"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
--Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
“All these hippies wandering about thinking the world was going to be different from that day on. As a cynical English arsehole, I walked through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them, trying to make them realize that nothing had changed and nothing was going to change. Not only that, 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 fuck the lot of them.”
--Pete Townshend on Woodstock (shown above famously tossing his guitar to the Woodstock crowd at the end of his performance)
Pete had a great time at Woodstock, which bears mention as we continue celebrating its 40th anniversary. No word yet on how the Altamont or the Cincinnati Who concert/stampede anniversary celebrations are shaping up.
No anniversary or occasion involving the Baby Boomers would be complete without our nation's media instinctively over-covering, over-analyzing, and over-hyping it, so the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock was no exception. What did it mean? What did it change? How have we changed? What happened to those who attended? Countless documentaries, re-airings of the movie, news channel cut-ins, radio retrospectives. Good Lord, there's even a new movie. It's everywhere. Paris Hilton and Craig Biggio's 3000th hit both think the media went overboard on the Woodstock anniversary.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
--Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
“All these hippies wandering about thinking the world was going to be different from that day on. As a cynical English arsehole, I walked through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them, trying to make them realize that nothing had changed and nothing was going to change. Not only that, 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 fuck the lot of them.”
--Pete Townshend on Woodstock (shown above famously tossing his guitar to the Woodstock crowd at the end of his performance)
Pete had a great time at Woodstock, which bears mention as we continue celebrating its 40th anniversary. No word yet on how the Altamont or the Cincinnati Who concert/stampede anniversary celebrations are shaping up.
No anniversary or occasion involving the Baby Boomers would be complete without our nation's media instinctively over-covering, over-analyzing, and over-hyping it, so the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock was no exception. What did it mean? What did it change? How have we changed? What happened to those who attended? Countless documentaries, re-airings of the movie, news channel cut-ins, radio retrospectives. Good Lord, there's even a new movie. It's everywhere. Paris Hilton and Craig Biggio's 3000th hit both think the media went overboard on the Woodstock anniversary.
No generation is as self-obsessed or aware as the Boomers. The Boomers were the hippies of the late 60s, smugly and self-righteously bent on changing the world and breaking away from their materialistic and shallow forefathers' ways. Instead, they spilled out of Woodstock, covered in mud and still tripping, only to became the coke-addled, EST-spouting, disco dancing swingers of the 70s, the junk bond trading, Reagan-voting, condo buyers of the 80s, and the balding, mutual fund-buying adulterers of the 90s. They resolved at Woodstock and Monterrey and the Be-In and at the Moratorium to make over the world from peace and love, but wound up buying the Porsche instead. Under their dominance, 30 years of solid, liberal, Boomer-controlled, Democratic party rule has decimated our cities, leaving them centers of poverty, violence and hopelessness. Welfare, which the Boomers embraced as the key to lifting the poor out of poverty, became so abused that the Boomer poster child (Bill Clinton), had to reform it. Public schools are going to hell for want of funds. Health care is excellent but available for fewer and fewer. Boomers preach "green," but drive "black" and our dependence for oil has skyrocketed under Boomer administrations.
The generation that wanted to teach this country how to love has instead left it more politically and socially polarized than at any time in living memory. They sing "Teach Your Children" but they vote down property tax rises and leave schools in shambles. They preach about loving your neighbor but build ever more prisons, cut treatment programs, and add crimes to the statute books. They beg others to "live and let live," but pass reams of Nanny State legislation. They bark at governments about world peace, but blithely cheer on military buildups.
