Woodstock turns 40
http://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/music/69866/woodstock-turns-40
By Shane Gilchrist
15 Aug 2009
This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, the most famous
rock festival in the world. Shane Gilchrist explores the event's
resonance with Mike Evans, co-editor of a new book on the subject.
Forty years ago, on August 15, 1969, a month after the moon landing
and a mere week after Charles Manson's cult members went on their
killing spree, another event began to earn headlines amid the news
log-jam of the times.
It was anticipated the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, held on Max
Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, would attract 100,000 people.
Instead, half a million turned up to listen to some of the leading
acts of the day, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful
Dead, The Band, Joan Baez, Jefferson Airplane and The Who.
Mike Evans, co-editor of a new book on the subject, Woodstock: three
days that rocked the world, was in England at the time, playing
saxophone in a band.
The first he knew of the three-day concert was when mainstream media
reports filtered across the Atlantic of a near-disaster: mud for
miles, sanitation issues, food shortages and massive traffic jams.
Evans, speaking from his London home, says the spirit of the time, a
mucking-in despite (or because of) the conditions was a key reason
why Woodstock continues to hold such a high place in the folklore of
popular culture.
"It certainly wasn't because of the music. Many of those festivals of
the time had the same bands," he says, pointing to the first of the
"big hippy festivals", the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.
"There were several others before Woodstock, but I think Woodstock
became famous mainly by default.
"Because there were far more people than expected, it descended into
chaos . . . [but] because there was this chaos, they actually looked
after themselves for three days. It was one great demonstration of
that whole peace and love ethos."
A musician on the 1960's rock scene, Evans began writing about
popular music in the 1970s.
Since the late '80s he has worked in book publishing, commissioning
and editing titles on rock 'n' roll, jazz, and popular culture.
Previous books include The Rock 'N' Roll Age , From Kerouac to Kesey:
An Illustrated Journey through the Beat Generation, The Beatles
Literary Anthology and Elvis: A Celebration.
Evans began collecting material for Woodstock early in 2008, the
project taking him more than a year to complete.
Working with co-editor Paul Kingsbury, a freelance writer and editor
specialising in music journalism and the former deputy director of
Special Projects for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, he
had access to the "massive" archives at the Museum At Bethel Woods,
which opened in June last year.
"They had interviewed various people who were there, local people,
policemen ... a lot of the quotes from people who were on the ground
there were from the archive. We wanted it to have as many first-hand
accounts as we could."
Evans and Kingsbury established a three-part structure to the book:
"Origins" sets the stage by describing the counterculture of the
time, along with the festival's organisation, fundraising,
buzz-building tactics, ticket selling and publicity, and site
building; "The Event" includes a run-down of each of the 32 acts, in
the order they appeared, as well as an examination of fans; and "The
Aftermath" focuses on media coverage, follow-up festivals and
Woodstock's enduring legacy.
A key theme of the book is the examination of the socio-political
context in which Woodstock was held; another reason for the event's resonance.
"The big unifying factor in that counterculture was the anti-Vietnam
War movement, because it affected young people in particular.
"The average age of a GI in Vietnam was 19; these were college kids.
There was an anger that grew among America's youth, which didn't
manifest itself elsewhere in quite the same way. It came to a head in 1969."
Evans says Woodstock attracted a wide cross-section of the
counterculture, "alternative society as you'd call it".
Some came to party, others to make a political statement.
Spiritual groups rubbed shoulders with anarchist outfits such as the
White Panthers or bus-dwellers the Hog Farmers, called in to help
with catering.
However, the main body comprised middle-class white kids.
Reaction among media to the event varied.
The New York Times gave ample room to drug use, traffic problems and
food shortages; the day after the festival ended, it ran a
finger-wagging editorial castigating organisers and concertgoers alike.
Others, however, preferred to recognise the event as a social phenomenon.
Life magazine presented an eight-page photo feature, while Newsweek
saw the event in the context of the counterculture, as a genuinely
radical voice in American society.
Evans says the problems of Woodstock actually helped set a template
for other festivals.
"Because it was a near-disaster, people learnt a lot of lessons from it.
They didn't anticipate the numbers; they had catered for about
100,000 and half a million turned up.
They didn't take into consideration the road situation, transport, or
the fact they were basically in the middle of a field that you could
only get to via small country roads.
From there on in, festival organisers began to streamline things.
