I won't be joining the nostalgia for Woodstock's 50th anniversary.
As rccently explored in the New Yorker, a 30-plus CD set is out that records every moment of the festival that trashed Mr. Yasger's farm in upstate New York in mid-August 1969.
Every song. Every groovy statement from a performer on stage. Every whir of helicopter blades. Every peal of thunder, and distorted buzz from a speaker. Every announcement, such as the one about the bad brown acid going around.
I wouldn't pay 5 cents for the package, but I did see some of the Woodstock documentary on TCM recently. Some of the performances held up, such as Joe Cocker's cover of the Beatles' "A Little Help From My Friends." John Sebastian with his hippie-dippie tie-dyed goofiness was endearing. Richie Havens' peace anthems sill stirred the emotions. In their first public performance, Crosby, Stills and Nash were show-biz pros.
But the fatuous 'far out" dialogue made me shudder. The interviews with the hippie kids were a testament to idiocy. The event was a statement of wasted opportunity, of a human dead-end.
As authors David Wallace-Wells in "The Uninhabitable Earth" and Nathaniel Rich in "Losing Earth" have detailed, the communal, earth-loving ethos of Woodstock had no long-term effect.
Rich shows how the oil companies derailed efforts to cut carbon emissions. Wallace-Wells documents how emissions have increased in the last few years. Now, the world is running out of time, if it hasn't already.
When I was a young hippie, speaking that same spurious lingo, I enjoyed Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" with its line, "we've got to get back to the garden." Tbe garden is burning.
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