Posted on 08/16/2009 7:40:02 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
Screw Woodstock. Really, I mean it. If you're my age -- I was 9 when the three-day concert took place -- you noted the 40th anniversary of the key event of our culture's endless 1960s nostalgia by thinking, "Gee, have I really been listening to these goofs celebrate themselves for only 40 years? Because it feels like 400."
Doesn't the self-regard and self-significance make you want to vomit? OK, 400,000 people gathered for a rock concert and didn't kill each other -- big flippin' deal. Ten years later, in 1979, 1.2 million people showed up in Grant Park for a mass with Pope John Paul II, and you never hear them claiming it was a rend in the time-space continuum. Even more people are flocking to the lakefront for the Air & Water Show this weekend, and we don't act like it's some giant epochal moment -- just another summer weekend in Chicago.
» Click to enlarge image Neil Steinberg
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Woodstock ruined my life, sort of. Imagine growing up, an impressionable child, watching all those supposedly pivotal 1960s events -- Woodstock, the riots at the Democratic National Convention, the moon landing -- on your parents' black-and-white Zenith TV in the living room of your suburban tract house in Berea, Ohio.
It quickly gave the impression that we lived in Noplace, that life, the important stuff in life, was always going on Somewhere Else. That, by 1974, every significant thing that might conceivably happen had already occurred. I had missed the feast but was free to pick over the scraps, had missed the party and arrived for the cleanup, the dismal denouement of the 1970s, a miserable void of disco and leisure suits and meaninglessness, at least by the judgment of the people who had so much freaky fun at Woodstock while we were busy learning cursive.
Doesn't it ever go away? How long must we gaze raptly at the enormous waddling rump of the Early Baby Boom? Forever? Not that we want our turn, no way -- hard experience has made us better than that. Should anyone announce that, for instance, the 1977 World Series of Rock at Cleveland Municipal Stadium was an earth-shattering moment of bottomless significance, at least I'd have the honesty to say, "Hey, buddy, I was THERE, and it was just 90,000 teens guzzling wine out of botas and listening to Peter Frampton."
How come nobody who was at Woodstock has the guts to say that? Nobody says, "You know, standing in a downpour, cold and hungry and listening to Alvin Lee wasn't really all that magnificent an experience. In fact, it was miserable, and it didn't mean a damn thing."
Maybe it was the jets roaring outside my window all day Friday -- honing their act for the Air & Water Show -- but I found myself thinking of another aeronautic milestone in Chicago: the Graf Zeppelin and how it touched down in Glenview, of all places, for 30 minutes in 1933.
The 776-foot aircraft had flown from Rio de Janeiro to make an appearance at Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition; the stamp honoring the event features the flight.
There is a wonderful account of the trip by Alicia Momsen Miller, who was an 8-year-old with her family aboard the aircraft. Her father, originally from Wisconsin, was a diplomat in Brazil and keen to take the family to the fair via zeppelin.
Her mother was naturally worried and demanded to inspect the zeppelin first. She was, as any mother would be, absolutely horrified. But she yielded, rationalizing: "If anything happens, at least we'll all be together."
The family got off in Akron, concerned about rumors that the zeppelin, which had caused controversy in Miami over the swastika on its port tail fin, would be bombed in Chicago. Miller describes the landing in Glenview:
"So Thursday, October 27, at 7 a.m., the Graf Zeppelin, carrying the rest of the passengers and 10,000 letters from Akron to Chicago, was pulled to the ground at Curtiss Wright Airport, Glenview, Illinois. Two hundred and fifty soldiers from Camp Whistler held the ship to the ground for 30 minutes, until the passengers, including Postmaster General James A. Farley and President Dawes of the 'Century of Progress,' boarded for the return trip to Akron."
The zeppelin captain, Hugo Eckener, proceeded to his flyover, keeping local sensibilities in mind.
"Captain Eckener did his part in refusing to display the swastika," Miller writes. "Before leaving Chicago for Akron, the Zeppelin circled the fairgrounds clockwise for all to see, the Captain taking care not to show the port side with the Nazi emblem painted on the tail fin."
Miller died in 1983, but her charming account, complete with the details of her 11-month-old brother, Billy, "The Zeppelin Baby," whose stroller and nursery accoutrements made for 167 of the family's 222 pounds of luggage, is online.
The old air station at Glenview was been turned into a pleasant, aeronautical-themed mall. Somebody should figure out the exact spot where the great airship touched down and install a plaque.
Give the Woodstock generation credit for one thing -- they did settle the long-hair-on-boys debate. When my older son grew his hair down to the middle of his back, and friends would ask me why I didn't make him cut his hair, I had a ready answer. "As his father, if I'm going to MAKE him do something, it better be important, and I just don't see how the length of his hair is important -- unless he's operating a lathe."
mailto:nsteinberg@suntimes.com
Too bad heroin, meth, speed, disease, poverty, anonymous sex and idiocy where the lifestyle of the main characters of Wood Stock.
Woodstock - Arc Light B-52 strike
OH my, this was freaking great!!
