The backlash against Woodstock's 40th anniversary
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6793611.ece
Michael Lang's bid for a back-to-its-roots free music festival to
commemorate the original has hit cynical backlash
August 16, 2009
Hardeep Phull
Reaching the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival can only mean
one thing: nostalgia. It's been in plentiful supply during the past
few months. Predictable retrospectives have been written. An
obligatory Blu-ray DVD of Michael Wadleigh's 1970 documentary
Woodstock has been released, with a multitude of extras and a
hideously tacky dashiki cover. Even the director Ang Lee is
capitalising on the occasion with his portrait of Elliot Tiber, a key
figure in finding the festival site, in the forthcoming feature film
Taking Woodstock. While those boxes of remembrance have all been
ticked, an official 40th anniversary concert is off the agenda.
Michael Lang one of the impresarios behind the original festival,
who recently added to the wave of nostalgia by publishing his memoirs
tried to get the ball rolling in March by announcing plans to hold
a back-to-its-roots free festival somewhere in New York and,
bizarrely, a concurrent gig to be held at that well-known mecca of
peace and love, the now abandoned Tempelhof airport, in Berlin
(Hitler's favourite aviation hub, no less). The Who, Santana and
Crosby, Stills and Nash were all mooted to reprise their 1969 roles
as the big pulls of the festival, while Lang suggested such stalwarts
of bland MOR as Red Hot Chili Peppers and Dave Matthews Band as a way
to contemporise proceedings. The idea was greeted with a yawn across
the music business.
When Brooklyn's Prospect Park emerged as a possible contender for a
venue in April, the local outcries and heated debates turned out to
be little more than a few residents of the gentrified surrounding
areas voicing concerns that the grass might have to be relaid.
Negotiations petered out and, at the start of August, Lang glumly
announced that there would be no event at all. The poor economy and a
lack of willing sponsors were cited as the main obstacles, but could
the reality be that, after 40 years, the world is finally letting go
of the outdated ideals of the hippie generation?
In truth, the rebellious flower-power spirit so closely intertwined
with the American pop culture of the 1960s was in its death throes by
the time Woodstock happened. The youthful push towards liberal
politics, social unity and higher states of consciousness reached a
peak in 1967 with the Human Be-In, in San Francisco, which
popularised hippie culture, giving rise to the so-called Summer of
Love later in the year. Subsequently, the term "counterculture"
became a part of the national idiom, but the hippie movement's rapid
growth also signalled its dilution. In 1968, the assassination of
Robert Kennedy, and the ensuing chaos at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago, left political reformists floundering. The
slaying of Martin Luther King Jr further polarised the civil-rights
movement between nonviolent protestors and the growing "by any means
necessary" contingent. Meanwhile, the nationwide unrest over the
escalating Vietnam conflict grew ever more pronounced. Perhaps most
damning for the hippie populace, however, was Nixon's victory in the
1968 presidential election something he achieved, in part, by
appealing to that "silent majority" of the electorate who viewed the
counterculture as an ugly blot on the American landscape.
The influence of hippie culture was dwindling as the 1960s drew to a
close, but there was a commercial viability that Michael Lang and his
friend Artie Kornfeld could see. At the start of 1969, Lang was a
band manager and Kornfeld was an A&R man. The duo developed the idea
of a recording studio in Woodstock, in upstate New York, and pitched
it to Joel Rosenman and John Roberts a pair of bored Wall Street
types with time, energy and money to spare. The studio idea was
superseded by the suggestion of having a giant three-day festival in
the town, which had gained a near-mythical status in the music world
as Bob Dylan's stomping ground. The dates were set as August 15, 16
and 17; 186,000 advance tickets were sold at $6 a day; and Woodstock
Ventures was born. When local residents refused permission for the
festival to be held in their town, Lang and Kornfeld kept the name
but moved the site to Wallkill, only for its residents to object too,
leaving the festival without a venue barely a month before the
confirmed dates.
