Woodstock revisited: Back to the garden
http://www.buffalonews.com/entertainment/story/751519.html
Believing that music can change the world
By Jeff Miers
August 02, 2009,
It seems almost quaint now, in this age of all but countless
festivals, from Bonaroo to Bethel and back again. But 40 years ago,
when a few rather idealistic beatniks conceived of a three-day
celebration with a soundtrack of the era's finest musicians and
songwriters, they were exploring uncharted territory.
Woodstock paved the way for what we now understand to be a de rigueur
part of the summer concert season.
But it did so much more. Woodstock presented us with a mythology that
has framed rock music ever since.
Making the world safe for long, often muddy, even more often
financially exploitative, and invariably pungent (in one way or
another) rock festivals might be a dubious achievement. One could
argue that a four-hour show in a more intimate environ with a band or
two you really care about -- not to mention easier access to cold
beer and running water -- beats rolling around in the mud on some air
force base allotment or cow pasture, hands down.
Woodstock did create the paradigm for everything from the California
Jam fests of the '70s, to Live Aid in the '80s, to traveling road
shows like Lollapalooza and Ozzfest, which became don't-miss events
in the '90s.
It also signaled an end to the idealistic, community-based essence of
'60s rock music. After Woodstock, rock was big business, not an
underground convergence of the like-minded. The festival managed to
simultaneously encapsulate all that was good about the subculture of
the '60s, and sound its death-knell as an underground movement.
What blossomed almost immediately following the event, however, has
endured. At its core, this mythology is the belief that the music
itself can be transformative; that actively engaging in creating it
and listening to it can teach us to live more fully in the moment. By
extension, those who have been altered somehow by immersion in the
music can then go out and effect change in the world.
It's the willful embracing of that mythology one that proved to be
naive, deeply flawed, hopelessly Utopian that has been the impetus
for most of the great music that has been made since.
So how does believing in something that seems wholly impossible and
counter to logic become a brave and artistically empowering act?
Woodstock, as cliche-ridden and posture-bound as has been the
scholarship surrounding the event over the past 40 years, still
provides the answer. It was a crazy idea that almost made sense, a
pipe dream that stumbled into reality like a newborn, basked in the
brief glow, and then passed out in the mud.
But it was enough. The window was now open.
The popular spin on Woodstock suggests that it was all flowers,
hand-holding, LSD and skinny-dipping. Maybe it was, for a large
portion of the crowd. The best reporting on Woodstock, however, isn't
really reportorial at all. It takes the form of a poem, penned by a
songwriter who wasn't at the concert itself.
Joni Mitchell wrote the song "Woodstock" as the festival was taking
place, after being ditched at the airport by her traveling
companions, Crosby Stills & Nash. She watched the whole thing unfold
on television, but somehow managed to capture the romantic mythology
that had midwived the festival's birth.
Remarkably, Mitchell's song which became a big hit in a radically
restructured form for CS&N came across as both world-weary and
jubilant, as if she knew that the very concepts she was conjuring
would not survive the grim realities of morning.
"We are stardust/ Billion year old carbon/ We are golden/ Caught in
the devil's bargain/And we've got to get ourselves back to the
garden," runs the refrain of the prayerlike tune, and though these
words have been deemed the nadir of hippie-dippy idealism in the
years since, they are the opposite.
Mitchell saw the festival in biblical terms, as indicative of fallen
man's yearning to return to the Garden of Eden. It wasn't about a
bunch of rock bands playing for a mostly wasted tribe of hippies in a
mud pit. It was about a generation attempting to reclaim its
birthright, to, in Mitchell's words, "lose the smog" and the feeling
of being "a cog in something turning." It was about grabbing the
concept of freedom by the scruff of the neck and throwing it around,
to see what it was made of.
Far from the naive optimism so often associated with Woodstock
reminiscence, Mitchell's song is presented as a dream, but it's a
dream that knows it's not likely to make the leap from sleep into
reality once the dreamer wakes up. This is what gives the song its
power and resonance. It's also the true legacy of Woodstock, this
willful belief that the marriage of music and thought and compassion
might turn "bombers riding shotgun in the sky" into "butterflies
above our nation."
