Posted on 08/16/2004 1:17:29 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Who could forget the sitar-like harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash? The " better living through chemistry " pulsations of Sly and the Family Stone, the chanting of Country Joe and the Fish, and the wonderfully wacky Wavy Gravy? Woodstock - a place where people ("half a million people strong") gathered for peace, love, and music. An event that represented a generation of youth.
Well, not quite.
Contrary to the prevailing myths about Woodstock, it was not an altruistic event.
Woodstock was all about money.
John Roberts, the Ivy League heir to the Polident fortune, financed it. He and his partners were in it for profit. They never stated otherwise. Max Yasgur, whose farm was the site of the event and whose name was immortalized in song, was anything but a simple dairy farmer. He was an NYU graduate and one of the wealthiest farmers in the area. He also walked away with $75,000 or about $300,000 in current dollars – not bad for the three-day rental of six hundred idle acres.
The Who was paid the then-unheard-of sum of $12,000 for their participation. Three groups refused to go on until they received cash in advance. The promoters had to get an advance from a local banker on a Saturday night in order to prevent a riot.
A ticket was approximately eighteen dollars. In an era when the minimum wage was $1.60/hour, a ticket was two days' pay. That does not count lost wages for taking off from work, travel expenses, and of course, the drugs – closer to a week's pay. The boys and girls (not ladies and gentlemen) of Woodstock were not all that inclusive. Woodstock was not for the poor.
If there is any significance to Woodstock (and the point is debatable), it is the symbolic irony of it. The Woodstock audience was composed of enlightened and compassionate liberals – at least that is what they thought of themselves. These were people who wanted to fed the poor and help the helpless. Yet promoters spent more than $2 million dollars staging Woodstock ($10 million in current dollars.) Ten million dollars, let alone the ticket receipts of that historic concert, could have bought many a breakfast in Appalachia or in the ghettoes its attendants allegedly cared so much about. These people are now part of the government's social welfare complex and self-indulgent leftist academic "culture," preaching "social justice" to their students.
Things quickly went haywire within the concert. "I remember building a fire one morning for breakfast. All we had was hot dogs and spaghetti," a Woodstock alumnus waxed nostalgically in a magazine article. Ironically, when Woodstock's well-to-do audience could not feed themselves (let alone the downtrodden), the hippies called on the very people they spurned to feed them: the National Guard. The Left needed those warmongering, baby killing, murdering monsters of the military establishment to drop food from helicopters to save them. The liberal Democrats, Naderites, and far-Leftists who planned this fiasco were dependent on the generosity of the "Military-Industrial Establishment." This is also the same National Guard that is now derided by liberal Democrats as "Chickenhawks." How ironic that the people who criticize President George W. Bush’s National Guard service were probably saved from starvation by his brethren.
The very same people who want to plan every aspect of the economy and society could not even plan a rock concert.
Another myth is that Woodstock, though intended to be a moneymaking venture, became a free concert through the benevolence of the concert's producers. Although it was good PR, this was not true. The promoters had to make it a free concert. The Woodstock generation wants what they want - and they want it free. They wanted to go to the concert so they crashed the gate.
It was the promoter’s fault. In order to get local approval the promoters purposely furnished low attendance figures. However, they did not realize how effective their marketing would be. Twice as many people came as they expected - ten times the amount they had told the locals.
Good intentions did not make Woodstock a free concert; poor business planning did.
Woodstock exposed the hypocrisy of the Left. A half a million people either spent money that could have been donated to charity and depended on the military to serve them food. The performers also earned substantial sums for their appearances. The only money donated was to Abbie Hoffman's fanatics, and that only because he extorted it by stating he would disrupt the concert.
They did all of this while inveighing against the capitalist system.
Country Joe's lyrical lamentation asked why we were in Vietnam. His answer was found during the Seventies - in the re-education programs of communist Vietnam, in the boat people who fled Vietnam on anything that could float, and in the killing fields of Cambodia.
The "Boys in the Wood" later proclaimed themselves "veterans." In their characteristic hubris, they want to erect a "monument" to Woodstock. What is there to venerate? Woodstock was nothing more than pampered kids acting irresponsibly. These Woodstock veterans are now advocating the election of one of their fellow antiwar activists, John Kerry.
In Washington, D.C., the genuine monument to real veterans of that era bears some 50,000 names on it. The Vietnam Memorial lists the names of real veterans, kids who did their duty. They were the real altruists. Their concerts were in places like Bien Hoa and Ia Drang. They are the finest men their time had to offer and the ones who should define their generation.
