Woodstock, Again…
(A diatribe.)
Forty years ago one of my best friends said he was driving up to this festival north of the city and did I want to come. We were fifteen. I said no, though I would have liked to have seen the bands. But the last thing I wanted to do was hang out with fifty or sixty thousand potheads. I still don’t regret it, even though they were half a million strong.
I was just flipping the dial and caught some remembrance show on VH1. Woodstock 40 years later. And all the talking heads were wearing sweaters and looking prosperous and I thought to myself, what a bunch of crap. The kind of folks who think rock and roll is about paying $150 to go see the Stones in the Meadowlands. I mean, come on. There have been some great bands that formed after 1971, but I got the feeling the people to whom this documentary is geared never really noticed. Hendrix, man. We changed the world.
Right. And so much for the better, too.
Funny, I had much the same reaction — and I was there: I’m one of the very few teenagers who went to Woodstock with his mom. When I was seventeen, I’m afraid I was a bit prissy, and the mud was just overwhelming (to the point that it even negated the adolescent tropism for naked hippie chicks.
At night, tripping hippies would climb the light towers for a better view. Chip Monck, one of the Digger, was the emcee, as it were, and his giant, echoey voice would come out of these giant speakers, the lights from the other towers would zero in on the culprit, and all 400,000 concert-goers would start yelling: “Get DOWN!! Get DOWN!!” I can’t imagine what that must have been like with a hit or two of Owsley burbling your brain, but to me, it was as close to Nuremberg and “Sieg HEIL” as I ever want to get.
And the latter-day me-toos are just object lessons in hippy-gone-mainstream, looking for the main chance. I share your distaste for them (To me the epitome was Jerry Rubin, former Yippie-turned-network-partier.
Scuse me while I kiss this guy.
PHM
Comment by Peyton Moss — August 25, 2009 @ 2:46 pm
I was prissy too. Still am. Then again, I probably would have yelled at the tripping hippies to get down, too.
Comment by Administrator — August 25, 2009 @ 10:37 pm