Well, no, it can't. And yes, it can.
It really doesn't matter if you were at Woodstock, or elsewhere, or
perhaps not even born yet. The wave crested, and then it rolled back,
leaving a generation's hopes washed up on the beach. There they sit,
waiting to be picked through, used as raw materials in the
construction of new dreams.
Maybe the concept of "hippie" is anathema to you. Maybe you simply
see rock festivals as gross capitalism run amok, or a simple excuse
for people to gather, party, and forget themselves for a while.
Perhaps you feel that glorifying and honoring the past to the degree
that Woodstock and the acts associated with it has been over the
past 40 years means that we overlook the best that the present has to
offer in the process.
Regardless, Mitchell's poem applies to you when it hits its emotional
peak with these words: "I don't know who I am/But life is for learning."
Those words, and the approach to life that informs them, still
glitter and gleam in the sun, 40 years on.
--
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Were you there? Woodstock still golden after 40 years
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/music/1694990,SHO-Sunday-woodstock02.article
40 YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, the music lovers who flocked to an upstate
New York farm felt a spirit of peace, hope and community that was
unequaled until Obama's inauguration
August 2, 2009
BY MIKE THOMAS Staff Reporter
The million-strong throng that assembled for President Obama's
inauguration in January has been likened to a modern-day Woodstock.
And, indeed, it's probably the closest any recent mass gathering has
come to exuding the exceedingly groovy peace-and-love vibe that
rippled across a rain-soaked sea of humanity pooled on Max Yasgur's
farm near Bethel, N.Y., in 1969.
For one blissful and emotionally charged day, a flood of cheering,
weeping, clapping revelers (and a handful of detractors) filled
Washington's National Mall, turning the vast expanse between the
Capitol building and the Lincoln Memorial into a less muddy version
of the most mythical musical blowout in American history: the
three-day Woodstock Music and Art Fair. The latter marks its 40th
anniversary starting Aug. 15.
"At both, there was a wonderful feeling of community," New York Times
columnist Gail Collins wrote at the time. "Along, of course, with the
sense that at any moment, you could be trampled to death by thousands
of very friendly people who were being moved around like the world's
most mellow herd of cattle."
Also, it's probably safe to assume, there was less tripping and
relatively little public humping.
Still, as eyewitnesses have attested, to truly comprehend the
magnitude and impact of both culturally momentous events, you really
had to be there. And in the case of Woodstock, it probably helped to
have avoided the brown acid.
"Being in the middle of it, you didn't realize what a big deal it
was," says Chicago resident and Chicago Board of Trade floor trader
Damien Reynolds, who was only 17 when he trekked (actually flew -- he
had a monied benefactor) east to hang with hippies. "It wasn't until
I got home. In fact, I got home and one of my sisters held up a copy
of Life magazine and said, 'Look, you're in Life magazine.' "
In a case of right place, right time, Reynolds -- who moonlights as
an illustrator -- had been strumming a stranger's guitar with his
female companion (named Bobbie, she hailed from a well-off family in
Indianapolis) on the trunk of a slow-moving Chevy Impala when Rolling
Stone magazine's first chief photographer, Baron Wolman, happened by
and captured the moment on film.
"And I kind of went, 'Oh, cool,' " Reynolds says, recalling his
blithe reaction to the published picture. "I was 17. I probably
thought I was going to be in Life magazine all the time."
When Reynolds and Bobbie arrived at the site, organizers were still
busy setting up stages and sound equipment. In the skies above, they
saw helicopters ferrying in talent. Since the New York State Thruway
was gridlocked with would-be revelers, it was the most efficient
shuttling system available.
Chicagoan Grace Jewell's ex-husband Jimmy Jewell was among those who
got a bird's-eye view of the grounds. A member of the Keef Hartley
Band, which jammed between John Sebastian and Santana on day two, he
later told her about the experience.
