woodstock
when i was young i thot it was fashionable to be a hippie.so i grew long hair and pants that belled my soul and sole.i thot i was a fashionista.
by a freak set of circumstance i got hooked onto mf hussain,vincent van gogh,picasso,geroge orwell , illayaraja and simon-garfunkel during my final year at school.
the more i saw hussain's horses and voluptuous nudes,picasso's acute and cute triangles and lisltened listlessly to illayaraja's back-to-bach movements in dapankoothu numbers
.........
...i knew that there was something terribly wrong in this world and that artists gave vent through their own medium in strokes that were different and afferent.
i was still innocent as a lark,though i knew the bees,the bonnets and the booze[ .....booze was the secret of my energy......]
and then i picked up this woodstock album--with a bird perched on a string guitar..the memory is still fresh..as though it is yesterday...i can still catch the smell of rain.....
make love,not war...it is forbidden to forbid...anti-war...creative juices........read on..this is a short edited version of the magic of woodstock
.....it is impossible to write the final word about Woodstock 1969.......... it has become a historic symbol with different meanings to thousands of people..........
HOW WOODSTOCK HAPPENED
by elliot tiber
reprinted with permission from the times herald-record and mr. tiber
woodstock commemorative edition
text copyright 1994 the times herald-record
The last bedraggled fan sloshed out of Max Yasgur's muddy pasture more than 25 years ago. That's when the debate began about Woodstock's historical significance. True believers still call Woodstock the capstone of an era devoted to human advancement. Cynics say it was a fitting, ridiculous end to an era of naivete. Then there are those who say it was just a hell of a party.
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969 drew more than 450,000 people to a pasture in Sullivan County. For four days, the site became a countercultural mini-nation in which minds were open, drugs were all but legal and love was "free". The music began Friday afternoon at 5:07pm August 15 and continued until mid-morning Monday August 18. The festival closed the New York State Thruway and created one of the nation's worst traffic jams. It also inspired a slew of local and state laws to ensure that nothing like it would ever happen again.
Woodstock, like only a handful of historical events, has become part of the cultural lexicon. As Watergate is the codeword for a national crisis of confidence and Waterloo stands for ignominious defeat, Woodstock has become an instant adjective denoting youthful hedonism and 60's excess. "What we had here was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence," said Bethel town historian Bert Feldman. "Dickens said it first: 'It was the best of times. It was the worst of times'. It's an amalgam that will never be reproduced again."
Gathered that weekend in 1969 were liars and lovers, prophets and profiteers. They made love, they made money and they made a little history. Arnold Skolnick, the artist who designed Woodstock's dove-and-guitar symbol, described it this way: "Something was tapped, a nerve, in this country. And everybody just came."
The counterculture's biggest bash - it ultimately cost more than $2.4 million - was sponsored by four very different, and very young, men: John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang. The oldest of the four was 26. John Roberts supplied the money. He was heir to a drugstore and toothpaste manufacturing fortune. He had a multimillion-dollar trust fund, a University of Pennsylvania degree and a lieutenant's commission in the Army. He had seen exactly one rock concert, by the Beach Boys.
The Woodstock dove is really a catbird; originally, it perched on a flute. "I was staying on Shelter Island off Long Island, and I was drawing catbirds all the time," said artist Arnold Skolnick. "As soon as Ira Arnold (a copywriter on the project) called with the copy-approved 'Three Days of Peace and Music,' I just took the razor blade and cut that catbird out of the sketchpad I was using. "First, it sat on a flute. I was listening to jazz at the time, and I guess that's why. But anyway, it sat on a flute for a day, and I finally ended up putting it on a guitar."
Yasgur met Lang in the alfalfa field. This time, Lang liked the lay of the land. "It was magic," Lang said. "It was perfect. The sloping bowl, a little rise for the stage. A lake in the background. The deal was sealed right there in the field. Max and I were walking on the rise above the bowl. When we started to talk business, he was figuring on how much he was going to lose in this crop and how much it was going to cost him to reseed the field. He was a sharp guy, ol' Max, and he was figuring everything up with a pencil and paper. He was wetting the tip of his pencil with his tongue. I remember shaking his hand, and that's the first time I noticed that he had only three fingers on his right hand. But his grip was like iron. He's cleared that land himself."