Woodstock was the end, not the beginning, of the Love Generation. Metaphorically, its where Hunter Thompson's wave broke. Months after Woodstock, Altamont went down in a maelstrom of greed, ego, and violence that would make a mosh pit seem like a DAR tea. The Isle of Wight festival, held the next year with many of the artists who performed at Woodstock, would turn into another disaster with suddenly aggressive and irate hippies overrunning the site and making demands of the musicians and promoters, all famously depicted in the documentary Message to Love. The spectre of Joan Baez, who has built an entire career around empowering the "people" and fighting capitalist greed, refusing to play that festival for free pretty much summed up the disintegrating scene. Within a year of Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died, the Jefferson Airplane split in two, the Kent State protests went down, and the Beatles broke up. All those Haight-Ashbury 60s groups would soon fall into obscurity as reverberations of the Chicago protests, Nixon's election, and the growing realization that LSD and free love wouldn't save the world began to set in. What Grace Slick called the "heavy groups" at Woodstock, like the Who, and later Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Black Sabbath, ZZ Top, Rush, and the other Arena Rock Gods, would replace rock activism with the Rock Star Cult of Personality.
You could see all this happening at Woodstock. The music was getting harder. Drugs, specifically "bad acid," were everywhere. All the backstage water and liquids had been dosed, so nearly all the performers were tripping on stage. The haggling over payments, and later over licensing fees for the album and movie rights, became legendary. The promoters, sitting on wads of cash from advanced ticket sales and from selling the movie rights, didn't provide sufficient basic amenities like food and water, or basic sanitation. If you liked the New Orleans Superdome after Katrina, you'd have loved Woodstock. The stars flew in and out on helicopters and stayed in relative comfort backstage while the kids endured gridlock, deprivation, flood, and pestilence mere yards away. The kids, without any options, trashed the place. Movie director Michael Wadleigh says that last scene surveying all the debris, as Hendrix famously played the bluesy Villanova Junction right after the frenetic 60s anthems of Star Spangled Banner/Purple Haze, was meant to be a warning of the troubles to come.
By the time the Woodstock movie came out in March 1970, the scene it depicted was finished. But like any other good trend coming out of California, the rest of the country wouldn't get on board until after it ran its course at the start. The 1967 Summer of Love reached its own high water mark in June with the Monterrey Pop festival, with a format similar to Woodstock, but without the refugee camp squalor and drug addled torpor that occurred two years later. It crashed and burned, as all the hippies who'd descended on the Haight succumbed to the inevitable realities of life on the street. They came with ideals, but many quickly became dirty, homeless, addicted street people. Some dream. By October, the "Death of the Hippie" march in Golden Gate Park marked what everyone in town already knew. Dylan famously stayed away from Woodstock because he was so sick of hippies hanging around his house. Not everyone got the message though. When the Woodstock movie came out, kids across the country who had only heard of hippies and the counter-culture movement could finally see what it was about. Like Saturday Night Fever a decade later, it inspired kids not in New York or San Francisco to get in on the action. I once looked in the old Cactus yearbooks at UT. Interestingly, men didn't start wearing their hair long until after 1970. After the Woodstock movie came out. I imagine something similar happened everywhere else. Its the same phenomenon responsible for punk rock not hitting Austin until 1981, about five years after it started in New York. Long Live the Judys!
Woodstock really is the appropriate Boomer milestone. They immediately adopted it as their crowning achievement, and unless you think the stock bubble, dot com bust, mortgage fraud recessions, S&L collapse, Bill Clinton, or cocaine are better candidates, it looks like we're stuck with the Woodstock Nation. Everything my generation has become began, or was on display, at Woodstock. Its best and its worst.
Clearly Woodstock became famous because something good happened there. Most obviously, the music was, at times, epochally good. Sly and the Family Stone's set easily ranks among the greatest performances of the second half of the 20th Century. Hendrix, despite having just fired the Experience and having had limited rehearsals with his new Band of Gypsies, displayed his virtuosity like almost no other performer ever. While soundboard recordings now available on the internet (see below) show that most of the Who's set was sluggish, they picked up speed mid-way through the heavily Tommy-laden set and dramatically finished at dawn that Sunday morning with one of their finest runs. One can reel off other career-making highlights that made the album: Santana's "Soul Sacrifice"; Ten Years After's "I'm Going Home," CSNY's "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," Joe Cocker's "I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends" and so on. Amazingly, this was probably about the last time that most of the entire generation coming of age basically all liked the same music. In the late 1960s, blacks and whites, rich and poor kids alike all enjoyed rock and roll and Motown and Stax soul. That's why in the movie you see a very racially diverse crowd. That's not been true since. Popular music fractured thereafter. Journey and Fleetwood Mac wound up crawling from the wreckage. "TUSK!" Thank God for the Ramones.