What property damage?
I visited the site a few years ago. Our church's camp is just a few miles away, so while there one night a dozen or so of us went to the Woodstock site. There's a memorial there, and it was covered with offerings of hippie paraphanalia. While we were gawking at that, some guy (alone) drove into the field and parked, unaware of us; things turned surreal for him when a bunch of strangers (us) appeared out of the darkness, surrounded his car, and started singing Christmas carols in August.
Anyway... It's still a farm. Aside from a couple buildings and a barn, there is nothing there. As the author mentions, $75000 ($300K in today's bucks) was a very good deal for renting some otherwise unused land. So what if a half-million hippies stomp on it for 3 days - just plow it afterwards and all is back to normal.
What many don't realize is the nearby town of Bethel NY is a resort/vacation town for hardcore Orthodox Jews - musta been a shock to the locals when a half-million ideological opposites suddenly showed up.
Major LOL! My son just looks at me and shakes his head when I recount tales of my former life as a hippie. I still get thumps on my head for having my own copy of Mao's Little Red Book. Thank God I met his dad, a Viet Nam vet, to bring me back to reality.
My husband did have a gold peace symbol on his tooth for a while when he came back to the world. Since I didn't know him then, I give him a pass. He probably had to do it because of the Kerry folks giving him a hard time for being a baby killer. Yeah, the same 'baby killer' who could never bring himself to spank his own kid. (my job)
RIP, Dale.
I'll confess that there is some rap that I think is catchy and clever. But not much. The problem with it is the perpetuation of the inner city hip-hop lifestyle and the culture of illiteracy and abject ignorance that it certainly seems to celebrate.
BUT -- Having gone to Provine High School in Jackson, MS for two years - and having been VERY much a white minority - I have a very intimate knowledge of what many black men like to see in their women. So I think Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back" is HILARIOUS. One example.
Actually, CSN were horrible at Woodstock.
I'm glad you liked one of my comments today. :)
"...The hallmark of the sixties was not Woodstock, but..."
Hollywood thinks the 60s began in 1968.
Of course were almost over by then.
They began with Eisenhower in the White House.
The 'hallmark' of the 60's might be the Cuban Missle Crisis or the murder of Kennedy.
Always was about the bucks
Seems to me, no one knows anything about their music
I know about their music.
D*mn. Another myth busted.
Well, one thing that Woodstock did make clear was how incredibly sappy drugs and moral platitudes can make a large mob of people. What better symbol of the utter futility if an entire generation of idealists than the truly idiotic chant "no more rain!" as the heavens opened up unheeding?
I was there too. My husband is shocked and saddened by this.
I was 18 and had just graduated from High School.
I voted Democrat the first time I voted. Believe it was for McGovern. Soon thereafter I was thinking about it and realized I was not a Democrat, I was a Republican. Have voted that way ever since. We were kids then, many from my School were in Nam including my cousins in the Marines. We thought it was an adventure to go to Woodstock. I just remember being dirty.
There is some rap that's pretty good, I admit.
But, I can not tell you what a pleasure it's
been to spend so much time with an almost 13
year old who is enamored with it.
Yep...a real dang pleasure.
Tnank goodness his parents don't like it one bit.
That's solved a WHOLE lotta problems. ;o)
Yeah -- I remember hearing a recording of either that performance or another one from around the same time. It was typical of a number of bands that were polished on record, but unable to duplicate their "sound" onstage. Never cared much for CSN, (or CSN&Y)personally.
Yeah, but there were naked girls, so don't bother me with all those other facts.
I used to listen a lot to Phish (starting in the early 90s). I went to a concert in 1995, and was astounded that they had a Dead-like hippie following. I had never made the association. I was turned off by the drug use there. But the crowd was peaceful, if a little smelly. I saw them again in 1997 and 1999, and saw Trey Anastasio in concert in 2001.
This was one of the "US" festivals in California. A three-day music concert put on by Steve Wozniak, I believe, the co-founder of Apple.
It was your basic hippy-dippy self-indulgent festivals meant to "recapture" the magic of Woodstock. They had some pretty good performers lined up too. David Bowie, Stevie Nicks, Van Halen, U2, and about a dozen other well-known acts of the time. I think it was around 1983.
Anyway, it was a miserable experience. Unless you like spending three days lying in mud and filth. It took a month of hot showers before I felt clean again.
"Thinking" is the key word there. It will lead you to being a pubbie anytime! LOL
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