Except for The Who (who weren’t very good at Woodstock, in any case), Creedence, and Sly & the Family Stone, I have pretty much no use for any of the acts that appeared at the festival (though I might have enjoyed Hendrix live - on record, he bores me to tears). So I’ve always been a bit baffled by the mythologizing of the event. Then again, I’ve never bought into the whole “communal feeling” thing, either - crowds annoy the shit out of me whether they’re all banded together for the same purpose or not. Nothing about it really speaks to me. Which isn’t to say every festival that’s followed hasn’t been equally uninspiring.
Yeah, this is one movie that should *never *be shown in any format other than widescreen. I saw a widescreen version Fri night on some weird all-music cable channel (Palladium?).
Dana Carvey did a standup routine about rock guitarists – how when they do chord changes they act like they’ve done a magic trick, and something about similarity with a dog scraping his butt on the driveway. Woodstock was the pinnacle of rock guitarists making faces…and now I can’t get Dana Carvey out of my head.
I was just watching it in the background as I was doing stuff on the computer and had never really read all the end credits. Martin Scorsese is listed as editor and assistant director. Didn’t know that.
I don’t think he actually lobbed it far enough to go into the crowd. I think it just dropped into the photographers’ pit. A stagehand probably retrieved it–you can see one scurrying across the stage with a guitar in each hand in the movie.
I was 19 at the time, and could have gone, I guess, except that I didn’t hear about it until it was over. I have no regrets about that, since it’s always sounded like pure hell to me. I might have handled the rain and mud okay, but if there was as much annoying hippie-speak as the movie suggests, I probably would have become homicidal. Believe it or not, most people didn’t talk that way. There were always a few stoner buttheads around who did, most of them so self-righteous you wanted to shoot them, but standard English was then, as now, the norm.
Anyway, we got a reasonably good movie out of it, and a nice Joni Mitchell song. But all the media stuff about how it was such a big deal, and it looked like the world was going to be lovely, then Altamont ended the sixties, blah, blah, blah; I could just gag.
That’s what I was wondering. Thanks for checking. I’m torn on getting this. I have the feeling that I’d play it once and then it will wind up on a shelve. OTOH, I have a ton of gift certificates so I can get it for free.
Woodstock was close enough that I could have gone. A guy I went to high school with is actually interviewed in the movie.
Instead, I choose to go to Worldcon, the World Science Fiction Convention, in St. Louis that year. Changed my life. Made my a permanent member of the sf crowd. Would I have gone into music if I went to Woodstock? Makes an interesting “what if?”
I was 23, and 5 or 6 of us made the trip from Ohio State, packed into a VW Beetle. I honestly don’t remember that much about the concert itself, and certainly didn’t think I was at some historical event. I had already seen most of the performers in various concerts, so what I remember most was the crowd, the drugs, the nudity (not as much as you’d think), and the rain . . . and the stench coming from the areas people were using as toilets.
I’m certain that that’s an urban legend. I could be convinced otherwise with proof. Until then, I call UL.
The extended version of the movie that I saw last week showed a clip of an extremely pregnant woman being taken into the medical tent…
Re: Pete’s Woodstock Gibson SG–apparently it was caught by someone named Kurt Pfeiffer, and “retrieved” by a roadie.
There is an exhaustive history of Townshend’s equipment on thewho.net…here’s the Gibson SG Special page.
The couple draped in a muddy quilt in the iconic photoare still together.
Interesting to think that the gay iconic event of the Stonewall revolt and the hippie iconic event of Woodstock took place about 6 weeks and 100 miles apart.
Throw in the scientifically iconic moon landing and it’s only 6 weeks and 240,000 miles.
I was a little too young to attend, but I wouda if I coulda. I still love listening to the album and seeing the movie. It brings me back to a good time in my life. I loved the music and the significance of the 60s. To me, the anniversary is worthy of all the coverage. Different strokes, I s’pose.
I was 16 and only a couple hundred miles from the event, but I couldn’t get a ride. I went to the 1973 Watkins Glen Summer Jam in an effort to get the experience, but it fell a bit short. People were there to make money, which bummed out my little hippie heart. It was a blast, though, and looking at the pictures from it a) makes me smile and 2) makes me wonder how on earth I enjoyed the crowd, because they freak me out now.