"They landed in New York and they got in limos and they started
driving to upstate New York," Jewell says. "And it took an awfully
long time. [Jimmy] said to me he thought the Americans were very,
very rude, because they kept giving him the peace sign and he thought
it meant what it does in Europe [up yours]. And finally they got to
their hotel, and when they got there, of course, all the rooms had
been given away. So they ended up crashing on [Jefferson Airplane
vocalist] Grace Slick's hotel floor. The next day they were going to
play, and they were going to go in these old Army helicopters. And so
they're sitting on this helicopter, and it's all rolling farmland
[below], and all of a sudden they look at the horizon and it's black.
They go, 'What the hell is that?' They got close and realized it was people."
Possibly the biggest bunch of chilled out -- and zoned out -- people
on the planet.
"There was a good vibe going around," Reynolds says. "I didn't see
any fights. I didn't see one drunk. There were a lot of people high as a kite."
But of course. Woodstock and high are like the Chicago Cubs and
heartbreak -- forever intertwined.
"It was like vendors at Comiskey walking around, shouting, 'I got
acid! I got weed! '" Reynolds remembers. " 'I got windowpane!' I got
Owsley [a special form of LSD].' Naming every drug you could think of."
Despite the frequently free cornucopia of illicit substances,
Reynolds says he partook of none.
"I'm probably the only person at Woodstock who didn't do something,"
he says. "Which is probably why I can remember it."
Former Chicago resident Steve Tappis, on the other hand, has a
somewhat harder time detailing his Woodstock experience -- in part,
he half jokes, "'cause of the acid."
Tappis now lives in California, but Chicago was his off-and-on home
for 20 years, starting in 1968, when he came for the Democratic
National Convention. Shortly thereafter, he got involved with a
nascent local organization of activists who put out a publication
called Rising Up Angry. Co-founded and led in part by former college
football player Michael James, longtime proprietor of the Heartland
Cafe in Rogers Park, the rebellious and unabashedly strident RUA -- a
self-styled working-class white version of the Black Panthers and the
Hispanic Young Lords Organization whose slogan was "To Live We Must
Fight" -- held dances, set up health clinics for the poor, pushed for
racial equality and preached against the proverbial Man -- be he pol
or "pig." RUA's mission, Tappis says, was to reach out "to people who
didn't feel comfortable either around college students or hippie
types. The kind of people who worked at gas stations or went in the
Army as opposed to going to college."
RUA's first issue, in July 1969, included a James-penned editorial
that declared, "Rising Up Angry is about our people, by our people,
for our people. It comes out of Chicago -- hard, low-down dirty,
straight-on Chicago. Right on! Our people! Dig it!"
Having loaded stacks of the righteous newspaper for propagandizing
purposes, a few carloads of RUA members motored up to Bethel, N.Y.,
to check out the acts -- Richie Havens; the Who; Joe Cocker; Crosby,
Stills, Nash & Young; the Grateful Dead; Jefferson Airplane; Jimi
Hendrix, to name a handful of the most storied -- and maybe even
score with some far-out femmes.
"So I showed up at Woodstock with all these people, and we had these
nine guys come strutting in wearing creased purple pants 'cause they
figured they'd be stylin' for this concert," Tappis recalls. "They
wanted to be looking good representing the South Side, so they're
wearing these silk shirts and little hats strutting in. And it was
just all mud. And these guys were venturing out, seeing if they could
make it with some hippie chicks.
"One thing I kind of remember is as we're walking in, one of the
younger guys, like a senior in high school, says, 'Steve, you think
my rap's gonna work on a hippie chick?' Just at that moment, these
young girls come walking [by], totally naked. It's all muddy, and
they're not wearing any shoes. And he's worried about his alligator
shoes getting scuffed. And he says, 'Well, you don't have far to talk
'em into anything when they're starting out naked.' " Tappis laughs
at the memory.
