Well I came upon a child of God

M

midwayhorn

100+ Posts
he was walkin along the road
and I asked him tell me where are you goin
this he told me.
Said I'm goin down to Yasgur's farm
goin to join in a rock n roll band
Got to get back to the land
and set my soul free.
We are stardust
we are golden
we are billion year old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden.......



40 years? I was a freshman in high school. That means I'm....
 
woodstock-poster.jpg



What a summer that was - I was 15 yrs old and a soph to be in HS but I remember well not only Woodstock, but:

The Charles Manson murders
Man landing on the Moon
Ted Kennedy driving his car into a lake and killing Mary Jo Kopechne
The build up of the loaded Texas Longhorns Football team in the 100th year of college football that won the NC
My first serious girlfriend & one of the best summers of my life
 
I still regret it to this day-not going to Woodstock. I was a junior at UT, and had a group lined up to go, and they all dropped out one by one. I still should have driven up there.
I went to my wife's high school reunion, a Catholic girl's school outside of Detroit, Michigan a few years ago. Every woman at the table had gone to Woodstock except my wife.
 
I had just finished juco and was about to enroll at UT for the fall. I honestly didn't hear about it until sometime after.

I saw the movie at a drive in with those little tinny-sounding speakers. Boy, times have changed.
 
Best performances from the movie for me.

Sly and the Family Stone - I want to take you higher
Jimi Hendrix - all 3 songs
Joe Cocker - With a little help from my friends
Santana - Soul sacrifice
Janis Joplin - Work me lord
The Who - We're not going to take it
 
I found this article to be pretty interesting. I am not saying I agree or disagree with it, as it does have a definite tilt to it, but it does play the part of devils advocate and highlights the ugly part. The author is a journalist out of New York.




The Legend of Woodstock is a Distorted Truth
by Jonathan Leaf
Posted 08/13/2009 ET

This weekend marks the fortieth anniversary of the much beloved and widely worshiped “counterculture festival of peace and love” -- Woodstock. According to popular belief, Woodstock was a generation-defining event that represented the best of the sixties spirit: half a million young people gathering for peaceful anti-war protest, easy sex, great rock music, mind-expanding psychedelics, and a rejection of lifeless commercialism. But is that what Woodstock really was?

This hallowed sixties legend, like that of so many “iconic” counter cultural events, has deeply and deliberately distorted the truth. In reality, Woodstock consisted of masses of people spending several days outdoors in rain-drenched conditions without proper facilities -- to the point that the vast majority of the crowd had departed before Jimi Hendrix’s famed closing performance, leaving behind a massive swath of garbage-strewn farmland. The prevalence of recreational drugs at Woodstock has become a point of humorous pride among the counterculture, but the deadly toll that the glorified drug culture exerted on that very generation is not so funny. One sixties icon after another -- Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Keith Moon and John Entwistle (the Who), Bob Hite (Canned Heat), to name just some of those at Woodstock -- died of drug overdoses.

Sifting through the realities and un-realities of Woodstock forty years later might seem trivial, but honoring and remembering Woodstock as a pivotal point in American history is foolish. The phrase “If you remember the Sixties, than you weren’t there,” has been repeated constantly throughout the past decades. But how can that be said about a decade that in actuality was one of the more conservative decades in recent history? The Sixties have come to be represented by hippies, rock music, and social revolution -- but at the time that counterculture existed largely outside the mainstream, conservative society.

Woodstock has become the number one example of this decade delusion. One puzzling question about Woodstock is how the organizers got so many big names to participate. This quiz may provide a clue: Which of the following Woodstock bands and singers had Billboard #1 singles during the 1960s?

1) Jimi Hendrix

2) The Who

3) The Grateful Dead

4) Carlos Santana

5) Jefferson Airplane

Actually, none of them did. Neither did Bob Dylan. By contrast, crooner Bobby Vinton had four #1 hits, and any list of the decade’s most popular performers would include decidedly non-rockin’ chart-toppers like Herb Alpert, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Petula Clark, Conway Twitty, Henry Mancini and Andy Williams. The albums “My Fair Lady,” “West Side Story,” and “Mary Poppins” out-sold the Rolling Stones’ biggest records, while big band leader Mitch Miller sold over 20 million.

The bottom line is this: Woodstock performers, and rock music in general, were not nearly as popular in the sixties as we’ve been led to believe. Rock music wasn’t the music of the sixties. And Woodstock certainly didn’t lie at the center of the decade. Contrary to popular belief, America in the sixties remained an overwhelmingly conservative country, where the counterculture’s tastes -- in politics, fashion, and even music – were in the minority.

A more important story of the time, of course, was the war in Vietnam. For, while the groovy hipsters were tripping at Woodstock, other Americans were fighting to defend the people of South Vietnam from Communist invaders. These Communist forces committed countless atrocities during the war and after their victory, including their attempt to “ethnically cleanse” the country of its Chinese minority, the forced migration of the “boat people,” and the torture and brainwashing of their political opponents in “re-education camps.” The Communist North Vietnamese Army also proved instrumental in the rise of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, ultimately resulting in the Cambodian genocide.

This is not how the 1960s is typically remembered, however. Ensconcing themselves in the media and in academia, counterculture activists have written their own version of history in which -- surprise, surprise -- the counterculture is glorified as daring, hip, freedom fighters, while Vietnam vets are portrayed as victimized dupes at best and as depraved murderers at worst.

The anniversary of Woodstock will undoubtedly engender a great deal of self-adulation by the remnants of the counterculture. It’s a good time, then, to re-evaluate their real legacy. To define the sixties by what supposedly happened at Woodstock -- or, even what actually did happen -- is to accept a false historical narrative, put forward by a small, radical clique that falsely portrays its own experiences as that of an entire generation.