Woodstock was the end, not the beginning, of the Love Generation. Metaphorically, its where Hunter Thompson's wave broke. Months after Woodstock, Altamont went down in a maelstrom of greed, ego, and violence that would make a mosh pit seem like a DAR tea. The Isle of Wight festival, held the next year with many of the artists who performed at Woodstock, would turn into another disaster with suddenly aggressive and irate hippies overrunning the site and making demands of the musicians and promoters, all famously depicted in the documentary Message to Love. The spectre of Joan Baez, who has built an entire career around empowering the "people" and fighting capitalist greed, refusing to play that festival for free pretty much summed up the disintegrating scene. Within a year of Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died, the Jefferson Airplane split in two, the Kent State protests went down, and the Beatles broke up. All those Haight-Ashbury 60s groups would soon fall into obscurity as reverberations of the Chicago protests, Nixon's election, and the growing realization that LSD and free love wouldn't save the world began to set in. What Grace Slick called the "heavy groups" at Woodstock, like the Who, and later Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Black Sabbath, ZZ Top, Rush, and the other Arena Rock Gods, would replace rock activism with the Rock Star Cult of Personality.
You could see all this happening at Woodstock. The music was getting harder. Drugs, specifically "bad acid," were everywhere. All the backstage water and liquids had been dosed, so nearly all the performers were tripping on stage. The haggling over payments, and later over licensing fees for the album and movie rights, became legendary. The promoters, sitting on wads of cash from advanced ticket sales and from selling the movie rights, didn't provide sufficient basic amenities like food and water, or basic sanitation. If you liked the New Orleans Superdome after Katrina, you'd have loved Woodstock. The stars flew in and out on helicopters and stayed in relative comfort backstage while the kids endured gridlock, deprivation, flood, and pestilence mere yards away. The kids, without any options, trashed the place. Movie director Michael Wadleigh says that last scene surveying all the debris, as Hendrix famously played the bluesy Villanova Junction right after the frenetic 60s anthems of Star Spangled Banner/Purple Haze, was meant to be a warning of the troubles to come.
By the time the Woodstock movie came out in March 1970, the scene it depicted was finished. But like any other good trend coming out of California, the rest of the country wouldn't get on board until after it ran its course at the start. The 1967 Summer of Love reached its own high water mark in June with the Monterrey Pop festival, with a format similar to Woodstock, but without the refugee camp squalor and drug addled torpor that occurred two years later. It crashed and burned, as all the hippies who'd descended on the Haight succumbed to the inevitable realities of life on the street. They came with ideals, but many quickly became dirty, homeless, addicted street people. Some dream. By October, the "Death of the Hippie" march in Golden Gate Park marked what everyone in town already knew. Dylan famously stayed away from Woodstock because he was so sick of hippies hanging around his house. Not everyone got the message though. When the Woodstock movie came out, kids across the country who had only heard of hippies and the counter-culture movement could finally see what it was about. Like Saturday Night Fever a decade later, it inspired kids not in New York or San Francisco to get in on the action. I once looked in the old Cactus yearbooks at UT. Interestingly, men didn't start wearing their hair long until after 1970. After the Woodstock movie came out. I imagine something similar happened everywhere else. Its the same phenomenon responsible for punk rock not hitting Austin until 1981, about five years after it started in New York. Long Live the Judys!
Woodstock really is the appropriate Boomer milestone. They immediately adopted it as their crowning achievement, and unless you think the stock bubble, dot com bust, mortgage fraud recessions, S&L collapse, Bill Clinton, or cocaine are better candidates, it looks like we're stuck with the Woodstock Nation. Everything my generation has become began, or was on display, at Woodstock. Its best and its worst.