Of course, by now, it has become much more corporate."
Though two people died at the festival - one from a drug overdose,
the other after being run over by a tractor - and 6000 were treated
for a range of complaints, including drug-related issues, Woodstock
was notable for its lack of violence, Evans says.
In fact, one of the most famous incidents involved The Who's
guitarist Pete Townshend, who struck Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman with
his instrument when the anarchist attempted to interrupt the British
band's set.
It seemed Townshend had little liking for the sentiments of many of the crowd.
Dressed in a white jumpsuit (Evans describes him as looking like he
was about to go to a painting job), Townshend had this to say of the
festival: "All these hippies wandering about thinking the world was
going to be different from that day on . . . what they thought was an
alternative society was basically a field full of six-foot-deep mud
laced with LSD.
If that was the world they wanted to live in, then f ... the lot of them."
To which The Who's singer, Roger Daltrey (dressed in a tasselled
suede jacket more synonymous with the event) replied: "Woodstock was
probably the single best show in history. Townshend doesn't like it
because he is an idiot."
Others shared Townshend's cynicism: Neil Young refused to allow those
filming the event to capture him on camera; he saw it as the
beginning of the end: "What effect did Woodstock have on music?
That's when the market got big enough for the marketers to realise
that they should go for it . . . that was the beginning of rock 'n'
roll being used in commercials."
Bob Dylan, who a few weeks later headlined the Isle of Wight festival
in Britain, refused to play at Woodstock; by the end of the '60s, he
was fed up with the hippies who trekked to his home town of
Woodstock, making life miserable for his family.
"Because he had so many hippies trying to park out on his lawn, he
put a sign on his gate that read, `if you haven't phoned, you're
trespassing'," Evans says.
"It's surprising how many people in the music business were fairly
cynical of the whole hippy thing."
Yet perhaps overlooked in the myth of Woodstock are the performances
over that weekend.
Reputations were made: Sly Stone and British blues act Ten Years
After went from strength to strength following the festival, as did
Melanie Safka, an unknown folk singer from Queens, New York, who
benefited from a mass match-lighting ceremony on the first night.
Others performed less than impressive sets: members of the Grateful
Dead are on record as saying it was the worst gig they'd done.
To be fair to the band, a combination of rain and electrical
equipment didn't help, with two members of the group suffering
electric shocks.
Janis Joplin's set was also below par, mainly because she was due to
play at 8pm but didn't get on stage until midnight, by which time she
had consumed a couple of bottles of bourbon.
Key contributors, too, to the endurance of the event were the film
and soundtracks that quickly followed.
The documentary Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music, directed by
Michael Wadleigh and co-edited by Martin Scorsese, hit screens in June 1970.
A box-office success that by 1999 had earned more than $US100 million
(as had the soundtrack by the same time), it eventually paid off the
debts of Woodstock Ventures, which a year after the festival had
recorded a loss of $US1.2 million.
"It certainly saved the people who put on the festival," Evans says.
"Because they had to make it a free event because so many people
turned up, they lost loads of money on it initially. They had to pay
the artists and fund the whole thing . . .
"It was only because they sold the movie and soundtrack rights that
they not only got their money back, but actually made a few million."
--
--Woodstock: factfile
When: August 15 to August 18, 1969.
Where: Max Yasgur's dairy farm at Bethel, about 200km from New York City.
Attendance: Between 300,000 and 500,000 (organisers had made
preparations for 100,000 concertgoers). An estimated 250,000 people
never made it to the site.
Revenue (mostly from advance ticket sales): $US1.4 million.
Expenses: $2.7 million.
Initial losses: $1.3 million (eventually recouped, by 1980, through
film and soundtrack royalties).
Other points: There were two deaths: one person died from heroin
overdose, another run over by a tractor.
There were two births and four miscarriages during the festival.
More than 6000 people were treated for injuries and other complaints.
As well as the initial 18 doctors and 36 nurses, an additional 50
doctors were flown in from New York City on August 16.
It took an average eight hours to drive the 200km from New York City
to Bethel; fans walked an average 30km to the site after abandoning
their cars.
At its peak, there was a 35km traffic jam along Route 78.
The shortest waiting time between acts was 40 minutes; the longest
(excluding rain-enforced delays) was 120 minutes.
36 off-duty New York City policemen were hired, in addition to 150
volunteer police, 100 local sheriffs and 100 state troopers and
deputies from 12 counties.
