Woodstock

I’ll admit there might have been a better choice for the accompanying old movie than this, considering the Bee Gees didn’t actually perform at the festival. However, I have often used this blog as an excuse to cross off my list stuff I have always wanted to watch.

Also, there was exactly one Australian song performed at Woodstock, and it was by the Bee Gees. Legendary Janis Joplin gave many of the fans their first taste of possibly the best Bee Gees song.

As far as the documentary, its availability for streaming is surprisingly scant, considering it was MASSIVELY profitable, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and is hailed as a huge classic. In fact, it’s considered the reason the Woodstock festival is hailed as such a cultural milestone; otherwise the festival would have just been a fun time the attendees in the Northeast knew about.

The movie is available to rent on Amazon, but only in the SD version. If you want HD, you have to buy – plus you have to watch the director’s cut instead of the theatrical version. Considering the latter is already over three hours long, sitting through an ADDITIONAL 1 1/3 hours wasn’t a simple decision. Nonetheless, HD lover that I am, I took the plunge.

I realized I didn’t actually have to watch the whole thing. It’s not a talking head documentary with a narrative – mostly the camera is just on while we watch what happened that legendary weekend. A lot of it is the musical acts – and I forwarded through most of them. Joe Cocker was awesome (if a little spastic LOL)

and I liked Jimi Hendrix at the end. I also remember Jefferson Airplane being okay. Mostly, I just forwarded though, as I realized late 60s music isn’t really my thing.

If Woodstock had taken place a decade later, I would have LOVED seeing a bunch of footage of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Cream, AC/DC, etc. I once went through a phase where I called 70s rock the greatest music ever.

This guy is still kicking ass!

If Woodstock had taken place a decade earlier, I would have LOVED seeing what I’ve called the greatest music ever for my whole life outside of that phase. Wow, a whole weekend’s worth of footage of Dion and the Belmonts, Little Peggy March, Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers, The Ronettes, etc. singing doo wop…

Guys and girls, this is my story and I have all of my glory

However, the 60s were of course a unique time in American history. We had a generation of young people responding to the horrors of the Kennedy assassinations, the racial violence, the Vietnam war, etc. by clamoring for peace and togetherness. What’s better than the footage of music here is the footage of the attendees bonding in ways such as playing games together and skinny dipping together (it doesn’t hurt that a lot of these female hippies are HOT). The site was meant to host about 100,000 (the number of tickets sold) but there were at least 400,000 there thanks to all the fence hoppers and some estimates put the total number close to 1,000,000. Yet the event organizers did more than realize they couldn’t stop the influx of people and accept the financial loss. They spoke to local vendors about donating food, and thus had a buffet set out from where the thousands of people could get trays of munchies that they were then to share with people near them.

Being camped out in such close quarters to such an ungodly number of people might make some of us feel claustrophobic and even agoraphobic. Yet this event was so driven by the spirit of togetherness that I’d be surprised if any of the million people DIDN’T form lifelong friendships or even find their future spouses. Admittedly a festival like this might have been more fun to learn about if it were a disaster (the reason I specifically found out about Summer of Soul so I could watch the Fyre Fest documentaries and have something to pair them with) but Woodstock was one of the greatest successes in pop culture history!

In terms of its experience for the attendees and its subsequent aura, I mean. Not in terms of its mission. I’ve seen many people justifiably get angry that the Baby Boomers, the generation about togetherness and love, went on to break American by voting for policies that plundered all the country’s resources for themselves.*

I did see an interesting comment once, though, saying that only 1/3 of the Boomers were those free-loving hippies; the other 2/3 were the assholes who put Reagan in power.

That makes sense. The year before Woodstock, the first year when an appreciable number of Boomers were old enough to vote for president, Nixon was elected, ending the era of compassionate conservatives represented by Eisenhower (whose vice-president Nixon ironically was) and beginning the endless shift of the Republican party to the right that continues today. It magnified and accelerated when more and more boomers grew to voting age and became the overwhelmingly dominant voting block as the “Greatest Generation” died. Nowadays Gen X, Millennials, and voting-age Gen Z FINALLY outnumber the surviving Boomers appreciably and thus we’re hearing things like universal healthcare and student loan forgiveness on major platforms.

I hope enough of the good Boomers survive to celebrate with us when measures like that become reality.

In the meantime, we can celebrate their ideals and enjoy this fabulous documentary immortalizing their special moment in time, filled with hope.

Bottom Line: Quite an epic.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to write below.

*Brilliant takedown of them – although make sure you see the original version to fully appreciate the parody.