One of the guys, Tappis says, got so sucked into the scene that he
hacked off his fancy pants at the knees, wrapped his shirt around his
head and went frolicking in filth.
"The whole thing was a transformative event for at least these nine
people," Tappis says. "It's like they went off to a foreign country
where everything was reversed."
Michael Lang, who co-created and produced Woodstock -- and who is a
key figure (albeit a fictionalized one) in Ang Lee's forthcoming
comedy "Taking Woodstock," which opens Aug. 28 -- spent years trying
to escape his famous fete's shadow. But even now, 40 years later, the
association remains.
"Afterward, I tried to give myself distance from it," says Lang, who
went on to produce many other events large and small in a variety of
media. "Because if you don't, it can run your life."
He became closely connected to it once again during the research and
writing of his recently released book, The Road to Woodstock (written
with Holly George-Warren), which is part memoir and part oral
history. The topic, he thinks, is still relevant -- especially in
this Age of Obama. Like Obama's ascendancy to the presidency and the
groundswell of hope that accompanied it, Woodstock was a "spark" that
brightened the bleakness.
"Woodstock was kind of like that moment of hope as well during a very
dark time," he says. "An unpopular war in Vietnam and a lot of
violent protests going on. And then here comes this amazing,
peaceful, mass gathering of youths, and suddenly we get another
chance to look at ourselves and think that maybe there's a better way."
--------
Far out: Woodstock co-founder lives in Delray Beach
http://www.pbpulse.com/music/2009/08/01/far-out-woodstock-co-founder-lives-in-delray-beach/
By Leslie Gray Streeter
August 01, 2009
It's been a long road from a 600-acre farm in Bethel, N.Y., to a
comfortable, one-story home in a gated community in Delray Beach.
But it all makes sense to Artie Kornfeld.
The 66-year-old, Brooklyn-born Kornfeld has packed in a lifetime's
worth of interesting experiences - from watching his parents fight
for civil rights in the segregated South to co-writing songs such as
The Pied Piper and Dead Man's Curve.
But it's what happened on that farm 40 years ago that has him
fielding calls from all over the world. Along with Michael Lang, John
Roberts and Joel Rosenman, he created a little music festival called
Woodstock, where he was famously dosed with acid and spent three days
tripping on peace, love and music.
He's writing about it in an upcoming memoir, The Pied Piper of
Woodstock, and when he looks back on 1969, he explains the festival
in the lingo of a man still dazed from the experience.
The Pied Piper, says Kornfeld, "got all the bad people out, so the
children could be free to express themselves."
The three-day event, on Aug. 14-16, 1969, brought 500,000 seekers to
Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y. They endured impossible
traffic and torrential rains to have their minds summarily expanded
and blown by communal positivity, by the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, The
Who, Joe Cocker, Santana and Jefferson Airplane, and, in many cases,
by a variety of legal and illegal substances.
Forty years later, Kornfeld, an award-winning producer, writer and
manager, who's worked with everyone from Brian Wilson and Jan and
Dean to Vanilla Ice and Sheryl Crow, now lives quietly in Delray
Beach with longtime girlfriend Caroline Ornstein and fluffy cat Boo Boo.
But to Kornfeld, it's just another stop on a curious, painful but
ultimately bountiful journey. And if the conversation lasts long
enough, there are shockingly casual reminders that he isn't the
typical Delray transplant from New York.
"This is Jimi's belt," he says at one point.
Jimi? Jimi Hendrix?
"Yeah," Kornfeld says, lifting his T-shirt and pointing to the
intricate strip of leather holding up his jeans. He seems more
impressed with the artistry of the leatherwork - "This is tie-dyed
leather!" he says. "You can't do that!"
"There's no B.S. with Artie," says his friend Rochelle Kerner. "His
stories are truly astounding. He really is the history of rock and roll."
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and Boca Raton resident Dion DiMucci
agrees. "He's a very soft-spoken guy, a visionary," says Dion, who
worked with Kornfeld back in the day. "He's a real lover of the
music, and (of) getting it to the people's hearts."