Clearly Woodstock became famous because something good happened there. Most obviously, the music was, at times, epochally good. Sly and the Family Stone's set easily ranks among the greatest performances of the second half of the 20th Century. Hendrix, despite having just fired the Experience and having had limited rehearsals with his new Band of Gypsies, displayed his virtuosity like almost no other performer ever. While soundboard recordings now available on the internet (see below) show that most of the Who's set was sluggish, they picked up speed mid-way through the heavily Tommy-laden set and dramatically finished at dawn that Sunday morning with one of their finest runs. One can reel off other career-making highlights that made the album: Santana's "Soul Sacrifice"; Ten Years After's "I'm Going Home," CSNY's "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," Joe Cocker's "I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends" and so on. Amazingly, this was probably about the last time that most of the entire generation coming of age basically all liked the same music. In the late 1960s, blacks and whites, rich and poor kids alike all enjoyed rock and roll and Motown and Stax soul. That's why in the movie you see a very racially diverse crowd. That's not been true since. Popular music fractured thereafter. Journey and Fleetwood Mac wound up crawling from the wreckage. "TUSK!" Thank God for the Ramones.
Sidebar...much of the Woodstock bill was average at best. Music geek that I am, I found a website that has amassed soundboard recordings (the live feed directly from the microphones and instrument pickups onstage) for download of nearly the entire three day concert. Between that, and the Sirius "Woodstock Channel" played over the anniversary weekend, I've now listened to most of the entire Woodstock concert. I can tell you there was a lot of mediocre music that weekend. Some of it was because the acts themselves were mediocre (Quill...really?). Other excellent acts played very subpar sets due to fatigue, the horrific stage conditions (the Grateful Dead said they suffered electrical shocks when they touched the microphones or their guitars), the drugs, or the weather. The Who's legendary set? Not really that great when compared to the superior and similar set on the incendiary Live at Leeds album. The Creedence set was workmanlike and uninspired. CSN&Y were, except for Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, out of tune and out of sync for most of their set. The "legendary" performances at Woodstock appear to have been as much about the myth, fuelled by listening while in a cloud of acid, hash, and pot, as the performances themselves.
Woodstock also displayed the Boomers' resilience in the face of adversity, as well as the tolerance they self-righteously preach (and generally abandon when confronted with actually living up to their ideals). Conditions were appalling. To call it a refugee camp doesn't do justice to the miserable scene. Accounts of reeking port-a-potties, dwindling food supplies, lack of water and medical care, heat, torrential rains, mud, and bad drugs all dominate Woodstock remembrances. Woodstock made that prison camp in Bridge Over the River Kwai look like the Four Seasons. Despite it all, nearly half a million people got along relatively well, with little or no reported violence or other havoc despite there being no visible police presence at Yasgur's farm. Locals pitched in to help the kids. Various communes and other groups like the Hog Farm pitched in and served food and provided assistance. The spirit of "we're all in this together" carried the day, and Woodstock seemed to symbolize the Boomers' sense of tolerance and community.
Finally, though in many ways the conditions were barbaric, the fact that it even happened at all provides an example of the Boomers' ingenuity. Accounts abound of how the town of Wallkill, NY, where the concert was supposed to take place, reneged on promises to issue required permits roughly four weeks before the festival. Promoters had to scramble to find a replacement location, get permits, build facilities, and handle logistics. That they succeeded with about three out of four of those goals was nothing short of miraculous. They ran out of time to build the fence and ticket stands, and instead of the 200,000 people they expected based on advance ticket sales, 500,000 showed up instead. Either "the New York State Thruway is closed" as Arlo Guthrie proclaimed from the stage, or it was so clogged that people miles away simply got out of their cars and began walking the traffic was so bad. Performers couldn't get to the site, which delayed the first day's (Friday) start time and forced the promoters to shuffle the lineup. The helicopters became necessary just to get the acts out to the site. When more sophisticated acts like the Who and the Grateful Dead demanded advanced payment by cashier's check, promoters were able to talk a local banker into going to his White Lake branch late on Saturday night to get some blank cashier's checks. They somehow conjured up 400 volunteers and $100,000 to collect all the debris on site and burn it (thereby earning a fine from the town of Bethel).