“Gee, have I really been listening to these goofs celebrate themselves for only 40 years? Because it feels like 400”
And so so true.
Too bad these are now the ones running this country
From what I remember, THE WHO rock group was totally disgusted by the sick display of human decadence and ecological rape of the area.
The smell was equally revolting.
He’s right about the Alvin Lee segment. I didn’t like his boring guitar solo, and he hasn’t been heard of before or after. Why the filmmakers thought his ten minute excursion into self-indulgence was so riveting I’ll never know.
Years later I happened to sit through the movie again and that same song I'd marvelled over sounded terrible and off-key....the difference? Drugs, plain and simple.
This is why it is so highly regarded by its contemporaries, and their resulting praise and adulation of the 'peaceful' event has tainted the accurate historical accounting of its real impact and effect on today's society.
In truth, it begat a counterculture that nearly destroyed our ability to protect ourselves from without and spawned a collaboration with socialist and other similarly bankrupt ideologies that have virtually destroyed this country from within.
Woodstock was not about freedom, as it has been billed. It was all about freeloading.
I hate smelly hippies.
Always have.
Agree just look at congress and senate.
Where’s all the “Yah, I was at Woodstock, man. It was COOL!” posts? I mean, even tho the author says there were only 40,000 people there, at last count, at least 100,000 folks say they attended. Hmmmm...Doctor Who would say it has something to do with the space-time continum, and all that 4-way windowpane LSD. I am sure I was not there. Really. Um..no one saw me there, right?
I agree with you about the music. It was so much better when we were totally fried! (But I still swear that Traffic’s “John Barleycorn Must Die” is an allegory for the Lord of the Rings!)
That generation totally screwed up this country. My husband is part of that generation and agrees with me. He was nineteen years old at the time and serving in the US Army.
Actually I’d like to think some good things came out of Woodstock.. I was on my way there at age 14 with some friends, broke down in New Hampshire... woke up learned a lot, 10 years later I was in the Military (Navy), became a staunch conservative and have been working with the military for 30 years now.
FYI, Alvin Lee has some great blues albums.
woodstock was and always has been about money, period.
I think the confluence of events 40 years ago was pretty cool. I think Max Yasgur is a great American. I'm glad Jimi Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner. I'm glad the Army sent in helicopters and medics and that they "grooved." I'm glad there were two-hour waits for the telephones so kids could call home.
Back then, even the countercultured respected mom and apple pie.
Everything associated with Woodstock since has had the feel of a late-night infomercial -- overtly, absurdly commercial. Pitches for it that appeal to the "spirit of Woodstock" or whatever could only possibly entice the most vacuous of lost souls.
But it was over by Monday morning, and it's been over since. Any doubt about that should have been put to rest by this weekend, 40 years hence, with Bob Dylan being picked up as a vagrant because he was sheltering himself from the rain (having gone for a walk) and a suspicious resident called the police on him. He had no ID, and the cop thought perhaps he'd escaped from a hospital when he told her his name was "Bob Dylan."
Good music for me at the time was on AM transister radio.
With songs like The Archies singing “Sugar, Sugar”
The Monkees
The Turtles
The Beatles
The Hollies
Listening to Roger miller and wondering what the heck a Chug-A-Lug was, or a Do-Wacka-Do. I din’d care, I loved the songs.
Ballad of the Green Berets. Even at 10 I was patriotic as hell, and I loved that song.
If Woodstock and the attendees were such a big nothing then why are they in charge?
I for one can’t WAIT for death to catch up to the 60s generation.....that generation is like bad intestional cramps.....just can’t wait to be rid of all that crap that is causing all this leftist pain.
Woodstock marked the first "media created fantasy". Woodstock was a "big deal" in the minds of the new media - and you're right - 1.2 million showing up for a Pope was not part of the fantasy....
I saw the lastest Woodstock tour. Ten Years After had a young lead guitar who was great. Canned Heat was very good
and Janis Joplin replacement,Sophia Ramos from tha Bronx,was
excellent.Jefferson Starship basically sucked.The groups
get set-up and played without any past or present B.S. We
were surprised the concert was that enjoyable.
Doesn't it ever go away? How long must we gaze raptly at the enormous waddling rump of the Early Baby Boom? Forever? Not that we want our turn, no way -- hard experience has made us better than that.
HEAR, HEAR!
If you-tube,the internet and 24 hour news were available in 1969, Woodstock would have been shown for what it really was: a celebration of self indulgent drug abuse and self importance narcissism.
That said, my hippy uncle said The Who and Santana were fantastic!!!
I missed it ,due to family matters. I was in the area, and packed, ready to go.
I just saw the show, yet again , this weekend. Most the acts were not all that good, but I must say there were a few that were outstanding.
1. Joe Cocker - can anyone argue that this version of “with a little help from my friends” is very very good.. his singing was in fine form, if that is your cup of tea.
2. CSN - very good as well.. their music stripped of all it’s embellishments, was basically just 3 voices and 2 barely heard (due to the mix) guitars.