The highest paid performer was Jimi Hendrix ($US18,000, plus $12,000
for subsequent film appearance); the lowest paid was Quill ($375).
---------
Remembering Woodstock
http://www.altoonamirror.com/page/content.detail/id/521669.html
Aquarian rock festival still fresh in the minds of some locals who were there
By Jimmy Mincin, jmincin@altoonamirror.co
POSTED: August 16, 2009
It was a hot August night in 1969 when Greg Wyandt and three of his
friends decided to attend Woodstock.
"We were cruising downtown Altoona when one of my friends asked if I
would like to see Jeff Beck in concert," Wyandt, 61, of Hollidaysburg
said. "Being a musician, I was more than glad to say, 'Yes, where?'
Someone said a place called Woodstock and it would cost $15 for three
days - a lot of money even back then. No one knew what we were in
for, but being 19 years old at the time, it sounded like a good idea to go."
And go they did.
Hopping into a 1967 Mustang, the four young men headed to a musical
event that would go on to define a generation. But they didn't know it.
"We thought we were going to just another concert - like many we had
attended so many times," Wyandt said. "What we ran into was a
lifetime memory like no other. We showed up and it seemed like
everyone in the world was there. It was breathtaking. Then you heard
the announcer saying, 'Ladies and gentlemen, we've just been declared
the second largest city in the state of New York.' ... It wasn't what
I thought it was gonna be. I was thinking concert - this was more
like an event."
Woodstock, variously billed as "An Aquarian Exposition" and "The
Woodstock Music and Art Fair" was a four-day music and arts festival
held in Bethel, N.Y., on Aug. 15-18, 1969, according to the event's
official Web site (www.woodstock.com).
The festival received its name because it was originally supposed to
be held in Woodstock, N.Y. Instead, it was held at a 600-acre dairy
farm in nearby Bethel.
The music began Friday afternoon at 5:07 p.m. Aug. 15 and continued
until mid-morning Monday, Aug. 18.
Thirty-two acts performed over four days, including Richie Havens,
Ravi Shankar, Arlo Guthrie, Melanie, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin,
Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Santana and
Jefferson Airplane.
Rolling Stone magazine calls it "the most famous event in rock history."
"From a musical standpoint, we couldn't really get close enough to
the stage to appreciate the performances," Wyandt said. "But as far
as the talent, they had the best around."
The festival was planned to have about 50,000 attendees but more than
400,000 people actually showed up, causing much unexpected chaos, the
Web site stated.
Because such a large amount of people showed up, most did not end up
paying the admission fee. Major traffic jams were a problem and roads
and highways stood still for 20 miles.
"No one really anticipated how huge this thing was going to be," Tom
McCarty, 61, of Lilly said, recalling how he and his friends headed
off to Woodstock just two weeks after attending the 1969 Atlantic
City Pop Festival in New Jersey.
"We thought it would be just another concert, but we showed up and it
seemed like everyone in the world was there. You'd see hippies,
tourists, motorcycle gangs, tourists, civilians, troopers - everyone
and everything you can imagine. There were straight people, high
people, low people - whatever you want to call it. There was just a
lot of people. It was like a complete love-in."
The festival often is most remembered as representing the height of
the "hippie era" and the counterculture of the '60s, said Jerry
Zolten, associate professor of communication arts and sciences at
Penn State Altoona.
"The fact that so many young people could gather in one space in a
responsible, non-violent manner seemed to be the heart and soul of
the story, at least in the media coverage - that, in spite of the
chaos, drug overdoses and the fact that the whole event was what it
was because so many had crashed the gate," he said. "As to the music,
a great deal of it was sub-par in terms of performance, but there
were exceptional, stellar moments such as the Hendrix's rendition of
"Star Spangled Banner"and Richie Havens, to name two."
Zolten refrained from going himself because of news stories hinting
at a logistical nightmare.
"I remember hearing about the New York thruway being jammed with
cars," he said. "But my girlfriend went and returned having little
memory of the music at the festival. Like many others, she was caught
up in the mud and party of it all."
Barbara Marinak, 66, of Bellwood, was living in White Lake, N.Y., at
the time of Woodstock, working at the Sullivan County Airport as a
secretary-bookkkeeper. She recalled waking one morning to find people
sleeping on the porch and front lawn of her rented apartment - some
in sleeping bags, some with a blankets on them and some just in their clothes.
