It does seem that when comparing Woodstock and Monterey, the latter had a better acts and performances.
Of course this is the opinion of someone who was far too young to be at either concert.
Why? Why, if there were a string of identikit festivals, was this one picked out by history as significant? Why did it pick up the “trumpeters” at the time? Why were songs written about it at the time (On Yasgur’s Farm - Mountain, Woodstock - Joani Mitchell et al)? Have you seen the footage of Jimi Hendrix shredding the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock? Do you remotely comprehend what a moment that was?
In short, by what measure - on what authority or experience - do you doubt history’s judgement?
If I counted right, I’d have been about to go into the sixth grade when Woodstock happened. Most of the adults in my vicinity considered it to be a sign that America was being undermined and the world was going to hell in a handbasket. I heard stories about people injecting heroin into their children at the event and probably would have heard tales of Free Love and VD, but that would have been inappropriate because of my age and gender.
We had a connect the relatives summer vacation, so I heard about it in Montana and Washington State, as well as California. It had an effect. Word got around.
I would have been there if I was alive at the time – even if I knew about the weather, parking, and lack of shitters in advance. Those are all minor annoyances in my book.
Yeah, and with the Beatles Rock Band game coming out within the week, it’s actually quite topical.
I would guess that both will look absolutely ridiculous. Wouldn’t you? We have another thread going on Pitchfork’s “500 top tracks of the 2000s” and their choices are just as silly, in many respects - and they’re only judging nine years’ worth of music.
Well, there was lots of crappy music on the radio back then, too. It wasn’t the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan 24/7; much of the radio was given over to pap. You just don’t hear the crap anymore, because it doesn’t stand the test of time, and 30 years from now you won’t be hearing the Jonas Brothers, either.
Since “Sgt. Pepper’s” - which I actually think might in fact be the best album of all time - was released in 1967, for shits and giggles I looked up “Top 100 hits of 1967.” Nobody seems to totally agree, but there’s a reasonable degree of agreement on the general composition of the list. Here’s one:
- To Sir With Love, Lulu
- Happy Together, The Turtles
- Windy, The Association
- Ode to Billie Joe, Bobby Gentry
- I’m a Believer, The Monkees
- Light My Fire, The Doors
- Somethin’ Stupid, Nancy Sinatra and Frank Sinatra
- The Letter, The Box Tops
- Groovin’, Young Rascals
- Kind of a Drag, The Buckinghams
There’s not a lot of lasting quality there, and really, none of the very best music of 1967. “Light my Fire” and “Happy Together” are excellent tracks, and there’s a few pretty catchy if poppy tunes on there; “I’m a Believer” is a legitimately excellent song, even if it’s performed by a sort-of-not-really-a group, and “The Letter” is pretty good too. But some of those songs are just totally forgettable pop shit and none (to my surprise, actually) are Beatles tunes, though they’re well represented from 11 to 100.
Today, NOBODY remembers Lulu or (really) remembers the Buckinghams or the Young Rascals. The Buckinghams are an interesting example because they were a huge pop sensation during their short run, but who now talks about their legacy? Someday people will look back at the Top Hits of 2008 and say “Who in the hell was Katy Perry?” and have to look it up on UltraWikiPedia through their eyeball computers to learn about how some amazingly forgettable and shitty song was a big deal because back in the olden days girls kissing girls was kind of risque, and they’ll talk about how OutKast was so much better than the crap bands of 2049.
As to my blog, guys, don’t get too upset at a blog that includes a letter from the Pope claiming I stole his girlfriend. That should suggest it’s somewhat tongue in cheek.
Could we agree on “most thoroughly documented music festival of a generation”?
Hello apples, meet the oranges. That’s a list of the bestselling singles of 1967. What’s wrong with that? Well, nobody ever bothers to include bestselling as a criterion for best of the year. They may overlap, but few people care. But singles as opposed to albums? That’s … a problem. Top 40 radio still ruled in 1967. Product was aimed at singles sales. Groups were just beginning to realize that albums could be made as whole albums, not a hit single with 11 items of filler. 1967 was the turning point for that. That all makes a list of bestselling singles at best irrelevant. At worst, either you don’t understand the issue at all or you’re deliberately subverting it.
[Aside: I love the Buckinghams and the Young Rascals. My first concert ever, in 1967, starred the Beach Boys with Tommy James and the Shondells and the Buckinghams backing them up. Sheer heaven. You could barely hear the music over the screams of the girls. But I had a date. Who didn’t scream. Yes. Oh, and “Don’t You Care,” the follow-up to “Kind of a Drag,” is a particular favorite of mine. A guy in the Young Rascals went to the same high school as me, although he was a few years ahead. They were a fine blue-eyed soul group and in 1967 switched to be an excellent psychedelic pop group. Their greatest hits album, Time/Peace, is very fine indeed. That whole list has more great pop hits than you let on.]
Anyway, a list of the ten best albums of 1967 is totally subjective but easy to find on the Internet. Best Albums Ever claims to compile best lists to make a composite best, so I’ll go with them.
I’d say the list is affected by future events rather than a year’s best, but that also has much to say about influence. You can’t argue that these aren’t great albums and you can’t argue that the next 5-10 years of music didn’t draw heavily on these exemplars.
Are they the best albums of all time? I’m not even arguing they’re the best of 1967. But at least we’re talking about the discussion we’re in the middle of.
This is also disappointing. Saying you made a stupid post doesn’t save you after you proudly linked to it in the first place.