Furthermore, despite its anti-commercial pretenses, the event was backed by Warner Brothers. Even its name was erroneous: the town of Woodstock is 45 miles away from the festival site.
 
The author of the above article seems to be missing the point when it comes to music. No offense to Bobby Vinton fans, but many Woodstock acts were indeed the defining music of the 60s in terms of influence and lasting impact on culture, as well as later music. To say that "rock music wasn’t the music of the sixties" is like criticizing the paintings of Van Gogh because he was not a popular artist in his lifetime.

In the 60s other musical artists might have outsold Jimi Hendrix, for example, but given the benefits of hindsight, we see who had true genius. The author also neglects to mention perhaps the most influential rock band, The Beatles, who by the end of the 60s were deeply into the counterculture as well.
 
Jonathan Leaf can have his popular Bobby Vinton records. Who the hell cares how many records Bobby Vinton sold?
This idoit puts Bobby Vinton and Bob Dylan in the same paragraph?
Obviously Leaf never got in on any good leaf.
And the reason at least 400,000 young people were at Woodstock was because the pre-event publicity was huge. It was like an upcoming earthquake, people of that generation felt the tremors in Texas, California, all over the country.
It was huge before it happened. Everybody wanted to go up there.
 
Woodstock accomplished nothing. Hippies accomplished nothing unless you consider sitting on your *** in mud on LSD an accomplishment (I don't). If you want to see what Woodstock really was like, take a walk down the drag and im sure some of the rats will tell you.

Now, I think the 16th anniversary of Waynestock is coming up, that I will be celebrating.
 
I think it’s funny to think how the current generation of young people would react to the draft. I would bet it very similar – pacifism/love would be the hot cool thing and tough guy rap/metal would take a dive.
 
Yeah, nothing was accomplished by the Sixties generation. We didn't improve race relations, women's rights, gay rights, we didn't end the Vietnam War, we kept sexuality repressed, yeah, nothing changed, you are so right.
 
I didn't say the sixties generation didn't accomplish anything, I said hippies didn't. We put a man on the moon in the sixties, but everybody in the control room was wearing a shirt and tie, not a poncho and body paint.
 
"everybody in the control room was wearing a shirt and tie"

How many of them were under 25? That's like saying the CEOs of the top 25 corporations are conservative. NO ****!
 
I mean we would still be in Vietnam if the people of the country had not fought so hard to end our involvement in it, led primarily by the younger generation.
 
We're still in Iraq so things apparently haven't changed all that much. The Who said it best, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Hippie culture came, they sat around banging every living thing that moved while drinking or shooting whatever drugs they could get their hands on, peaked at Woodstock, and died a quiet death at Altamont. Call it a revolution or whatever you want, it was just a bunch of people who didn't want to be a part of reality.
 
I'm a bit at a loss to understand the perspective that would see the need to criticize or diss the event, general subculture of those times, and, particularly, the music.

I'm talking about someone of an age to have been through it. Still pissed that somebody, somewhere, was having a good time?
 
No, I don't tell people what to do or not to do. If they want to do that stuff I'm cool with it as long as it does not interfere with what I want to do which it rarely does. I'm just saying, I don't consider Woodstock to have been any great accomplishment. For people that totally dig nature man they really trashed that farm and town. The music was great, but having to hear about every single year about how world changing Woodstock was is BS. They didn't accomplish anything. They weren't freedom riding, they were laying around in mud listening to Country Joe and the Fish. They weren't holding sit-ins, they were dropping acid and smoking dope. Those are not accomplishments, those are things a 15 year old kid does when his parents aren't home.
 
I know it's your job to dis the older generation, but you might realize the event only lasted a few days, and there were a few other things people did during a time where society did change in many ways. But I didn't mean to ruin your stereotype, so go back to your narrowminded picture of the times.
 
Wonder if there was a spike in the birth rate in May 1970?

I honestly don't remember hearing a lot about it when it was happening-I think a friend mentioned some big concert up in NY. But as a 15 year old, watching the news wasn't a priority. My 1st awareness of really how big it was came in '70 when a bunch of us saw the movie at the drive-in (it was my car-I didn't have to ride in the trunk). Soul Sacrifice-damn!
 
There probably was a "Hippie Culture" that sprang up briefly in places like San Fran and Austin, but the number of people that actually were a part of it was very small. Most college kids grew their hair long and tried a little pot, but that was about the extent of it. They weren't any more committed to a counter-culture than the kids of today that shave their heads, get tats, and wear droopy pants . It was mostly fashion, just like today.
 
I think the key to Woodstock was the times. Many things were happening to disrupt and change the culture. Integration had started which completely changed the nature of the society and made the you disrespect the old, obviously corrupt laws of the past generation. That was in conjunction with the baby boom which put tremendous stress on the school system and the ability of the larger population to control/guide/assimilate this huge glut of young people pouring in. They (we) were the first children of television, like today's generations of the internet/computer/cell phone/ and other tech revolutions, we were different from all those who had come before us. As a result of those huge numbers of children who were raised so much differently than their parents coming into the disrupted society whose integration laws were being scorned and rejected, other values of the culture were also being challenged, like sexual mores and drug laws. Then with the seemingly never ending Vietnam war, and the draft, there was just one more thing to fight and despise about the older generation. The culture was in flux. Things were changing. Rock and Roll happened. Timothy Leary happened. MLK, JFK, and RFK were assassinated. Space travel happened. Woodstock was just a sign of the times, not a defining event. The times were just wild and crazy. I'm glad I was there to witness it all. And I'm sorry I won't be a part of the next wave, whenever it comes. It's probably already here and I don't even know it. Good luck youngsters and ride the wave.
 
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