Woodstock also displayed the Boomers' resilience in the face of adversity, as well as the tolerance they self-righteously preach (and generally abandon when confronted with actually living up to their ideals). Conditions were appalling. To call it a refugee camp doesn't do justice to the miserable scene. Accounts of reeking port-a-potties, dwindling food supplies, lack of water and medical care, heat, torrential rains, mud, and bad drugs all dominate Woodstock remembrances. Woodstock made that prison camp in Bridge Over the River Kwai look like the Four Seasons. Despite it all, nearly half a million people got along relatively well, with little or no reported violence or other havoc despite there being no visible police presence at Yasgur's farm. Locals pitched in to help the kids. Various communes and other groups like the Hog Farm pitched in and served food and provided assistance. The spirit of "we're all in this together" carried the day, and Woodstock seemed to symbolize the Boomers' sense of tolerance and community.
Finally, though in many ways the conditions were barbaric, the fact that it even happened at all provides an example of the Boomers' ingenuity. Accounts abound of how the town of Wallkill, NY, where the concert was supposed to take place, reneged on promises to issue required permits roughly four weeks before the festival. Promoters had to scramble to find a replacement location, get permits, build facilities, and handle logistics. That they succeeded with about three out of four of those goals was nothing short of miraculous. They ran out of time to build the fence and ticket stands, and instead of the 200,000 people they expected based on advance ticket sales, 500,000 showed up instead. Either "the New York State Thruway is closed" as Arlo Guthrie proclaimed from the stage, or it was so clogged that people miles away simply got out of their cars and began walking the traffic was so bad. Performers couldn't get to the site, which delayed the first day's (Friday) start time and forced the promoters to shuffle the lineup. The helicopters became necessary just to get the acts out to the site. When more sophisticated acts like the Who and the Grateful Dead demanded advanced payment by cashier's check, promoters were able to talk a local banker into going to his White Lake branch late on Saturday night to get some blank cashier's checks. They somehow conjured up 400 volunteers and $100,000 to collect all the debris on site and burn it (thereby earning a fine from the town of Bethel).
But in Woodstock we saw the Boomers' hypocrisy, greed, selfishness, and, frankly, hedonism that would also change this nation. Let's start with the personal behavior. "There's no such thing as 'bad acid'." Really? The movie shows rampant drug taking, glorified on stage and throughout the movie. Acid in particular was everywhere and in everything. The Hog Farm was brought in, in part, just to deal with people having bad trips. Performers went on stage drunk, high, tripping, or various combinations thereof. Janis Joplin famously held a bottle in each hand when she took the stage. Hendrix proclaimed he was high at the beginning of his set. Country Joe and the Fish belted out "MARIJUANA" at the end of "Rock and Soul Music." Arlo Guthrie's "Coming Into Los Angeles, carryin' a couple of keys" pretty much made his entire career. And where did that all lead? As mentioned above, Joplin and Hendrix died of overdoses the next year. Tim Hardin, who played the first day, overdosed in 1980. Keith Moon beat him to the punch in 1978. Many of the other performers battled drug problems for years. David Crosby had to get a new liver. The relevant point is that Woodstock, and the hippies who gave it life, created a myth of "consciousness-raising" through drugs that has wreaked havoc on this country ever since. Imagine the 70s without cocaine, the 80s without ecstasy, or the 90s without heroin. What could have been accomplished without the staggering human toll brought about by all that drug use?
