Originally published in The Progressive, August/September 2019.
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| James M. Shelley, Woodstock 1969 |
It didn’t matter.
Revolution was in the air. We’d taken it to the streets. We’d occupied buildings. Now nearly half a million young people headed for the hills—and the fences came down. The spirit of the times prevailed. The white dove that had been perched on the neck of a guitar on the iconic Woodstock Music and Art Fair poster took flight, descended on the crowd, and made history.
It didn’t make money though. After the event that captured the heart of my generation, the promoters—and presumably the 450,000 folks who’d gone down to Max Yasgur’s farm to set their souls free—ended up taking a bath.
The movie that was released the following spring etched Woodstock into the collective consciousness of a generation. What had been a mixed bag for those on the ground—and in the mud—became larger-than-life on the big screen. The spirit of the times that had transformed a disaster area into a peaceful community (where the head of security was a clown with a kazoo), now touched tens of millions of us. And, of course, a few folks made a bundle.
I didn’t make it to Woodstock 1969. It didn’t matter. The genie was out of the bottle. The word was on the streets. The following summer, I drove west in a Volkswagen Beetle and watched the heart and soul of my generation play out on screen, through a cloud of cannabis smoke, in a crowded theater in San Francisco.
With peace signs flashing, the leftist folk music of the early sixties danced onto the stage with the electrified blues and acid rock that had erupted on the left coast’s hotbed of be-ins and a Summer of Love. Through a kaleidoscopic swirl of images and sounds, we long-haired hippies constructed a massive stage and drove tractors. We danced and did yoga amidst teepees and gaily painted school buses. We skinny dipped, then rolled up our sleeves to answer the call to, as Wavy Gravy famously put it, “serve breakfast in bed for 400,000.”
It was a revival meeting. The spirit of the times danced with the timeless. In cinematic communion, we were living the dream.
In that dream, martyred union organizer Joe Hill appeared on Joan Baez’s breath and encouraged us to organize. In that dream, bomber death planes turned into butterflies. With irreverent reverence, Country Joe McDonald took the pulpit and yelled, “Give me an F,” and we did just that—with a roar! When Joe Cocker proclaimed “I get by with a little help from my friends,” we knew it was gospel. We rocked. We rolled. We laughed. We cried. Then, as dawn emerged, Jimi Hendrix captured the fury and anguish of the war that raged halfway round the world. His “Star-Spangled Banner” became our national anthem. J oni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” became our “Rock of Ages.”
We’d been to the mountaintop. We were about to change the world. Or so we thought.
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