Woodstock truly was something special
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/woodstock-truly-was-something-special-1.1350126
August 6, 2009
By GLENN GAMBOA
glenn.gamboa@newsday.com
The mythology of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair overtook its
reality years ago.
Mountain's Leslie West jokes, "If you count all the people now that
say they were there, there had to be 10 million people there, not
just 400,000."
The magic of those three days of peace, love and music from the
biggest and brightest stars of the time can never be recaptured
because it was something unique.
All the massive festivals that have followed, all the attempts to
link music with politics, all the plans to create "the next
Woodstock" fall a little short because they lack the element of surprise.
"We didn't know what was going to happen," says Martin Perry, a
business consultant from Massapequa who went to Woodstock more for
the experience than the music. "Who could have expected all of that
ahead of time?"
Perry says he attended other festivals shortly after Woodstock hoping
for a repeat performance and was disappointed. "People were not as
friendly," he says. "The experience was much more brutal. Woodstock
was really a singular moment."
That may be why people get nervous about anything that might tarnish
the Woodstock legacy.
Woodstock promoter Michael Lang recently dropped plans to celebrate
the original festival's 40th anniversary this year with a free
concert in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, after he wasn't able to find
enough sponsors. (Considering the problems of Woodstock '99 in Rome,
N.Y., which reportedly lost more than $10 million and ended in riots,
fires and looting after four days of blistering heat and $4-a-bottle
waters, the Woodstock plan of regular anniversary festivals every
five years have been put on hold since 1999.)
It is a testament, actually, to how cherished the Woodstock
Experience still is that so many are still eager to tap into that
"singular moment."
A walk through any bookstore this summer will find more than a dozen
new books about the event. There will be a new Ang Lee movie, "Taking
Woodstock," about preparations for the festival, as well as a new VH1
documentary "Woodstock: Now and Then" from Barbara Kopple.
And, of course, there's the music. Sony Legacy has a new 10-CD boxed
set called "The Woodstock Experience," while Rhino Records is
offering the six-CD "Woodstock - 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm,"
which will include 38 previously unreleased tracks and the entire
festival set list.
But it doesn't stop there. You could put your Woodstock coffee mug on
some Woodstock coasters made from the vinyl albums of Woodstock
artists, while you fold some Woodstock psychedelic origami and put
together a thousand-piece Woodstock puzzle, while wearing some
Woodstock T-shirts, naturally.
A single idyllic moment
Cocooning in that moment becomes important, since it didn't last very
long. What Woodstock succeeded in creating was idyllic, but it was
also short-lived.
"It was a high point," says Jim Henke, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
and Museum's vice president of exhibitions and curatorial affairs.
"For a moment, it was the center of pop culture. It showed a huge
number of young people rebelling against the social norms of the
time, and it showed the hippie movement to be as big as it was. And
it all went off pretty smoothly. Then came Altamont, and that sent
almost the opposite message."
The violence at the Altamont concert, along with the substance-abuse
deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison shortly after
that, quickly overturned the "sex and drugs and rock and roll"
idealism that Woodstock had built. Reality had overtaken the myth.
Slowly but surely, the balance began to shift again. Henke says all
the attention that the anniversaries bring to the original Woodstock
add to its importance, as does the recently rereleased "Woodstock" documentary.
"For many people, when that movie came out, that was the introduction
for many people to that ethos, that lifestyle," he says. "It all
helps spread the word."
West's wedding plans
And for artists like Mountain's West, who became a star after
performing at the festival and plans to return this week to play the
40th anniversary show at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts,
Woodstock's positive aspects will always outweigh whatever negatives
that followed it.
"I'm really looking forward to the show," says West, who plans to wed
his fiancee, Jenni Maurer, onstage at the end of the band's Woodstock
set. "It's such a beautiful place."
West, like a lot of people whose lives were changed by the Woodstock
Music and Art Fair, see the potential.
For three days, 40 years ago, 400,000 people joined together to show
that the hippie ideals of peace and love and mutual respect could not
only work, but could lead to an unforgettably good time. Since then,
we have seen numerous examples of how this could break down. But it
happened once. Maybe it could happen again.
Maybe that is the true legacy of Woodstock.
--
Hippiefest and Heroes of Woodstock
WHAT Hippiefest with Mountain's Leslie West and Corky Laing, Vanilla
Fudge's Mark Stein and Vince Martel, Three Dog Night's Chuck Negron,
The Turtles and more
WHEN | WHERE 6 p.m. Sunday
INFO $25-$37.50; 631-451-8010; brookhavenamphitheater.com
--
WHAT Heroes of Woodstock with Jefferson Starship, Canned Heat,
Country Joe McDonald, Ten Years After and others
WHEN | WHERE 8 p.m. Thursday, The Capital One Bank Theatre at
Westbury, 960 Brush Hollow Road, Westbury
INFO $51.50-$61.50; 516-334-0800; livenation.com
--------
Generational divide an unexpected legacy of Woodstock
August 6, 2009
When Chris Zhune hears about Woodstock, he thinks first of wild partying.
"There were a lot of crazy drugs going on," said Zhune, 21, of Deer
Park, a student at Suffolk County Community College.
Those old enough to remember Woodstock often talk about it as a
social movement and musical milestone. But some younger people aren't
as convinced.
"Historical significance?" he said. "I don't really know if it was
all that significant."
Marie Mayes of Lindenhurst, also 21, figures that's what older people
do - reminisce about the events of their youth.
"I think maybe some people over 40 glorify it," said Mayes, a singer
who is entering her senior year as a music education major at New
York University. "But that's part of the allure of Woodstock. There's
so much legend and myth around it."
Mayes identifies Woodstock with "peace and love - but I don't know
much about it."
Woodstock left its share of legacies, but one unexpected one might be
a generational divide. At Five Towns College, professor Peter Rogine
often senses that in his music history class. He can predict the
students' reactions to the word Woodstock:
They will talk about love and peace. They'll mention Jimi Hendrix.
And they'll bring up drugs.
To Rogine, 62, this generation of students does not have a sense of
Woodstock's musical and cultural importance.
"Woodstock," he says, "really was the end of an era - the '60s -
which brought about the sexual revolution, civil rights, Native
American rights, birth control, divorce, women's rights, the idea of
living off the land and rejecting consumerism."
Rogine's theory about the different perspectives on Woodstock held up
during recent interviews of recent high school and college graduates,
along with those old enough to be their parents. Some of the older
Long Islanders described Woodstock as a landmark event - even if they
disliked the music and the politics. Younger ones often said they
were dubious of all the attention to a music festival that took place
on a farm 40 years ago.
Old and young did agree on one point: Since the 1960s, music has
become too commercial.
"Woodstock wasn't a product, it was very much the creation of
musicians," said Ryan Pratt, 23, of Oceanside, who is studying law at
St. John's University. He plays guitar and used to play the saxophone
and piano. Like George Harrison, he notes, he owns a sitar.
"There might be a grain of truth in all the boasting about
Woodstock," he said. "What we have now is the commodification of music."
Adelphi University history professor Dominick Cavallo teaches a
course on the 1960s, and says any mention of Woodstock sparks
conversations among students.
"Almost universally they are enchanted by the music . . . how
entwined it became with rebellion and activism," said Cavallo, who
also is the author of a book about the era, "A Fiction of the Past:
The Sixties in American History."
Students debate whether something like Woodstock could take place
today. "Some of them are rueful that nothing like the '60s youth
rebellion is happening," he said.
Of course, not everyone looks back fondly at the Woodstock era.
Cavallo notes that other students dismiss the three-day festival as
"unbridled hedonism."
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