Woodstock also birthed the Rock Star. Sure, Elvis, the Beatles, Dylan, and the Rolling Stones were all huge stars, but for the most part your average rocker was just that. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and even the Who, still weren't so removed from the audiences for whom they played. The former two bands had houses in the Haight where fans routinely stopped by. Lots of other bands and solo acts would live basically "normal" lives without the Arena Rock chasm between audience and performer. Woodstock changed that. Woodstock showed half a million kids worshipping at the altar of the Rock God. The stars helicoptered in and out while the kids hoofed it. The stars relaxed in the dry, comfortable backstage area or in local hotels while the kids suffered in the mud and the muck. Woodstock brought a flood of money (see below), which the stars used to buy country manors, play polo, and drive a fleet of Bentleys. Rockers would be expected to live grandiose lifestyles, engage in extreme decadence and churn out epic poetry set to mind-blowing music, and we little peons would try to live vicariously through them.
Woodstock also birthed the Rock Star. Sure, Elvis, the Beatles, Dylan, and the Rolling Stones were all huge stars, but for the most part your average rocker was just that. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and even the Who, still weren't so removed from the audiences for whom they played. The former two bands had houses in the Haight where fans routinely stopped by. Lots of other bands and solo acts would live basically "normal" lives without the Arena Rock chasm between audience and performer. Woodstock changed that. Woodstock showed half a million kids worshipping at the altar of the Rock God. The stars helicoptered in and out while the kids hoofed it. The stars relaxed in the dry, comfortable backstage area or in local hotels while the kids suffered in the mud and the muck. Woodstock brought a flood of money (see below), which the stars used to buy country manors, play polo, and drive a fleet of Bentleys. Rockers would be expected to live grandiose lifestyles, engage in extreme decadence and churn out epic poetry set to mind-blowing music, and we little peons would try to live vicariously through them.
Woodstock also ushered in the era of Corporate Rock. It wasn't the first big music festival, but because it was so close to New York it was the first one where the Madison Avenue bosses' kids went. That so many kids would go to such extreme lengths just to see rock and roll performers was not lost on Corporate America. The older generation may not have approved of these longhairs, but they sure weren't above making money off them. In came the money men. Everything went commercial. Publishing, performance and licensing rights became strictly controlled. The acts started selling merchandise instead of singing songs. A rock concert became more than just going to hear the group-after Woodstock, one had to have the t-shirt, the album, the souvenier program, and the coffee mug. This didn't stop just with the established acts. Corporate America found that it could sell to kids on a wider scale. Enter "The Mod Squad," "Partridge Family," and countless other youth-oriented marketing gimmicks. Woodstock itself suffered from that commercial ethic. Some of the groups there, most notably Creedence Clearwater Revival, weren't seen in the movie or heard on the album because their record label couldn't or wouldn't reach a deal with the movie or album producers. Some of the bigger acts didn't hit the stage until well after their scheduled start time because the producers were resisting paying them before their performance. Some invited groups, most famously the then newly-formed Led Zeppelin, wouldn't play because they didn't want to share the bill with other groups. Lead promoter Michael Lang left the concert grounds that Monday morning by helicopter and flew straight to Wall Street to meet with the investors and plot a strategy for sorting out the monumental cost overruns. A prophetic act. The Woodstock promoters and investors are still cashing in. Anniversary concerts, a web site selling all kinds of merchandise, a movie, and expanded CD reissues are all being made available to you, at a low, low price, so that you can relive or experience first hand the Aquarian Celebration. Now that's the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
I was going to talk about Boomer politics, but this is just about enough. Let's just say that the goofy, drugged-out rantings of rock stars and their 20 year old sycophants were sufficiently in vogue to capture the Democratic Party in 1972, leading to a Presidential landslide, and to the 1974-76 response to Watergate. In many respects, the inevitable backlash led to Reagan's election and the New Right victories of the 1980s. On the other hand, the hippies' notions of equality, peace, and compassion did make it through to the larger society. As the Boomers became older, their hippy ideals matured and in turn influenced the passage of expanded civil rights legislation, of renewed focus on education, and a greater social ethic of racial and other minority inclusion and integration. Had these idiots not combined their cultural ethos and their politics, what would have happened?
Now I'm done.
Next-I'm going on Vacation!
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