World Views of Woodstock

www.examiner.com/x-19134-Pittsburgh-Concerts-Examiner~y2009m8d14-Looking-back-Woodstock-turns-40

Woodstock’s representation of freedom has truly endured throughout the past 40 years. The generation was being held captive by its government’s decisions. The Vietnam War  was raging and pulling members of the generation overseas against their will. Symbols of hope for the generation. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated the year before. The need for an outlet and a voice was incredibly dire.

The event turned into an all-out protest once Country Joe McDonald performed his anti-war tune, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die”. With lyrics that burned the war effort and an infectious melody that brought the festival goers together in a sing along, there was no doubt in the minds of the attendees or the festival officials that Woodstock was turning into something bigger than a music festival.

…Woodstock is the greatest music festival the world has ever seen. There is no doubt that the festival will never be topped in either its symbolism or musical talent. There has never been, and there never will be, a better festival, or one that is more important to the world of music or the world in general, as the one that was put together in a field in rural New York. Those three days in the mud transformed the face of music and protests forever.

A UK Newspaper Talks About the Woodstock Legacy.

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/5995703/Woodstock-40-years-on-The-legend-the-legacy.html

• “…..The last time I saw her was 25 years to the day after Woodstock walking on the beach with one of her daughters, and I had not seen her for the years in between as the relationship was short lived with me being a new initiate and less skilled and aware than my predecessor… and her moving on to “better and more experienced things”. Getting back to Woodstock for a few lines, neither I nor anyone else expected it to be much more than a “music festival in the fields” but within hours of its beginning there had been created the third largest “city” in New York State, an honor that seemed appropriate as clouds of cannabis smoke rolled by and the speakers from the organizer tents provided announcements such as “Jenny, Bill has your pills, please go to tent four”, meaning of course that Bill had scored and now could not find Jenny to share in the experience of his newly acquired pills. The announcement system was a valued and much used service for many attendees. The music began with the carpenters still 40 ft. in the air nailing in the last parts of the stage. A moment of awe was created that night when a stage emcee asked the whole audience to light a match, and one could then see across the natural bowl of land 200,000+ matches being lit, making a rather incredible sight of human presence and light in the night…..”

Woodstock’s legacy…

The success of the festival has arguably fuelled every outdoor rock event since, from the Concert for Bangladesh, the star-studded charity show organized by George Harrison in 1971, to Live Aid (1985) and Live 8 (2005). Woodstock was also the precursor of Glastonbury, now in its 39th year of raising funds for environmental concerns.

AK: “Time magazine called it the greatest peaceful man-made event in history. The impact was like the war of the worlds, a time of love and hate. I think it was also the start of the end of the war. It showed that so many people were against the way people were treating each other. Forty years on, that still resonates and people can still see the significance of it. I think the anniversary is focusing people on the problems we still have today. But you can’t do another Woodstock because you can’t repeat a miraculous work of art. Woodstock was anti-business and capitalist. With a lot of them [the festivals], it is using people’s problems as a reason to make money on a concert.”

BL: “I think what Woodstock represented, and what it still represents today, is hope, which is in such short supply. These were such dark days: we’d had the assassinations [of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King] the year before, we were in Vietnam, there was tremendous division in American society. But Woodstock gave the hope that things could be different. A lot of people describe the inauguration of Barack Obama as a Woodstock moment. We’ve had eight dark years, but now there’s hope.

“Almost all of the big movements that have emerged over the years are elements of Woodstock that have survived. The green movement, the less-is-more mentality, and even the sexual revolution. Before Woodstock, the idea in America was that sex should only happen between married men and women at home with the lights out. But at Woodstock, there were naked couples kissing in the lake and couples making love in the grass.”

AG:”There was a constant hum at the time that you couldn’t trust young people because the nature of man is such that we need the disciplines of authority or else all hell will break loose. But here were hundreds of thousands of people with no regulation of any kind, who just all took care of each other. Woodstock showed that, in times of disaster or difficulty, people can take care of each other, and for that reason alone it reaffirmed my faith in people.”

ML: “When you’re young, you’re part of a generation that wants to change the world, and you want it changed tomorrow. We strived to make a point and extend some of our desires into mainstream America. Woodstock sowed the seeds for the green movement – nobody talked about organic gardening before Woodstock or had seen granola or long-grained rice, and all our kitchens on site used organic, locally-grown vegetables.

“It feels like we’re having another Woodstock moment now. Things have been going so badly for the past four years, and looked as if they might get even worse, and then we elect Barack Obama and suddenly the world is changing. The inauguration got the headlines, ‘Washington’s Woodstock’.

“You can’t plan magic like Woodstock. Glastonbury, Live Aid, all the others – they are all wonderful music events, but they haven’t had the impact on social behavior that Woodstock did. People who were there, and even people who watched it on TV, came away with a different take on how we can live with each other.”

Ellen Shapiro, co-owner of the Golden Notebook bookshop in Woodstock, who has lived in the town for more than 35 years: “I moved to Woodstock because I was drawn to the counter-culture and artistic atmosphere that became ingrained here after the festival. It’s still a music town. A lot of musicians live here and Michael Lang lives here. It still has the sense of being a real artists’ colony.

“Every weekend, people come into the store and want to talk about Woodstock. The festival definitely had an impact on the way people in the town see themselves and how the town itself is perceived. While some of the original settlers probably wish they’d never been part of it, most of us are proud of living somewhere so historic.

“After all, wherever I go in the world, people have always heard of Woodstock.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/5995703/Woodstock-40-years-on-The-legend-the-legacy.html