplane felt, looked or sounded their best).
The Atlantic City Rock Festival earlier that summer at the old race track there was almost as good, if not as many acts. Last three acts were Janis Joplin followed by Ike and Tina Turner followed by Little Richard.