It wasn’t very important at the time, just one of a string of festivals, and certainly nothing national. And the festivals weren’t even the way most people experienced music. But Woodstock’s reputation grows now because it has its trumpeters. And as the others fade, so it has a chance to stand in for all of them. It’s got the footage that keeps being played over and over. Now, that is. But not then. It was a big deal in New York but even there it was off the news a few days later. So the restricted memory reel is distorting the history. Last reel playing, so winner by attrition.
To the boomers, everything that happened between 1965 and 1972 was the most important stuff that ever happened ever.
I ripped on it in my blog a few days ago. Go to the Rolling Stone site, too, to see what I’m bitching about.
It’s like the canonization of Teddy Kennedy. People are (choosing?) to forget the negatives about Woodstock, and remember it as this wonderful event.
It was a soggy traffic jam mess with tons off garbage everywhere, not enough food or bathrooms. So the whole grounds were a big smelly feces and urine mixed pit of sludge, mud, trash and human waste.
Yuck.
This is silly.
The attendance at Woodstock certainly makes it stand out from the string of festivals, just on that alone.
“just one of a string of festivals”
Yeah, not really. There were other festivals it’s true but they weren’t the same and didn’t mean as much. Maybe you had to be around then to “get it”.
(Let me just apologize in advance for this…)
“…don’t criticize what you don’t understand…”
( …couldn’t resist.)
Maybe they didn’t liberate any concentration camps, but they were brave enough to dress like this yet remain condescending toward us 'tweeners" who thought our own version of cool could be anything besides a sad pastiche of what they’d enjoyed.
At least we’ll have the honor of supporting their huge numbers as they retire.
That was great!
This has kind of a Cafe Society vibe to me, man – can ya dig it?
Peace and love,
twickster, MPSIMS moderator
There was nothing more national than LIFE magazine back in '69 and they went so far as to publish a special issue devoted to Woodstock at the time. The movie was a huge hit less than a year later. And I’m sure one can find plenty of other evidence that the event had a national impact.
It was so important, there was a Peanuts character named after it.
Got it on the first try, excellent.
It does nothing to change your point, but Sgt. Pepper was released in 1967, not 1969.
As a card-carrying Boomer, I never wished I’d been to Woodstock. It looked like a giant mess; it would have been very hard to really hear any of the music.
If I could borrow a Time Machine, I’d visit the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967.
Not sure how I made that mistake, since I had the list right in front of me. Thanks, I have corrected that.
If you’ve ever read the strip where Woodstock reveals his name, Snoopy is very cynical about it in response.
My sense is, the vast majority of the people who actually ATTENDED the Woodstock festival, whether as performers (like Pete Townshend) or as fans (like Billy Joel) hated every second of it, and will readily tell you “It sucked- you didn’t miss a thing.”
It was the people who WEREN’T there but loved the IDEA of Woodstock who turned it into a legend.
This is correct. And Altamont happening only a few months later made Woodstock seem even more special.
There were not 500,000 person festivals taking place on a regular basis in the U.S. at the time. There was Monterey in 1967 and then Woodstock. Smaller festivals existed but these were the only ones that drew national attention.
Woodstock became famous in 1969. It’s not memory.
RickJay, all I can say about your screed is that you can find zillions of polls in the last 25 years from hip “new music” magazines that don’t list any 60s albums among the top. We’ll see in the future which sets hold up better.
Pop music in general was better in the '60s and '70s. That’s as close to objective fact as you’re going to get in a discussion of the arts.
There are albums today as good as Pet Sounds or Led Zep IV or Sgt. Pepper’s but you don’t hear of them unless you go looking for them on your own, because Little Wayne and the Jonas Brothers bogart all the airwaves.
Now all the top 10 albums being within a few years of each other is a little suspect, and so is 4 out 10 being by the Beatles, but oh well, those lists are provocative on purpose to get people to talk about them.
The reason “Why The Beatles Broke Up” is an article THIRTY-NINE FRICKIN’ YEARS LATER is because they’re trying to be relevant by appealing to a demographic whose parents were in diapers thirty nine frickin’ years ago.
Pop music was always better in the past because we’ve forgotten the crap. Glastonbury is still going and still hosted by the same man, but of course now it is ‘respectable’ and probably full of middle-class kids dragged down there hating every moment. What is good is that, however compromised, the ideals have not been lost altogether like so much before.
I had to open this thread to find out where the smell of sour grapes was coming from.
This doesn’t prove anything. A lot of important events go unnoticed at the time they happen, with their significance only realized later.
Speaking as someone who wasn’t there: was Woodstock important? Maybe not. Was it a significant cultural event, and more or less unique at the time? Absolutely.