"I never went to the festival itself, since I had to go to work every
day, but I remember the crowds of people, who for the most part were
well-behaved," she said. "Of course, all of them were hippies then -
the girls in their long skirts and flowers in their hair and the men
with shaggy hair. ... At the time, no one knew it would be such a big
thing. It was only after the fact that it became so huge.
"I know everyone in White Lake was relieved when they all left. They
did leave quite a mess, especially the farm where the festival was
held - it was nothing but mud."
Zolten said the Woodstock experience ultimately comes down to the
individual stories of those who were there.
"I know many who were talked about feeling a sense of community, an
empowerment that maybe they were on to something after all. That
feeling of being among so many like-minded people united by music
was, I'm sure, a unique moment in time for those who were there. ...
Moments like Woodstock were tied to a unique convergence of politics,
social change, and technology. It was what it was and will never be again."
--
Mirror Staff Writer Jimmy Mincin is at 946-7460.
-------
40 years on, Bethel embraces Woodstock
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090816/COMM/908160325/-1/NEWS
By Barry Lewis
Posted: August 16, 2009
A young journalist covering Sullivan County in the summer of 1984
asks Bethel Supervisor George Neuhaus what he thinks about the 15th
anniversary of Woodstock being celebrated not in his town, where the
original concert was held, but in Liberty. At Grossinger's.
"Good!" he says with a swift chuckle, swatting away the question as
if it were some annoying bug which to Neuhaus it's been for all
those 15 years.
"Really, you don't mind?"
A smile leaves the round face of the man wearing the conservative
haircut and outdated sport jacket. Neuhaus takes an unnecessary step
forward to make sure the 24-year-old reporter with the long hair and
fancy thin tie can hear his reply.
"We're not ever going to have Woodstock in Bethel again. We've got
nothing to celebrate. There was nothing but drugs, and those hippies
destroyed the place. They want to have some party over in Liberty,
fine. Woodstock's done in Bethel." Then he laughed.
That was vintage Neuhaus.
The man rode to victory less than three months after the 1969
festival with a simple platform: Woodstock Never again. Voters in
Bethel agreed.
Never again.
It's easy for folks today to forget just how despised the Woodstock
festival was in Bethel, considering that now you can't take two steps
in town without seeing the Woodstock symbol. Every welcome sign in
Bethel has a bird sitting on a guitar. Every welcome flag has a bird
on a guitar. Even the town constable wears a patch on his uniform
with a picture of a bird on a guitar.
So we're all lovin' Woodstock this week. This month. For the past
couple of years.
It's about time.
Folks forget that even 15 years after the festival, there remained
anger, fear and resentment among a good many in Bethel and around the
county. They still weren't ready to embrace the spirit of Woodstock
or the maturing "hippies" who were taking their new families on the
August pilgrimage down Hurd Road for impromptu gatherings.
So instead of an organized dare I say even money-making event in
Bethel the "official" Woodstock 15th anniversary weekend was at
Grossinger's. And to no one's surprise, it was as lame as you would
expect a Woodstock anniversary weekend to be at an aging Borscht Belt
resort that was holding canasta weekends.
The running joke was courtesy of John Sebastian, an original
Woodstock performer and the musical headliner for the weekend, who
kept warning folks, "Don't eat the purple tzimmes."
The man everyone wanted to talk to was Abbie Hoffman, who walked
around wearing a "Hippie Yea, Yuppie Nay" T-shirt. He was there as a
reporter for a magazine but was happy to give interviews. If only he
could manage to string more than two words together before tossing
out a profanity, his quotes would have made the airwaves.
Fast-forward five more years, and again, the Sullivan
County-sanctioned Woodstock celebration is not in Bethel, but at a
rundown Catskill hotel. It failed miserably.
The organized musical event for the 20th anniversary, at the Imperial
Hotel, the former Stevensville resort in Swan Lake, attracted 250
people. A few miles away, about 10,000 people showed up on the famed
field for a series of spontaneous concerts.
That's the way Woodstock was remembered all these years. Illegal mass
gatherings.
Only after four decades, a growing worldwide interest and the
development of a first-class performing arts center and 1960s museum
not necessarily in that order have the folks in Bethel and their
brethren across Sullivan County realize that welcoming people back to
the garden is a good thing.
