Nobody says “Sticks in your craw” anymore. That’s REALLY old. 
Actually, I’d wholeheartedly agree that Woodstock WAS the most important music festival ever. It’s wildly and very tiresomely overdone, but there’s sure as hell no other music festival ever held nearly as culturally significant.
Two guys flying over the festival (paraphrased from Woodstock Now & Then):
“What sort of crop is that?”
“That ain’t no crop! That’s people, man!”
I don’t think the term “Woodstock” meant anything to me at the time. Even “Haight Ashbury” wasn’t a well known term then. When it’s happening the labels are different, more based on the feeling than places and events. Flower Power was strong, Summer of Love was strong. Anti-War, and various ways of saying hallucinogenic. Eventually people would look back and pick certain events as iconic, but at the time the feeling was that change was everywhere and the music was everywhere. It wasn’t a couple of localized events but something much bigger, more general.
There WERE, however, two deaths.
I’d stretch that out to extend from 1963-1974 (to take in the JFK assassination and Watergate). Them were happening times (1968 had more bizarre and far-reaching events than any other year in which I’ve lived) and I hope nothing like them ever happens again.
Every musical era since the days of Tin Pan Alley had a superficial frosting of hits (some good, some mediocre, some vomit-inducing) and a large undercurrent of interesting to great music which doesn’t get much attention from “popular music historians”. 70 years ago the top hits were stuff like the Andrews Sisters’ “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree” and other gag reflex-challenging songs, but you could still listen to the good stuff like Louis Jordan and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Stone Cold Dead In The Market”.
I’m sure 2007 had just as much good stuff going on in the background as 1967. Well, maybe it did. It’s just been remarkably well hidden. But I’m sure it’s out there somewhere. Possibly.
As to Woodstock: It was a big deal for its time but it is so over. Can we please put it aside, both the demented nostalgia from those who mostly weren’t there and the whiny carping of resentful post-generational attention whores, at least for another ten years, at which time we can get sick of Woodstock-related yapping all over again?
I have a co-worker who went to Woodstock and while she thinks it’s neat she was “part of history”, the only reason she went was because her sister had an extra ticket. Even now, she doesn’t understand what was so special about it.
And one birth, so it kinda evens out.
I’ll try to find it, but I read an article recently that said that may not be true. Said try as they might, no one’s been able to find the alleged person who was born there, nor any medical personnel who delivered a baby.
Sadly, she’s never stopped having a fairly regular media presence in Britain.
Exactly. When was the last time you heard Barry Manilow, the Partidge Family, Donnie and Marie or Leif Garrett on the radio? Those people were HUGE in their day, yet they didn’t stand the test of time.
Totally indulgent, largely irrelevant, middle class, liberal nonsense, whether in the doing, the reporting or the deifying. Man.