In the nick of time, a struggling farmer named Max Yasgur saw an
opportunity to shore up his own finances and offered his land in
Bethel as a venue. Roberts has always claimed that Yasgur was acting
out of altruism as much as monetary motivation, arguing, years later,
that "Yasgur was a genuinely decent man". Probably so, but $75,000
must have helped.
From the start, the Woodstock endeavour was based firmly on
profiteering for the main parties, and the blissful mantra of "3 Days
of Peace and Music", used for the advertising material, was what was
offered in return.
Not that there wasn't anything to remember about the festival, of
course; performances by Sly and the Family Stone and Janis Joplin,
and Jimi Hendrix's stellar reinterpretation of The Star-Spangled
Banner, have become cornerstones of American rock history. But their
contributions didn't materialise simply from goodwill. The Who had to
be begged to play by their management, and received a then staggering
$12,500 for their headline set, which was interrupted by the Yippie
activist Abbie Hoffman, venting his fury about the imprisonment of
the White Panther John Sinclair. Already unimpressed with the
mud-caked longhairs ("I felt like spitting on the lot of them," he
recalled in 1982), Pete Townshend showed his lack of interest in this
show of political righteousness by clobbering Hoffman with his
guitar. The irony was that Hoffman had threatened to gatecrash the
event, and was paid $10,000 by Lang and Kornfeld to stay away. So
much for a come-one, come-all utopia.
Thanks to such financial haemorrhaging, the cost of staging the event
reached $2.5m, but what Lang and Kornfeld unwittingly did was create
a franchise that would reimburse them this overspend, and a whole lot
more, in the next four decades. The aforementioned film earned
millions, and all but saved Warner Brothers from going out of
business, while the soundtrack album spent a month at No 1 in the
Billboard charts in 1970, giving rise to a second volume a year
later. Lower-key anniversary concerts followed in 1979 and 1989, but
it was in 1994 that organisers shifted into corporate high gear with
the 25th anniversary concert in Saugerties, NY. Sponsorship for the
event was secured by Pepsi, and anyone not willing to brace the
on-site quagmire could watch the three more days of peace and music
on pay-per-view TV. In fairness, there was a wry acknowledgement of
the original ideals being muddied adverts promoting the event
featured middle-aged yuppies ditching their BMWs for a weekend of
tie-dyed wistfulness.
The dream truly turned into a nightmare in 1999, when looting and
violence overshadowed the 30th anniversary celebration. This time it
was held at an air-force base in Rome, NY, and fans were forced to
pay inflated ticket prices and extortionate rates for food and water,
as well as having to endure poor on-site sanitation. The crowd
reacted to the squalid environment by lighting fires across the site,
and a full-scale riot took place on the final night. The multiple
rapes that were also reported underlined the fact that the event was
reprehensible, and no amount of rose-tinted hippie mythology could
obscure that.
The memory of that decidedly hostile weekend is fresh enough to mute
this year's 40th anniversary celebrations. Numerous small-scale
events are planned across the world, but, overall, fewer music fans
seem willing to deal with the bluntly obvious money-making intent of
Woodstock Ventures. Lang isn't helping to reverse this image: when
plans were announced in June for an unofficial free festival in San
Francisco, called West Fest: 40th Anniversary of Woodstock, he issued
a cease-and-desist order over the use of the word "Woodstock".
The true hippie ideals are long dead, but, more than 40 years on,
there are still plenty of people striving to keep its profitability
alive and well.
--------
Woodstock The Brand: Still Moving Merch
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111866164
by Joel Rose
August 14, 2009
Forty years ago, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was billed as three
days of peace and music. Today, it's being marketed as well, let's
just say it's being marketed.
There's a crowded field of book and music releases. Director Ang Lee
has a new film. Target was even offering a line of Woodstock-themed
merchandise. The Woodstock name or do we say brand these days?
has been an unlikely but potent marketing force since the moment the
festival ended.
In fact, Woodstock was always intended as a for-profit venture.
Though, of course, that's not exactly how it looked in August of
1969. The festival lost a couple million dollars. But the money
started flowing pretty quickly. Warner Bros. offered the organizers
enough to pay off about half of their debt, in exchange for the movie
and soundtrack rights.
