There are events in every scholarly category which have such influence that they are the canonical events central to the subject. You can't discuss America's involvement in World War II without bringing up Pearl Harbor. You can't discuss physics without bringing up Einstein. You can't talk about the computer revolution without bringing up Unix. And so on.

When you talk about music in the United States, you have to mention Woodstock. It is simply the most influential and groundbreaking concert in American music history. If you were alive during Woodstock, you either can brag that you were there, or you have a reason why you weren't.

Don't feel bad if you missed it. So did Tommy James and the Shondells. Lead singer Tommy James said about this event, "We could have just kicked ourselves. We were in Hawaii, and my secretary called and said, 'Yeah, listen, there's this pig farmer in upstate New York that wants you to play in his field.' That's how it was put to me. So we passed, and we realized what we'd missed a couple of days later." That must burn!

Which brings us to the song "Woodstock," originally performed by Joni Mitchell - who also missed it - but more famously covered by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Joni Mitchell wrote this song at home while watching Woodstock on TV, crushed because she'd skipped it to appear on The Dick Cavett Show instead. Ironically enough, the most famous song about the event was written based on second-hand recounting. The song was a hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as well as for Matthews Southern Comfort, whose cover-of-a-cover reached #1 on the UK charts. And then on the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, Iain Matthews re-released the song with his new band, Nick Vernier Band, in 2009, getting popular all over again.

So there they were, on a dairy farm in the town of Bethel, Sullivan County, state of New York, though the actual town of Woodstock is some 40 miles southwest of there in Ulster County.

The famous documentaries, books, and news reporting of the event all agree on one thing: It was a huge mess. It started as a simple money-making venture, and the authorities at every level tried to stop it before it became so obvious that the event had gotten out of control that everybody just scrambled to get out of the way. They sold 186,000 tickets before they just chopped holes in the fence and let everybody else attend free. Seeing as how, counting by either the advance rate of $18 or the $24 price at the gate, the organizers had made between $3.3 million to $4.4 in a three-day weekend, it's probably just as well that they decided not to be too greedy.

The song "Woodstock" itself is filled with flowery phrases and starry-eyed idealism about what the event was like; it probably paints a rosier picture than what actually happened. Certainly, the optimism that that generation had about how they were going to make the world better didn't bear as much fruit as they had hoped, though you can't fault them for trying. Instead of trying to pin responsibilities on Woodstock, we should just see it for what it was: Generation Hippie's Big Love-In. Why don't we do this every year?

Pete Trbovich
October 8, 2012 Woodstock Songfacts
Browse all Songplaces

Comments

Be the first to comment...