(Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)
The Museum at Bethel Woods, located on the site of the legendary Woodstock music festival, is working over the next five years to gather firsthand accounts of people’s experiences of that infamous weekend. Understandably, since that pivotal couple of days defined an entire generation and shaped people’s idea of what being brought together by music could mean. It even shaped my idea of music and I was only eight years old!
This was around the time – the very same month, in fact – that I became aware of the print media, as I’ve written about before. I became aware and then quickly became immersed in the news. Fortunately for me, my parents subscribed to the daily newspaper, which I read most nights. There was a lot of coverage of Woodstock, much of it derisive if I recall, but I was somehow smitten with that gathering of people. The throngs of peace-loving youth caught my imagination, drawn as they were simply to the music. Or so it seemed – of course, much as been researched and written about Woodstock since then and we know a lot more was going on, but the pictures of The Youth Movement took hold in my young brain.
The following year, 1970, something called the ‘Festival Express’ rolled into Calgary bringing what seems now to be an astonishing mix of musicians on a chartered train. I’m talking Janis Joplin, The Band, Grateful Dead – the newspaper got hold of that one before they all arrived, and the news was filled with disdain for bringing Calgary into the youth movement. I was filled with the excitement and romance of the whole thing. I begged my dad to let me go.
“You can’t go to a rock and roll concert, you’re only nine!” he exclaimed, in a phrase that was to go down in history.
But I also remember that on the Sunday of the two-day music fest, on July 5, 1970, he slowed down as we drove past McMahon Stadium on our way to Grandma’s for our usual Sunday dinner. He slowed and I jumped a full 360 degree circle from where I was squatting on the backseat, nearly jumping out of my skin as I eagerly peered at the throngs of people out of every window. They were dancing on the hills that still surround the stadium, they were packed inside the stands and I have no idea who was performing at that moment, but the strains of music and mayhem poured into the car. We were that close. THAT close.
It’s like when people tell you the world slows down when something dramatic, like an accident, is unfolding. I remember those brief moments like they were etched into me. All four of us kids, lined up in the backseat with no seatbelts, were twisting and turning over each other to see out the windows. Dad was focused with military precision on the road ahead, lest a hooligan jump in front of the car. Mom was muttering that nothing good was going to come of any of it. And I felt we were all bearing witness to something grand, something bigger than ourselves. Given that Janis Joplin would be dead only three months from then, it was something big, indeed.
So that is my little personal story of a rock and roll moment that involved some of the musicians who had left their mark at Woodstock the year before. And I totally understand the power of what it must have meant to have been on that upstate New York farm. Can’t wait to see what people write!