I’m with Kalhoun, though. I’m really glad to revisit that time and those feelings.
Good remembrance here, written on the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, by Hendrik Hertzberg, then of The New Republic, now of The New Yorker.
Got time for a Generation X mini-rant? Good! 
(I’ll keep it clean because we’re not in the Pit.)
My dad recently sent me an email about the wonderful world of 60s hippie culture, citing Woodstock specifically as a time when a bunch of people got together, organized, flaunted “the rules” (was there some law about organizing rock concerts or something?), and accomplished this amazing, miraculous, world-changing feat. Only he thought it was 30 years ago. I promptly informed him that he is 10 years older than he apparently thinks he is and that I, his darling daughter, am 40, not 30. Senility must suck.
He replied something like, “Yeah, but isn’t it amazing what a group of people can accomplish when they band together?”
I have dropped the conversation. The following responses have come to mind since then:
-
Oh. You mean like Tiananmen Square? Or the Gulf War protests of my college days? Or do you mean like Lollapalooza? Or Habitat for Humanity? Would you even recognize “Work together to accomplish a great feat” if it jumped up and bit you on the ass? How many of my examples above were orchestrated by 60’s hippies?
-
Hm. Sounds like “community organizing.” I thought you hated Obama and community organizers. I guess it’s okay if it’s a bunch of stinky hippies from your glory days, right? P.S. Dad: You had a three-year-old and a 1-month-old. You were working in some factory while your wife was working as a nurse. You guys were not remotely anything like hippies; you did not go to rock concerts, and you did not smoke pot until the 70s at least. You were squares (I believe that’s the correct term). Straight Squares, IIRC.
-
So what did this band of organized hippies actually accomplish anyway? In fact, nevermind Woodstock – what did the hippies of the 1960s actually accomplish? They weren’t the people involved in the Civil Rights marches, not so much. They didn’t manage to bring the Vietnam War to an end, despite all that weed-fueled protesting. They didn’t stimulate the economy or invent some magical, wonderful Hippie Thing that saved the world. They didn’t stop, or even slow, the Cold War. They didn’t end hunger or homelessness. They certainly didn’t improve education (New Math anyone?). Seems to me as though all they really managed to accomplish was to make a mess on some poor farmer’s property and ingest a bunch of drugs. Then they promptly turned around and made free sex, drugs, and rock and roll forbidden, if not illegal, for the generations to come after them. The hippies had Free Love! We had Silence = Death. The hippies had Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out. We had Just Say No.
Maybe that should be a Great Debate thread. What did the hippies actually achieve? Aside from wallowing in naive idealism and navel gazing? Why is Woodstock better/stronger/faster for the world than Lollapallooza? Aren’t they really the same thing: a minor distraction for the youth of the era, about which they get to wax nostalgic 40 years later?
Dogzilla:
Your rant betrays bitterness, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what, exactly, is making you bitter.
Also, you don’t seem to have much of a handle on what the hippies were about, and seem to be confusing everyone of your parents generation with hippies.
A short answer to your question is that the hippies didn’t accomplish anything, because accomplishing things was not on the hippie agenda. Dropping out of society was what they were about. Eventually, though, the fact that dropping out of society leads to what I like to call “grinding poverty” dawned on the hippies, and they became ex-hippies and got jobs. Or they tried living in communes, mostly figured out they couldn’t get along, and so left and got jobs.
Most of the kids at the time were not hippies. They were perfectly normal kids, going to school, working towards earning a living. Aside from fashion and slang differences, you could plop them down among a bunch of kids today, and no one would be able to tell the difference. Do you seriously think the American psyche has changed that much in a mere 40-50 years?
Hippie-ness was mostly about a particular mind-set…which I think has bubbled into the national consciousness to some degree. The 60s changed the way we as a society look at things.
But back to Woodstock…it was the first and last semi-spontaneous, unforeseen, unorganized, non-commercialized event in music. It can never be repeated (something analogous may happen in an entirely different field of human endeavor, but it won’t be concert-going), and that may be why people feel so nostalgic about it.