Bob Dylan was the only one of Lang's rock'n'roll heroes who hadn't signed a contract. The promoters had borrowed some of Dylan's mystique by naming their concert after his adopted home town, which was only 70 miles from Bethel. Dylan's backup group, The Band, was already signed. Lang figured that Dylan's appearance was a natural. So he made the pilgrimage to Dylan's Ulster County hideaway. "I went to see Bob Dylan about three weeks before the festival," Lang said. "I went with Bob Dacey, a friend of Dylan's, and we met in his house for a couple of hours. I told him what we were doing and told him, 'We'd love to have you there.' But he didn't come. I don't know why."
Eight miles away, Timer Herald-Record harness racing John Szefc was working on a feature story at the Monticello Raceway. Then he caught a glimpse of the traffic out on Route 17B. It was 11am, more than 24 hours before the concert, and traffic was already backed up all the way down Route 17B to Route 17 - a distance of 10 miles. "That's when I knew this was going to be big. Really significant, " he said. Szefc's story that night was about the effect of the concert on the racetrack. Some bettors fought the traffic on Route 17B and managed to get to the windows.
Prankster leader Babbs acted as emcee, opening the stage to anyone who wanted to jam. The sound system was a space amplifier borrowed from the Grateful Dead. "Over the hill and into the woods we went," Babbs said. "We had the free school for the kids, the Free Kitchen and so, the Free Stage
Every time Richie Havens tried to quit playing, he had to keep on. The other acts hadn't arrived. Finally, after Havens had played for nearly three hours - improvising his last song "Freedom" - a large U.S. Army helicopter landed with musical reinforcements. An Army helicopter? "Yes," said Havens. "It was the only helicopter available. If it wasn't for the U.S. Army, Woodstock might not have happened." The U.S. Army saved the day for a crowd that was, for the most part, anti-war? "We were never anti-soldier," said Havens. "We were just against the war."
When Country Joe McDonald came out yelling " Gimme an F," revving the crowd with anti-Vietnam cheers, Wadleight was loading his camera and fixing a minor jam. "I was just scrambling like crazy to get my camera in some kind of working order," Wadleigh said. "That's why you don't see him for the first two minutes or so in the film. You just hear him. I got him on camera eventually. Someone should give him an award for that song. That is one of the greatest war songs there is."
The ration ticket read "Food for Love."
Wavy Gravy called it "Breakfast in Bed for 400,000." The recipe: Rolled oats or bulgur wheat (often both). Cook until mush. Add peanuts for taste. Cook until the texture of goulash. For a side dish, stir-fry any vegetables that can be scraped together. Scoop the mixtures onto paper plates. "These people were feeding literally hundreds of thousands of people with nothing," Krewson said. "They were taking what they could get and feeding people with it." Gravy told the audience that it was no miracle. "We're all feeding each other, man," he said.
It was about 9am, time for Hendrix, the headliner. He had launched into the national anthem, a moment that would go down in the annals of rock'n'roll. "I remember trying to fall asleep during the ‘Star-Spangled Banner'," said Ciganer, Jerry Garcia's buddy. "I just wished he would stop." The party was over.
John Pinnavaia was considered 1-A by his draft board when he walked onto Yasgur's farm. After he stepped on the bottle and it slashed the tendon in his right foot, he was classified 1-Y for a temporary disability. After four months on crutches, Pinnavaia got married, putting him even lower on the draft list. Pinnavaia stayed out of the Army but still bears a road map of scars on his foot. He calls it his "Woodstock wound."
For the next decade, Woodstock was virtually a cliche for all that was goofy about the ‘60s. By 1980, the world had moved on
The magic that is Woodstock continues...it's in the air!
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