http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_13093194
By Brent Green
Posted: 08/15/2009
Woodstock has been described as a watershed, seminal, formative, game
changing, and with dozens of superlatives. Those who've attempted to
contain the baby boomer generation in a tidy sociological package
have pointed at Woodstock in summary, sometimes with derision for the
Bacchanalian overtones this word can represent.
Woodstock means little until you place it in larger context of a
society unraveling around the newest generation of young adults, a
dominant and dominating cohort of malcontents. From their parents'
generation they had absorbed rich idealism for time-honored
principles of social and economic justice.
From the world they were inheriting they had discovered unbearable
discontinuities and hypocrisies. From romanticized western
archetypes, the first generation to grow up with television had
learned to stare down orthodoxy.
Woodstock was just one major event with national impact that blasted
through 1969. The final year of the tumultuous sixties included
discordant Richard Milhous Nixon succeeding Lyndon Baines Johnson as
37th president of the United States. US troops stationed in Vietnam
crested at 543,000.
Three hundred students stormed and occupied Harvard University's
administration building in a spellbinding demonstration of street
theater. Charles Manson's LSD-crazed cult executed actress Sharon
Tate and seven others, including Tate's unborn child. And this was
all before a turbulent autumn featuring the largest peaceful protest
in US history on October 15, the first Vietnam War Moratorium. And
that's not even close to half of it.
Woodstock was not merely a rock concert showcasing some of the best
rock 'n' roll bands of the sixties. It was an interlude arriving in
the context of more social and political upheaval than most Americans
had witnessed. It was a chaotic but peaceful prelude to forthcoming
breakdown between government and governed when combined will would
end an unpopular war.
Denver gave a nod to Woodstock six weeks beforehand, from June 27 to
June 29 at Mile High Stadium. A three-day concert featured
forthcoming Woodstock headliners including Joe Cocker (now a Colorado
resident), Credence Clearwater Revival, Johnny Winter and Jimi Hendrix.
The Mile High City also served as a major waypoint where hitchhiking
and ride-sharing hippies passed through in droves on their way to a
chimerical instant city plopped in the middle of Max Yasgur's dairy farm.
I did not attend the concert although, like many o f my peers, I gave
the odyssey passing consideration. When "Butch" Barger asked me if I
wanted to drive across country with him to upstate New York, I barely
had a clue what he was talking about. Prospects for this road trip
sounded interesting but indefinite.
In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't go because mud and unsanitary
conditions would not have enlivened me even at 19. I'm better suited
to experiencing Woodstock cinematically from a home theater, shower
and comfy bed nearby.
To become embroiled in the turmoil and idealism this festival
represented did not require attendance. Political upheaval,
disintegrating racial relations, burgeoning feminism, environmental
degradation, and rock 'n' roll culture enveloped a generation,
inundating us, forging strident collective mentalities.
From Alaska to Colorado to New York, young people crossed the
country for peace and love in a time of rage and resentment. They
wanted to do the right thing, and to them this meant standing firm
against received authority. Woodstock at once represented the
improbable and the possible: just three spins of the globe, three
short days - an interruption of business-as-usual that persists even
in this new century.
I saw remnants of Woodstock as young protesters clamored along the
16th Street Mall during the Democratic National Convention last
August, their faces lit up with passion and high purpose. I felt
reassuring presence of shared citizenship in Civic Center Park last
October 26 when more than 100,000 gathered peacefully to hear words
of hope from their next president, improbably an African-American man
with a strangely un-American sounding name.
I saw the teenagers of Woodstock with wizened faces filling Red Rocks
Amphitheater for the 40th anniversary of sixties' super-group Jethro
Tull. I think of Woodstock-era uproar when watching media reports of
roiling public protests against possible new health care legislation.
The 40th anniversary of Woodstock is virtually meaningless if nothing
meaningful survives. But when we peer through those throngs of
tie-dyed t-shirts and tribal costumes into the present we see an
extraordinarily different America four decades later: arguably, a
better America.
--
Brent Green is author of "Leading-edge Baby Boomers: Perceptions,
Principles, Practices, Predictions," (Paramount Market Publishing).
He lives in Denver.
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