It took about another 10 years for the festival organizers to recoup
their investment from royalties on movie ticket and record sales. The
royalties have been flowing in ever since. The film alone made more
than $50 million.
Madison Avenue Got The Message
The organizers of Woodstock weren't the only ones who cashed in on
what they'd started, says music journalist Alan Light, a former
editor of Spin and Vibe magazines.
"If that's your job, to pay attention to these kinds of trends of
movements, this was now a movement you could not help but notice," Light says.
Before Woodstock, most journalists and advertisers had written off
the counterculture as something that was mainly confined to the San
Francisco Bay Area, Light says.
"I think there was a still a sense that those were those kids. It
didn't seem like they were our kids. At Woodstock, that's where
people started to think, this is what all those kids are doing, and
what they're going to be doing," says Light.
So marketers immediately started using the style and music of young
people to sell them stuff, according to Todd Gitlin, author of The
Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.
"The conversion of the counterculture into a market was the holy
grail of many marketers," says Gitlin.
Take Coca-Cola's 1971 "Hilltop" ad, as it was called. It featured a
bunch of attractive, multiethnic, long-haired young people singing
together on a grassy hilltop. The commercial was shot in Italy. But
the reference to Woodstock is obvious.
Name Recognition
Wharton School marketing professor Steve Hoch says the festival had
great brand recognition from the get-go.
"You say the word 'Woodstock,' people are not gonna be thinking about
its location," Hoch asserts. "They think about that festival. It
happened so long ago, but it's still fresh. It still has exactly the
same meaning to people as it did before."
No matter how far you stretch it. This year, festival organizers
licensed the Woodstock dove-and-guitar logo to Target for a line of
plastic silverware, beach towels and reversible picnic blankets.
So, what accounts for this resilience? Maybe, says author and
Columbia University professor Gitlin, it's because we want to
remember Woodstock as a moment when Americans could coexist.
"Woodstock ever since has corresponded to that desire, the hope that
Americans could quote, unquote come together," says Gitlin. "I'm not
cynical about it. I'm not saying it's simply a shtick to sell stuff.
What's been projected onto the event of Woodstock is this collective
desire, which never quite goes away."
No matter how many times they repackage the soundtrack album.
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Woodstock 2009: Tie-dyed nostalgia misses the irony
Thousands flocked to the site of the 1969 Woodstock music festival
over the weekend for an orgy of tie-dyed nostalgia.
By Leonard Doyle
16 Aug 2009
Forty years ago, over three mud-soaked and drug fuelled days, a farm
in upstate New York became the centre of the counterculture with an
extraordinary lineup of musicians which helped change the history of
Rock and Roll.
Joan Baez, The Who and Jefferson Airplane all played at the original
festival, which was captured in the 1970 documentary "Woodstock".
Unlike the original event, there was little rebellion in the air this
weekend, and 15,000 seats were sold in advance. At the original
event, a unexpectedly large crowd pushed down the fence and watched for free.
A 15-year-old musician opened the 40th anniversary Woodstock concert
by playing the instrumental version of The Star-Spangled Banner which
Jimi Hendrix unleashed on an unsuspecting America in 1969. Perhaps
missing the shocking counter-culture vibe of the Hendrix original, in
2009, the mostly aging Baby Boomers stood for the national anthem.
The audience raised their arms, self-consciously flashing peace signs
with their fingers, invoking a distant memory of the mood of hope and
defiance that marked the three day concert four decades ago.
There were plenty of veterans of the original concert on hand. Richie
Havens gave two performances and member of Janis Joplin's backing
band Big Brother and the Holding Company held a singalong for the
crowd with Me and Bobby McGee, Piece of My Heart and Summertime.
--------
Woodstock: Was it something, or was it nothing?
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/08/woodstock_was_it_something_or.html
Roy Digliani
August 15, 2009
Woodstock '69. Was it just sex, drugs, music, and wallowing naked in
the mud, or was it a milestone in American cultural history? Ask a
hundred people and you'll get a hundred different answers. This
weekend's 40th Woodstock Anniversary Celebration brings back the
memories and questions about what Rolling Stone calls,
"...one of the most significant concerts in rock history."
