Forum / The Woodstock Nation & literary history
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James Lloyd DavisAug 14, 03:24pmOn August 15, 1969, the Woodstock music festival opened on Max Yasgur's dairy farm near Bethel, New York.
You ask, 'What does that have to do with literary history?' Not much, but it did have a lot to do with an epoch and epochs affect and effect literature.
1968 and 1969 were centers of phenomena in an era of change and Woodstock was a very big part of it all. It was more than an event. It was a catalyst.On August 15, 1969, where were you?
Did you know what was happening on Yasgur's farm?
Where you there?
Did you care? -
MaryAnne KoltonAug 14, 06:13pmWas living in Syracuse NY at the time. By the time we decided to go they had closed the Thruways. Watched most of it on TV. Clean and dry. Know so many people who say they were there and were not. . . .Of course I cared, man.
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Susan TepperAug 14, 11:14pmOh, yes, I remember the Woodstock festival well. I gave birth to my first set of conjoined twins there. It was raining and muddy but Mother and twins did well. Several other sets followed. We named the first two Max and Yasgur. Max became a bond trader and Yasgur wanted to farm, but they had to stick together (for obvious reasons). And like the man said: "Money talks and bullshit walks."
Poor Yasgur is just the tag-along on the trading floor. The others I cannot mention for privacy reasons, but all are still together and doing well! -
Susan TepperAug 14, 11:30pm
My favorite song that was played during the festival, during the delivery, I believe when Max was being born, was Bob Dylan scratching out "Blowin' in the Wind." I almost named Max Bob and Yasgur Dylan. What a momentous time in our cultural history! I will never forget the Woodstock Festival.
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Susan TepperAug 14, 11:31pm
Did I mention I wore braids?
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Susan TepperAug 14, 11:39pm
But, seriously. My brother was there. My husband was there for twenty minutes (he didn't like the crowd). He wasn't my husband for another 20 years. I was, alas, somewhere on a plane being a stew.
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Joani ReeseAug 14, 11:58pmI was 13. I was a Midwesterner at the time who happened to be in Jersey on vacation at my mom's best friend's house. I remember listening to the reports on the radio --Scott Muni of WNEW FM fame? It sounded like every 13-year-old wanna be's wet dream. Of course I told people for years afterward I was there. After all, I was only a generation and fifty or so miles away, wasn't I? That was also the vacation when I first listened to Laura Nyro, also thanks to Mr. Muni. The latter exposure was the best gift in the long run, but CSNY's "Sea of Madness" was my theme song for a few years afterward. Memory and desire...
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Robert VaughanAug 15, 12:06amI was 9, but one of my older sister's was a complete Joni Mitchell freak and that stuck with me to this day. In particular, her Miles of Aisles (a live double album) makes me think of that era although I am not sure without looking whether any of it was recorded there. Probably was. And I also lived in upstate NY, and on a farm, so I recall how I heard tons about how awful those hippies tore up that poor farmer's land. Imagine that. My sisters also liked to fake their attendance, much to my parents chagrin.
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Carol ReidAug 15, 02:44amWell. I was 14, and I had the hair, the beads, the bare feet and the no money and I was on the Canadian west coast where I still am today. We knew Woodstock was happening, we were into all the counterculture trappings and the music. Still into the music. I finally got to Woodstock New York last fall and it was a trip. I still love the illusion of it all, probably always will. You know what I remember about that summer? Saying to someone, I like that album and him taking it off the turntable and saying, "have it", same with jewellery and books, literally the shirts off each other's backs, well, vests anyway.It was good. I'm glad I was there in spirit at least.
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Marcus SpehAug 15, 09:05ami was 6 and lived in hamburg, germany. the previous summer had been very violent even for european standards—may revolution in france, dutschke shot in germany, warhol wounded by radical feminist, britain shaken by "rivers of blood" speech...it goes on and on. 1969 was boring by comparison: i watched the apollo 11 moon landing & i never heard of woodstock until many years later. i traveled to england on a ferry for the first time and almost died from eating too much on board (never having seen a buffet before, i mistook it for an instruction to eat without end). in the harbor town harwich where we stayed for two hours, i bought small roman soldiers which i loved to play with, enacting hannibal's battles. on the way back, i puked a lot and i wrote my first story ever in my head which i put to paper upon our return. it involved food, ferries and fernweh (german for "itchy feet", which i still have), but no rock music, and it is lost at sea.
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James Lloyd DavisAug 15, 03:03pm
I forget my age, sometimes. It never depresses me, my age, and I have a self-image that never takes into account the idea that so much personal history equates to ... so much age.
I could have gone to Woodstock, but did not. Had it been political, maybe. Yes, 1969 was boring compared to the previous year (1968 saw the Chicago convention riots, MLK and RFK assassinations, revolution on the streets in France and a sense that riots in the ghetto were a precursor of something similar to occur in Amerika <sic> a sense that we were on the verge of a revolution.)
The idea of a festival of music did not appeal to me then. I was more interested in my anger than in universal love.
Strange times.
Love more or less trumped the energy of that revolution in the end ... love and those funny little cigarettes. It lasted for quite a while, though ... that epoch of revolution and love, ended in blood and fire at Kent State and Jackson State and finally with the televised destruction of the SLA in Los Angeles.
After it was all over, I think that Neil Young wrote the greatest anthem for the spirit of the times in the quiet wake of it all, a kind of hopeful hopelessness in a dream:
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Joani ReeseAug 15, 04:23pm
Oh, my. That made me sad.
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James Lloyd DavisAug 15, 04:38pm
I just reread what I wrote, listened to the song and it made me sad as well. I wasn't sad when I wrote it, just tripping on the flush of anger it brought back, not sad at all, but there it is ...
