Happy Anniversary, Woodstock! And Yes, Baby Boomers, It's Too Late to Die Before You Get Old

It was forty years ago this weekend that the Woodstock Music and Art Festival was held in Bethel, NY. Why wasn't it called the Bethel Music and Art Festival? I don't know. I guess Woodstock just sounded a lot cooler. And what about that bird that couldn't fly straight in the Peanuts cartoon strip? Would he (or was it a she?) have been as cool had he been known as Bethel? I think not. And which came first, the bird in Peanuts or the music festival? Whatever. I'm getting off track. And the track I want to be on is the one thing that I believe deep in my heart of hearts: I would have made an awful hippie.



For one thing, I don't like to be dirty. I don't like dirt on me, especially in it's semi-liquid mud form. Also, I don't like to wear sandals. They were okay for Jesus, but not for me. And I don't think you can chant away the rain. The climactic conditions of Earth simply don't give a rat's ass about the anti-rain vibes you're putting out, man. As for the nudity, I don't much like being naked in public, nor do I wish to see most of my fellow humans naked in public.

I'm wound a little too tight to be a hippie. And I'm a bit of a rebel. When told to not take the brown acid because it's bad, I would have taken it anyway. And what would have been the result of my rebellious behavior? A bad trip, that's what. Although, I gotta be honest, a weekend spent with a hundred thousand people, all rolling around in various states of undress in the mud combined with an extreme lack of bathroom facilities and no showers, that sounds like one giant bad trip to me. Bring on the brown acid.

It's best for someone like me, and all other God fearing Americans, to simply watch the Woodstock movie and dig the groovy music from a safe distance of 40 years. And the movie is well worth watching, if for no other reason than you get to observe a culture, temporary as it was, that at this point in time seems quaint, if not a little naive. Heck, it seemed that way when I first saw the film at the Parkway Theater in Chicago somewhere around 1979. Only ten years after (hey, they were great in the movie!) the event, it looked like it could have happened a hundred years earlier. That's how much things had changed in America and in culture. The tie-dyed dreamers just looked out of touch in the brave new age of punk and New Wave. In a mere decade, we had strayed pretty far from the garden.

But the music, the music was great. If you can sit through Joan Baez singing "Joe Hill" near the beginning of the film (and if you can reach the fast forward on your remote, you won't have to) you are rewarded with stellar performances from many bands that are now considered the bastions of "classic rock": Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Joe Cocker, Santana and Ten Years After ("I'm goin' home...by helicopter"). Even Sha Na Na was good. Why a retro-1950s band was at the penultimate celebration of hippiedom, I don't know but they seemed to have had a good time.



So there you have it. I could never be a hippie, but I do dig their groovy, groovy tunes, man.



Having just watched this clip of the Who doing "My Generation" I have two thoughts (other than Pete Townshend looks really young and stoned here).

1. Does a guy in a white jumpsuit beating his guitar until it makes primal noises, whereupon it is thrown into the audience, represent the peace and love that Woodstock is supposed to be all about?

2. I really like the home grown feeling of the event itself. It seems light years away from the professional, antiseptic shows you get quite often now. The whole thing looks like some kids got together and said, "Hey! Let's put on a show!" built a stage and invited a hundred thousand of their closest friends to watch. It's actually very cool. Still wouldn't have wanted to be there though.