"Woodstock is widely regarded as one of the greatest moments in
popular music history and was listed on Rolling Stone's 50 Moments
That Changed the History of Rock and Roll," writes Wikipedia.
Was the unique experience of the Woodstock Music Festival a
culminating event of a decade of radical cultural transformation, and
the legacy of the Sixties? Or was it just a music concert with a lot
people trashing up a farmer's field in upstate New York?
My God.... can we stop this nonsense? Hippies were not
revolutionaries. Not radical cultural transformers. I was there,
before Woodstock... in the middle of the whole deal, ground zero in
San Francisco. From its genesis in the mid-60's until it overdosed on
Methedrine at the end of the decade. We were hedonists pure and
simple. Well meaning, most definitely but absolutely self indulgent,
self centered and delusional.
The counter culture was about chicks and partying. It was about
getting high and goofing off. Yes, everyone at first was very polite
and mostly kind, but stealing and liberating what others had worked
for was the norm. Woodstock was noteworthy for the broken down fences
and free (stolen) admission.
I loved the hippie days but let's not lie about what went on. What do
you think all the 60's rebellion was about? There were a lot of
unhappy Baby Boomers, dysfunctional families, but the 60's didn't
solve that. It just redirected the unhappiness. When the media blared
across the land that Haight Ashbury was the place, and the Summer of
Love was on the top of the menu, a lot of confused and unhappy people
decided to take off for San Francisco. Unfortunately what they mostly
did was bring all their unhappiness with them. So, 40 years later
we're hearing how revolutionary Woodstock was, how world changing,
yeah, yeah. What did Wavy Gravy say in the Woodstock movie? "We
showed the world how to live." Woodstock was five hundred thousand or
so young people getting high and watching some bands. That's about
all there was to it. They got high, goofed off, made a mess, and then
went home and left a pile of trash for someone else to pick up. A
real new world creation.
Somehow, the fact that The New World that was being created was
totally dependent on the Old World's sanitary, transportation and
economic structures was totally ignored by the media and the "Counter
Culture." For the Boomer generation, it hit high gear when Life
Magazine sold millions of extra copies each week that featured the
Beatles or some youth oriented story on the cover. The Woodstock
generation had it rough, though. They were manipulated and slyly,
subconsciously coerced, and the world confronting them as they grew
out of their 1950's adolescence was frightening as all hell. By the
time Woodstock happened they had plenty of fears to confront. Duck
and cover. Nuclear war. The Draft. Assassinations. Urban riots.
Desire. Despair. Confusion.
Can we blame them for their grasping for meaning? While LBJ got up
every morning and had the fun of deciding which Vietnamese targets to
bomb (never mind that he had no war expertise), every 18 or 19 year
old kid got up and worried about whether he would have to leave home
and go to some god forsaken jungle, while others were already waking
up in the jungle. Woodstock left its imprint. Joanie Mitchell wrote a
song about it. She viewed Woodstock as some major spiritual
awakening. Really? Like your first night at the drive-in with that
cute neighbor girl from down the street? These days, Lefties seem
loath to give up the visions and face the realities of what happened,
but again, there were half a million different stories and different
memories in those naked mud baths.
Woodstock was a great "political" product. Leftists, being the
simpletons that they are, tend to make life-long friends with their
basic assumptions about the universe rather than continually updating
their thinking as new data become available. They lock in on a
mindset and never again question it, like grade schoolers deciding on
their favorite color, or flower, or ice cream flavor. Woodstock
imprinted strongly on the non-thinkers. They imagined this magical
world of fairies and elves and LSD and pot and Jerry Garcia and Janis
Joplin and this big evil edifice that is America.
Of course the scamming still goes on, and the "scamees" soak it up.
Today's Woodstockers have their god, Barrack the Magnificent. But you
know... everyone had a good time I guess. Mostly. Evidently. Lets
leave it at that and forget the hype. Or... whatever dude...drink
some Bong water.
.
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