Neuhaus died in a car accident in 1993 at the age of 75.
I like to think time would have softened his own stance on Woodstock
anniversaries, given that yesterday's hippies are on today's AARP mailing list.
Now they arrive back in Bethel in luxury cars instead of beat-up
Beetles. They've traded in stale bread and warm water for surf and
turf and a fine merlot, and ditched their drenched sleeping bags for
a Serta Perfect Sleeper.
No matter. They come back. Certainly older. Hopefully wiser. But with
that same crazy passion to hear music on Max Yasgur's old farm.
That's the spirit of Woodstock we should never forget.
We'll see you at the 41st.
---
Barry Lewis is the Sullivan County editor. He can be reached at
794-3712 or at blewis@th-record.com
-------
VIDEO EXTRA:
Forty years later, local residents recall their memories of Woodstock festival
By Maria Papadopoulos
ENTERPRISE STAFF WRITER
Posted Aug 15, 2009
s
Ira Korim had never seen a naked man in public until he got to
Woodstock. Then 17, Korim and a friend had just finished the
five-hour drive from Brockton to Bethel, N.Y.
They got there a day before the festival of sex, drugs and rock and
roll began on Friday, Aug. 15, 1969.
The wide-eyed teens parked their station wagon next to a lake, after
paying a farm worker $5 to reroute them from heavy traffic to a back
way into the festival. Korim opened the car door.
"The very first thing that I see is a man who is completely naked,"
said Korim, now 57 and a married father of two grown children.
"All he had on was a black Garrison belt, and he was looking for
wood," Korim said. "He wanted to start a fire."
Forty years later, Korim is among the local baby boomers who
witnessed the Woodstock Music & Art Fair a rainy, muddy nonstop
event billed as "An Aquarian Exposition" of "peace & music."
It was 1969, a time when hippies ruled the youth culture, civil
rights and women's rights were surging, and the Vietnam anti-war
movement was reaching its peak.
The festival featured the likes of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the
Jefferson Airplane.
"I am still wrapped up in Woodstock nation in my head," said Randolph
native Ed Symkus, as he listened last week to pioneering rock station
WBCN's farewell to 104.1 on Boston's FM dial.
Symkus, 59, a freelance journalist now living in West Roxbury,
recalled buying his $14 ticket to Woodstock. It transported him to a
place where everything was done out in the open.
"Most people were smoking pot, and a lot of people were doing acid,"
recalled Symkus, then 18, who admitted to leaving his pot "at home by
accident."
When he and a friend got snarled in traffic, they pulled the Valiant
they drove onto the side of the road and slept in the car overnight.
Around 7 a.m. the next day, the two friends walked 10 miles all
morning with their sleeping bags to get to the stage area.
There was a party atmosphere on that walk, with "stoned" hippies
everywhere sharing food, wine, drugs and sex.
"I remember seeing people in sleeping bags, two people at a time," he said.
The Woodstock musical legacy stems from bands like The Grateful Dead
and Crosby, Stills and Nash playing at a show where everything went
wrong but turned out right.
The town of Woodstock didn't want the concert and promoters were
bounced from another site at the 11th hour.
Promoter Michael Lang settled on a hay field in Bethel owned by a
kindly dairy farmer named Max Yasgur.
The weekend concert did come off, but barely. Fences were torn down,
tickets became useless. More than 400,000 people converged on the
rural corner 80 miles northwest of New York City, clogging traffic
for miles. Then the rains doused everything.
Woodstock was a symbol of the happy, hippie side of the '60s youth movement.
Only 109 people were arrested at the festival, all but four for
drugs. "No instance of violence came to the attention of troopers,"
said New York state police records, according to USA Today.
James Gouveia of Lakeville, 58, a retired Water Department employee
for the town of Middleboro, was at Woodstock.
"There was a lot of sharing and a lot of people being good to one
another, people just being nice," he recalled last week.
Gouveia, then 18, said he took turns sharing "blanket duty" during
the Joplin and Hendrix performances. He was among a group of
Middleboro teens who set up a large blanket near the stage.
On that weekend, the music began Friday afternoon and continued
nonstop until mid-morning on Monday. Highlights for Symkus were
seeing Santana, The Who and Jefferson Airplane.
But John Finstein, 60, of Easton has a different memory that of
young hippies at odds with the Vietnam War.