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Andrew StancekAug 15, 06:57pmAaah folks, you talk of the events of 1968, the key year of my life, and the event that changed the lives of millions does not register on your list. The Warsaw Pact countries led by the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. I was 13, and saw tanks going through the streets of my hometown, Bratislava. Youths only slightly older than I were climbing on top of those tanks, trying to engage the young Russian men driving them in conversation, handing them flowers, telling them they are occupying the country of their brothers. Within three months several hundred thousand Czechs and Slovaks left their country, followed by 21 years of repression. Yes, 1969 was very boring by comparison. I was living in Toronto, had hair like Arlo Guthrie and longed to be at Woodstock but no, I wasn't.
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MaryAnne KoltonAug 15, 08:32pm
JLD, you were twenty-four. Seems like a hundred years ago. 'Bout time for another revolution, don't you think?
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J. Mykell CollinzAug 15, 08:55pmI was 31, living in San Francisco at the time, and very much aware of the Woodstock music festival. Updates were frequent on the FM radio station. Along with infrequent TV news reports.
I had tickets for the Monterey International Pop Music Festival in 1967 but when the day came, June 16, my birth date, I gave the tickets to someone else because I too was busy and couldn't make it.
I did attend Michigan's Woodstock in 1970, the Goose Lake International Music Festival, held August 7, 8, 9. It was an outdoor rock festival with a long list of top performing artists.
I was working at an AM&FM radio station in nearby Jackson, Michigan, and we covered the story for our audience and for our network affiliate, Mutual News Service, who picked up our early stories and rebroadcast them throughout Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Approximately 70,000 advance tickets were sold, but 200,000 to 300,000 people showed up and stormed their way in hoping to join the Woodstock Nation after hearing our news reports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goose_Lake_International_Music_Festival
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stephen hastings-kingAug 17, 02:32pmdavid--i wasn't really talking about the sentence in itself. more its position in the thread and the role it appeared to me to be playing in it. i just thought it peculiar.
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stephen hastings-kingAug 17, 02:33pm
crap. wrong thread. sorry about that. another post to follow, one that it actually about this one.
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stephen hastings-kingAug 17, 02:36pm
you know, i'm a bit younger and spent way too much time studying revolutionary politics in france after world war 2. so when i think about woodstock, which isn't often, and run into claims about some radical potential in it, i juxtapose it to other events of the period, like 68, and find that woodstock almost disappears.
one thing that the festival was important for, however: the sound system was a real advance in the development of outdoor p.a. systems. and i like p.a. systems--audio technologies in general--and so that's not a small thing.
woodstock was also an amazing piece of ex-post-facto marketing. the film made the event, not the other way around. the albums reinforced the film. woodstock is a brand.
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Jeanne HoltzmanAug 23, 01:31amI guess I am the only pathetic old hippie here. I was there, though true to the 60's I really don't remember a lot of it. Spent most of it away from the main stage in the field near where the Hog Farm was feeding people. Ran into the guy I was with in the commune in California the year before, and we hugged, and then a few people joined in, and then there was a giant circle of people hugging. I have to say, to me Woodstock was quite the event in and of itself, prior to any after-the-fact marketing. But I was more into universal love than politics.
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James Lloyd DavisAug 24, 05:31pm
Woodstock as zeitgeist was the birth and fulmination of itself. Marketing? Sure, there was that, after the fact, but like so many events, the actual participants at Woodstock were few and far between.
I did hang loosely for a time with an urban commune in Virginia, people who called themselves, the "Real People." Universal love was part of their schtick, but there were disturbing hierarchies within the group, a microcosm of the world at large. So it is with any movement, I suppose.
Political or apolitical activism was part of the zeitgeist, because of the war, because of the racial unrest, because of the huge gap between wealth and poverty at the time.
I suppose Woodstock could be considered a force unto itself, but the times were many things to many people. I love to hear the experiences of others, Jeanne, thanks for the input.
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Sam RasnakeAug 24, 06:12pm -
Joani ReeseAug 24, 07:33pm
Sam: You're such a tease. Here's the really good part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmgS29qg6u4&NR=1 I was always a bit in love with Stephen Stills.
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Sam RasnakeAug 24, 07:37pm
Great song, great song.
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Linda Simoni-WastilaAug 25, 01:00amFascinating thread. Cool to see where folks were (or weren't).
I was 7, living 2 blocks from the beach in Solona Beach, California. Woodstock was far away, though hippies and music were not. We lived in a down-and-out part of town, and there were several properties where folks squatted. Always music playing. I remember not being able to go barefoot on the beach because of all the hypodermics littering the ramp and rocky point.
And yes to Stephen Stills. Oh yes. Peace...
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James Lloyd DavisAug 25, 01:11am
I suddenly feel ... so old.
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Ann BogleAug 25, 01:00pmSo I guess Spanky Lofland was born exactly a year after Woodstock, on August 15, 1970. When Tom Williams and I walked into Emos on a Sunday in August in 1991, a huge party was going on. A man was dancing on the bar with his trousers dropped. We saw his ass. We'd thought we'd be in for a quiet drink, not so. The party was in honor of Spanky's 21st birthday, the anniversary of Woodstock, and hundreds of people were there and a band. I said I'd talk to Spanky only after he'd pulled up his pants. He had been my student in Composition 1303 at U of Houston then had had to leave the class to work five jobs at bars. He entrusted me with his collection of handwritten poems, gathered in a black binder that I carried very carefully in my car the day I went in search of him to return them.
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Sam RasnakeAug 25, 01:48pm
There's a story or a memfic in this, Ann - if you haven't already written about it.
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