Kornfeld is a man of principles, too, some of which have prevented
him from making as much money as he could have. He protested Pepsi's
sponsorship of Woodstock '94, the 25th-anniversary concert because
"that means politics were involved … It was sponsored by the enemy."
(An ill-fated third concert, Woodstock '99, in which he was not
involved, exploded in a rash of rapes, fights and fires, which
Kornfeld said he envisioned 30 years earlier at the original show, as
a result of the psychedelic drugs he'd been passed.)
Kornfeld's sense of community responsibility was instilled early by
father Irving, a police officer and union organizer, and mother
Shirley, instrumental in the segregation-busting Freedom Rides
sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
"Woodstock started for me when we moved to North Carolina, and I saw
the hatred," says Kornfeld, who recalls giving his bus seat to an
African-American woman who, by law, should have gone to the back, and
having the police called on both of them. It was an experience "that
enraged me," said Kornfeld.
In 1969, though, he was an entrenched part of The Establishment. "I
was not counterculture. I produced the music that caused the
counterculture to happen," says Kornfeld, who, by the age of 21, was
the youngest vice president ever at Capitol Records and eventually
earned more than 100 gold records.
It was his industry work on the corporate, rather than musical, side
of the business that sparked a conversation over a game of pool with
Lang, a Miami head shop owner and concert promoter. "Michael said,
'You never get to go to shows anymore,' " Kornfeld recalls.
The two dreamed up a concert involving the giants of the day, like
The Who and the Beatles, perhaps at a Broadway theater, but
Kornfeld's wife, Linda, suggested they do it on a farm. Lang had
friends in Woodstock, N.Y., so they began planning for a massive
festival there. Kornfeld predicted about 50,000 attendees, with Lang
predicting twice that and Linda Kornfeld projecting 500,000, which
turned out to be about right.
Kornfeld threw himself into the project, even though he's sure it
cost him the presidency of Capitol Records - "I started doing radio
interviews, saying 'If you're tired of saying "I had a friend come
home dead from Vietnam," peacefully show up at Woodstock.' "
The concert, named for the nearby small town, was to have taken place
in an industrial park in Wallkill, but officials nixed those plans.
It was then moved to Yasgur's farm in Bethel.
Even though he was one of the producers, Kornfeld hitchhiked to the
show because of last-minute business in New York and got stuck in the
horrendous traffic, just like everybody else. And once there, his
experience was profound, from his scary trip to the music to the
relative lack of violence.
"There was a cocoon that covered us, a pod of protection over us,"
says Kornfeld, who is keeping some of his juiciest memories for his book.
In the years since Woodstock, Kornfeld's fortunes have grown, waned
and stabilized. He lost his first wife, Linda, in the early '80s. And
then his 16-year-old daughter, Jamie, to a drug overdose.
"It's all for a purpose, isn't it?" he says. "I thank God I had a
daughter for 16 years, and don't say 'You son-of-a … you know.' "
He's been sober for years, and doesn't touch anything stronger than
Pepsi Max and cigarettes. Kornfeld moved to Broward County in 1999,
and then to Delray five years ago, where he lives with Caroline
Ornstein. He is working with some bands, and wrote a few songs for a
B.B. King album that has yet to be released.
"He writes songs all the time," says Ornstein. "I tell him, 'You
should record that,' and he'll say, 'That's just for now, not for them.' "
Kornfeld doesn't share all of his music, but he's keeping the
Woodstock spirit alive in his Woodstock Nation show on ArtistFirst
Radio, on his Web site (artiekornfeld-woodstock.com) and in every
interview he gives, whether it's to a European journalist or an area
middle school student doing a project.
"I'm not gonna change," he says, smiling. "I'm not alone. The
Woodstock Nation is bigger than it was."
And that nation, he hopes, still has the power to make the changes
that Woodstock's founders wanted to see 40 years ago.
"You're more powerful," he says, "than you think."
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