3. Sly and the Family Stone - very untight, but very powerful and original all the same.
5. Hendrix - friggin brilliant, nuff said... too bad he didn’t play the night before.
6. Santana - a highly original and different sound for those times.. Carlos Santana has said he was high on mescaline for their set.. wish he would have skipped that.
the sound of the concert, in terms of sonics, is god awful. I still really enjoyed the movie.
The article is spot on for many of his points.
bttt
These same Woodstock hippies spit on me when I came home. I knocked one of them out, and I'm still proud of it to this day.
It's alright though cause we got Bob Hope and that was better than that trash.
Former US Army Airborne Ranger...timydnuc.
Death from the sky...you mess with the best, you die like the rest.
It's not part of the media fantasy that boomers grew up - and rather than being at Woodstock, we're at townhall meetings (on the conservative side).
Liberals ARE the Establishment in our time.
The Who came next and played like their lives depended on it, including the entire Tommy but some incendiary stuff like "Young Man Blues," "Tattoo," "Happy Jack," a "My Generation" that was even then developing from their usual bust-up set closer into a workout that slid into an instrumental Tommy medley that invariably included "Sparks" (the shortened version of "Underture"), and "The Magic Bus" as their encore. It turned out that Pete Townshend was playing as if his life depended on it---he'd suffered back trouble during their tour, bad enough that they nearly pulled out of Woodstock, until he decided the festival was just too important to miss, in terms of the band's growing position in the U.S. (they'd only recently become major rock stars on this side of the ocean, on top of each member becoming dollar millionaires when Tommy hit the racks at the time their original record deals expired and new deals were ready, I think is what it was), and made Woodstock loaded with painkillers.
The Airplane? They played a three-hour set, by the end of two hours of which half the audience was probably sound asleep (the Who had gone for two hours), but they played well enough and had a surprise for the encore: guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and bassist Jack Casady came out without the rest of the band and played a brief set of vintage acoustic blues, half of which (including "Hesitation Blues," "How Long Blues," and "Death Don't Have No Mercy") ended up as part of the first (and best) Hot Tuna album.
Kind of strange that some of the best music at Woodstock itself didn't make the original movie or album cut. I didn't get to Woodstock but I'd have loved catching Mountain (for whom Woodstock was only their fourth live show), Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Canned Heat (their "Going Up the Country" was used in the original film as a backdrop for early scenes, but the quintet themselves weren't shown playing any part of their actual set), and the tragic Sweetwater. (They sounded like they were going places, based on their first album---they were the first band, as opposed to solo act, to play at Woodstock---when Nansi Nevins's automobile accident wrecked their momentum and, in due course, their career.)
I gaduated high school in ‘69. Believe it or not, some of us just did not care...and still don’t.
That’s true.
Grace Slick great voice! My of favorite albums is Red Octopus.
Best quote of the day!
IF Woodstock had been a patriotic gathering of young Americans supporting the war effort in Vietnam, condemning the Communist third column working to stab our boys in the back, with perhaps Paul Lavalle and his Band of America providing the music (he was a fervent fan and conductor of Sousa marches), not only would Woodstock have been forgotten within a year or two, but it would be dredged up every 10 years or so as an example of ‘American jingoism’ by the left wing scumbags that run our media.
Wow, your story is nearly identical to mine age and all!
And, the music sucked. (I’m a boomer.)
Some of we boomers were actually grown up and doing productive things during Woodstock... and thought that it was a joke.
Eckener was an ardent anti-Nazi and hated Hitler. He was immensely popular in Germany. He was asked to run for president to oppose the National Socialist German Workers Party but chose not to. He ended up being black listed. I read about him in the book Dr. Eckener's Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel by Douglas Botting. I have since wondered where we might be today had he chosen to run.... Check out the Wikipedia article about him.
Tell me about it! I am 33, and had to spend my entire life hearing about this boring sh-t, and now I have to put up with these damn millenials/hipsters who also outnumber my (rather tiny) generation. You don't see me boring people with commemorations of the "Grunge" movement.
A rare moment of lucidity for Junior Marxist Neil Steinberg!!
:)
I don't think Marty Balin wants a commemoration of THAT.
While I am no fan of the Hells Angels, you are morally obligated to take out somebody brandishing a gun around the musicians you are hired to protect.
Who would think that a place like Livermore could produce so much excitement?
Grace will be 70 in a few months.
“just don’t see how the length of his hair is important — unless he’s operating a lathe.”
I remember seeing photos of people with hair caught in lathes and rotating shafts.
Meanwhile, While Woodstock was being the “in thing” in the US, I was knocked out of bed by a B-52 blowing up on the runway at Ban U-Tapao.
By contrast, the concerts my uncle attended in the 1970s had ALOT of harder stuff going around.
Knowing the neighborhood in question, he was probably looking for some good "churrasco." Some nearsighted Brazilian lady thought that he was a "bag lady" and called the cops.
All I can say is that the Who sounded awful due not so much to musicianship, than to poor sound. Townsend sounded like he was playing a Sears Harmony electric through a PHILCO portable record player.
I guess that's in now: http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/453778/It-Might-Get-Loud/trailers
Amen. I was 8 yo and feel the exact same way he does.
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