WOODSTOCK LESSONS ARE JUST AN ILLUSION

GOOD WILL THAT MAY HAVE COME OUT OF 1969 FESTIVAL HAS DIED JUST LIKE HENDRIX

DATE: Thursday, August 11, 1994

SOURCE: Steve Love, Akron Beacon Journal

Woodstock lives because no one died during that long August weekend on Max Yasgur's farm in '69. We got by in the rain. We got along in an instant community that mushroomed to half a million. It wasn't much. Just a big party, really. But it impressed some of us and shocked the adults. They were running things then, and not very damn well, either. In Chicago the summer before, they had felt compelled to beat in a few of our heads when we dared to point out they were killing our friends and brothers in Vietnam. And for what? Someone said go. So we went. Woodstock was like that, too. Only no one died.

In another few months they would have us turning our weapons on our own on a rolling hillside in Kent, a bucolic place of learning where the lesson was bloody and lasting and haunts us still. Now, 25 years later, the graying Woodstock Nation looks back on the eve of a new Woodstock, a different festival on a different site in upstate New York.

This has been a summer of anniversary remembrances: D-Day. Neil Armstrong on the moon. The sinking of Camelot at Chappaquiddick. Nixon's resignation. Now Woodstock. Man, ain't it groovy? Richie Havens thinks so. He opened Woodstock. In an afterword to photographer Elliott Landy's book titled Woodstock Vision: the spirit of a generation, Havens writes: "We had a different view of the world and we wanted people to know that the world wasn't as negative as most people thought -- that there were a lot of positive things that we could make happen for the betterment of our planet and the world around us. "The world wasn't gonna change overnight ... (but) as far as I'm concerned, everyone now is a product of the Woodstock spirit." Oh, yeah? Why such a mess? Then tell me this: If the essence of Woodstock was not sex, drugs and music but a commonality, a willingness to share and care for one another, why are we as much a mess as we were in '69? And we are. Look around. The war has come home to us. It's in our streets and homes.

We live in fear not of our longstanding foreign enemies but of our own citizens of the Woodstock Nation and of their children. We protested until we stopped a war. Now we run things. A citizen of the Woodstock Nation has become president. But we do not know how to stop what is happening in Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti. We don't even know if we should. We do not care enough about each other to find a way -- and there has to be a way -- to pay for universal health care.

I mean, isn't health care free? It was at Woodstock. There were no tolls for those on bad trips. Doctors even delivered a baby. But it was just one birth, not the birth of a nation or a new way. If death had come to Woodstock as it did to Altamont Speedway during a subsequent California music festival, the image, the memories, would be darker.

The two most audible, lasting images from Woodstock, at least for me, were Jimi Hendrix's off-center guitar rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner and the songs that Janis Joplin ripped from her gut in a rasping, raging whisper. Like Woodstock, it was illusion. Didn't survive Neither the festival's good will nor Hendrix and Joplin survived. Now, 25 years later, the reprise of promoter Michael Lang has drawn fire and damnation for a commercialism believed to have been lacking in the original.

Of course, the first Woodstock never was intended to be the free concert it became. Lang and his fellow promoters underestimated the response that clogged and closed the New York roads. They lost control and then scrambled to recover, in the end standing before the Academy Award-winning cameras of Michael Wadleigh and laughing in the wake of their financial bath. "People are really communicating with each other," promoters said. "This is really happening."

No denying Woodstock was a happening, but, unlike the president, those who see the mud and music as an epiphany may have been guilty of excessive inhaling. In a Pepsi commercial on Woodstock redux, John Sebastian inquires of fellow performer Country Joe McDonald: "Remember when we did this 25 years ago?" Country Joe looks hazy.

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