No, they do not. Which is precisely my point. Look what I was replying to:
That’s the point I was replying to, EM. What’s on the airwaves is not reflective of what will end up being remembered as the defining music of the time. There has always been crap mixed with the gold; it’s time that bears out which is which, not sales and CERTAINLY not who wins the Grammy Awards. It’s no different now than it was then. Just as today you have to put up with a lot of Nickleback and Daughtry while listening to the radio to hear the good stuff, in the 60s you had to put up with Lulu and Nancy Sinatra.
You can play this game with any era, not just the 60s. What was the defining music of, say, 1992? I’d say the real musical movements were hip-hop and grunge. The top Billboard single was “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men and the top selling album was by Billy Ray Cyrus and I’ve actually forgotten the title in the 15 seconds since I switched tabs. Which will be remembered more; Billy Ray Cyrus or Nirvana? Let’s be honest; in 20 years people will still look on “Nevermind” as a major work of rock music, while Billy Ray will largely be remembered as Miley’s dad.
(This doesn’t work with every year, of course. 1983 was dominated by “Thriller,” and rightfully so.)
I don’t think we disagree, really.
I didn’t say it was stupid. I said it contained jokes. My criticism of Rolling Stone is, however, quite honest; I think their view of music is often remarkably skewed towards that particular time period (granted, depends who’s doing the writing.)
Now, in fairness to RS, that makes their job in ranking the greatest albums of all time hard. It’s much easier to tell what the best albums of 1965 were, given forty years’ of evidence as to what lasted and what influenced that which followed it, than it is to make the same call about an album released in 1995. And to make the same call about an album released last year is probably no better than sheer guesswork. But, shit, if you’re gonna make a list, you have to at least try.
The closest I came to Woodstock was my roommate’s sister. She went and loved it. Gave her brother a Woodstock poster she’d brought back. It was a few years later that we were roommates. We just had the poster taped up on the wall. Then one day my roommate saw a notice in Rolling Stone offering something like US$200 for genuine posters. He didn’t answer the ad. Lost touch with him decades ago, but I’ll bet he still has it. I wonder what it would be worth now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Jam_at_Watkins_Glen
Posting drive-by link about the *biggest *rock festival of all time, which nobody seems to remember anymore (probably including many of the attendees!)
That was only 3 bands, and 2 of them were at Woodstock, plus a lot more popular acts.
It did become national news because of the attendance.
Aside from the performances (and how can anyone argue with the performances), Woodstock was also very notable in that, even with all of the overcrowding, lack of facilities, shortage of food and abundance of chemicals, there was no violence.
Thank you for proving Rick Jay’s point.
However, if I remember correctly, Cisco is not a Boomer.
I would point out that at least 7 of the 10 still get airplay* today*. I’m not even sure you can say that about the top 10 from 2007. The ‘pop crap’ you are deriding may be more long lived then you thought, 42 years later.
I wouldn’t bother trying to convince non-boomers how “important” Woodstock was. Rather, I’d ask them to come up with a comparable pop culture event (one that lives as large in main-stream memory, four decades after the fact) from their generation.
Somebody has to be right about when the “most important stuff ever” happened. It just sticks in your craw that it happens to be us boomers. 
Viewed by itself, it was pretty damn great, but not necessarily important (say if it were to take place today). But in the context of that time, it was very special and significant.
Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated the previous year. People were rioting in the streets - over King and civil rights, over the Democratic Convention, over Stonewall. Man had landed on the moon earlier that summer. Opposition to the war in Vietnam had been ongoing for years, but was reaching a fever pitch. The whole music paradigm was shifting away from hit singles toward what would later be called Album-oriented rock. Drugs weren’t something that the bad kids did anymore, and the law’s inflexible attitude toward pot turned a lot of otherwise complacent folks against authority. The country seemed to be polarized over every issue. Nothing turns on a dime, but there were a lot of changes happening, and they were happening quickly.
Rain, mud, lack of toilets, lack of food, brown acid? Who cares. It was peaceful, and I don’t think that anyone who attended had major regrets. It was a number of kids who had had people telling them they couldn’t be trusted to act responsibly, and proving them wrong.
Everyone wants to bookend August’s Woodstock with December’s Altamont and it’s both a reasonable opinion as well as being symmetrical. Another might be the (earlier) Tate/LaBianca murders in August. But to me, a moody and impressionable teen ager at the time, it seemed that there really was a sort of war of good and evil going on at the time. And there was no way that any reasonable person at that time or now could look at Woodstock and see any evil.
ETA: Nope, didn’t attend. Didn’t really know about it until it was over. But if I could have gone I would have.
If you only want to talk about line-ups and set lists, then yeah there’s probably an argument that Woodstock might not be the ultimate “60’s” festival.
But Woodstock at some probably undefinable point, maybe the rain and the mud, maybe just the whole thing, stopped being a festival and became something more, it became an event. Something singular and impossible to recreate. (It’s not like it wasn’t attempted. And we could add the Fillmore’s Bill Graham’s attempts, A Gathering of the Tribes and Lollapalooza too.)
Would we really remember the '65 Newport Folk Festival if Bob Dylan hadn’t gone electric, and turned it into an event?
Would we remember the Altamont Speedway Free Festival if Alan Passaro hadn’t stabbed a revolver brandishing Meredith Hunter, and turned it into an event?
I think it’s in part what Hunter S. Thompson was alluding to in the “wave speech”
In just over three months we went from peace and love, to mayhem and murder.
Woodstock was the crest of a wave that no one knew had crested, until it had already broken and rolled back. That’s why it’s remembered the way it is.
CMC fnord!
Who wasn’t around then to “get it”, born in '63, but gets it.