"It was sex and drugs and rock and roll," Finstein, then 20 and a
Randolph resident, recalled. "In the meantime, our contemporaries
were half a world away sitting in the jungle, getting shot at, getting killed."
Back then, Americans put blame on soldiers and politicians for the
war, "when it was really the (Johnson) administration who put these
guys over there," Finstein said.
"We were wrong as a generation. We were wrong as a country in the way
we treated (our soldiers) when they came home," Finstein said.
But for Symkus and others, Woodstock remains an event marking a
freedom they will never forget or likely will see again.
"We were completely free and on our own. There were no parents. There
was no establishment. There were so many of us," Symkus said. "It was nuts."
--
ON THE WEB
Maria Papadopoulos can be reached at mpapadopoulos@enterprisenews.com.
[See URL for videos.]
--------
From ragtag hippies to thriving businessmen
http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report_from-ragtag-hippies-to-thriving-businessmen_1282703
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Back in 1969, Woodstock organisers billed their three-day festival as
"An Aquarian Exposition." But although the concert became free when
an expected crowd of 200,000 grew half a million strong, it was
conceived as a business proposition.
And the business has endured. Woodstock Ventures, the firm that
oversees the licensing and intellectual property related to the
Woodstock festival, is still run by the original producers of the
event. And for several decades now, that once ragtag group of hippies
has evolved into -- if they weren't already -- good businessmen with
savvy instincts.
For Woodstock's 40th anniversary --- officially August 15-18 -- the
breadth of projects and merchandise is staggering. Rhino and Sony
will deliver albums of performances, Warner Bros. will release the
original film and the Ang Lee-directed narrative feature "Taking
Woodstock," VH1 and the History Channel will air a documentary by
Barbara Koppel, several publishers will release books, Target will
sell anniversary-themed merchandise, and Sony is launching a social
networking/e-commerce site, Woodstock.com.
What happened in 1969 is now rock 'n' roll history. Conceived by
entrepreneurs Joel Rosenman, Michael Lang, John Roberts and Artie
Kornfeld amid a backdrop of social upheaval, the three-day concert
had an impact that resonated far beyond the confines of Max Yasgur's
farm in Bethel, NY. With the formation of Woodstock Ventures before
the festival, the producers also had the foresight to realise that
the event was worth documenting in what ended up as the now-renowned
Warner Bros film and soundtrack album.
Woodstock the ideal has long interfaced with Woodstock the cash cow.
Woodstock Ventures -- owned primarily by Rosenman's family and the
Roberts family, with Lang retaining a minority ownership -- owns the
Woodstock trademarks, including the iconic dove-on-guitar logo.
And while Woodstock-related projects have tapped into consumer
interest for decades, the brand has not been exploited or
over-saturated, at least by its owners. "We haven't monetised it
much, to be honest," says Lang.
"There are some small decisions we would have changed here and there,
but for the most part, if we weren't happy with the way something
felt, then we didn't go ahead," says Rosenman, one of the original
organisers and now a partner in Woodstock Ventures. "And that's
because what happened in 1969 and how it feels to us is more
important than pretty much any consideration."
This year, Warner and Sony are making a wealth of music available. In
June, Rhino released remastered editions of the "Music From the
Original Soundtrack and More: Woodstock" and "Woodstock Two" albums
and is working closely with Warner Home Video, which released Lang's
"The Road to Woodstock" in July.
From Warner Home Video, a "Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music"
director's cut expands on the content of the original documentary.
Sony Legacy took a different tack with its "The Woodstock Experience"
collection in releasing CDs from five Woodstock acts that recorded
albums in 1969 for Columbia, Epic and RCA, now all divisions of Sony
Music. The project pairs 1969 albums from Santana, Jefferson
Airplane, Johnny Winter, Sly & the Family Stone and Janis Joplin with
the artists' Woodstock performances in eco-friendly two-disc packages
at $19.98 each.
"The whole idea was to try and share what that year was like for that
artist," says Jim Parham, vice president of marketing at Sony Legacy.
"For someone like Santana, 1969 that was the first album."
The value of the brand is obvious but, as always, with the people
behind Woodstock Ventures, it's not all about the money. "We would
only form some kind of partnership with someone who was willing to
explore the potential of Woodstock for its effect on civilization
that goes beyond a financial profit," Rosenman says. "It would have
to be somebody who got it, and that's a tall order."
.
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