Forty years on and we’re getting especially nostalgiac for this revolutionary time known as ‘the year that everything changed’ the Summer of 1969 – Summer of love, when skirts were high and the youth were higher and change was ringing in the air.
Today is the fortieth anniversary of man walking on the moon, can you believe it? Can your parents still remember where they were when they watched that ‘small step for man…’ with David Bowie’s Space Oddity backing that extraordinary footage? ‘Tis also forty years since John and Yoko hosted their Amsterdam bed-in (apt location), the Beatles announced their forthcoming split, the Vietnam War was raging and forty years since two affluent New Yorkers met two muso-hippies and planned the first major rock festival ever – namely Woodstock.
The open air festival took place on a farm in a town called Bethel outside New York and brought dozens of the most famous acts in the world at the time together celebrating the vibe of peace, nature and love man. The players included a kite-like Janis Joplin, the hallucinating Who and closing the fest was the amazing Jimi Hendrix – who was getting high in the ‘freak out tent’ right up until his slot on stage but went on to give his iconic rendition of ‘Star Spangled Banner’.
With an estimated turn out of 150,000 punters on the first day the organisers felt triumphant – imagine how they felt when by day three almost 500,000 strung out hippies thronged naked, sun-burnt and stoned in the escalating crowd! Unprepared and panicked to say the least.
Still one of the biggest festivals of all time, Woodstock is an event we will never see the likes of again in our super-organised and controlled music fests today, the times have a changed alright but we’ll always have the photos, the music, the clothes (or lack thereof!) and of course – the muck… some things never change!
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