Posted on 03/21/2023 9:07:05 PM PDT by DoodleBob
Bobbi Kelly Ercoline, who, along with her boyfriend (and later husband) Nick became an iconic, if unwitting, symbol of the Woodstock generation when their bedraggled, blanketed and poignant image was featured on the music festival’s 1970 soundtrack album, died Saturday following a lengthy illness.
Her death was announced by husband of 54 years, Nick Ercoline. Neither a specific cause of death or age were disclosed, but Ercoline wrote that his wife was surrounded by family when she passed.
“She lived her life well, and left this world in a much better place,” Nick Ercoline wrote. “If you knew her, you loved her. She lived by her saying, ‘Be kind.'” He added, “She didn’t deserve this past years nightmare, but she isn’t suffering from the physical pain anymore and that brings some comfort to us.”
Nick Ercoline and Bobbi Kelly were both 20 years old and had been dating less than two months when they decided on a whim to drive the 40 miles from their New York State hometown to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair happening on Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York.
...
At one point during the mud- and rain-soaked festival, photographer Burk Uzzle of the Magnum photo agency snapped a picture of a young couple embracing on a hill amidst concert-goers and sleeping bags. The couple was draped in a tattered-looking blanket, the man’s face turned away, the young woman, in sunglasses, seeming to stare directly at the camera.
It wasn’t until the following year with the release of the soundtrack album featuring the photograph on its soon-to-be famous cover that Ercoline and Kelly even realized their photo had been taken.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
In first with “Now I feel old.”
damn hippies
Did they take the brown acid?
So the two stayed together until the death of one. In those days couples often lasted a few weeks or pushed it to a few months. A blessing to find true mutual love, as I know from experience. Lost my dear wife a year ago. Love from 1973 to current (I still love her now.)
Indeed, every generation starts out stupid. Then they mature.
And their marriage is something to be celebrated. As is yours.
Thanks very much.
“In first with “Now I feel old.””
______
A few years ago, I would have beaten you to being the first to say that. However at my current age, I do not move as fast as I did at the time of Woodstock.
However, now that I have arrived, may I echo your statement?
“Now I feel old”!
Can you imagine a concert of that size, and that disorganized being held now without multiple murders and non-stop mayhem? Compared to even one night at a bar in the downtown of a major democrat city, the entire week of Woodstock was a crime-free weekend! (It actually was with the exception of a few (okay—maybe a lot) illegal drugs and maybe a few minor assaults due to a couple of drunks bumping into each other before being properly introduced).
my father was crawling around the jungles of vietnam getting shot at while these @#@#$@# hippies sat around on their lazy a55es taking drugs and defiling all that was good and true about American society. They can rot in hell. They’re the trailblazers of today’s woke communist mob.
And then came Altamont.
Bob Hite of Canned Heat had a line on stage “I have a message just handed to me. Billy, meet me behind the stage. Bring the cash. I’ve got the dope.”
I will point out that the International Pop Festival in Atlanta in 1969 and 1970 were bigger and had none of the problems Woodstock had. Woodstock was terribly run and organized and they lost out on a lot of ticket revenue because they ended up letting anyone in. Of course they made money on the film and records sold but I am not sure how much the promoters really got on that end of it.
Didn’t he die like two years later?
I posted this elsewhere but it’s worth putting here to reach others.
“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
That's where Grand Funk Railroad got their big break.
Not everyone there was a Hippie. There were a number of musical events in those years.
Actually, the under 30 young were pretty conservative then, the strongest supporters of the Vietnam war of any age group, voted 52% GOP/46% democrat in 1972, produced 10 million veterans.
May her Memory be Eternal!
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