“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).
And then came Altamont.
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.
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
I don’t have to imagine, it was called the Altamont raceway free concert just a few months later. I suppose you’re correct though, in the sense that 60’s “hippies” were (mostly) kids caught up in a popular culture fashion statement and fairly conservative by today’s standards, downright troglodytes. Mission accomplished, I guess.
It’s interesting to me that the long hair and goofy clothes was more or less a uniform, with everything that entails.
One major component was missing in ‘69 ... an over abundance of a violent sub demographic that plagues society today.
True. Even R&B and other black-attended concerts went off without incident, whereas now there is always at least one murder, many assaults, rapes and drug overdoses, like the 8 dead at Astroworld in Houston, 2021.