Baby Boomers Remember Woodstock on 40th Anniversary [VIDEOS]
August 15th, 2009
Today, Friday, August 15, 2009, Baby Boomers celebrate Woodstock 40th year anniversary.
Baby Boomers Remember Woodstock on 40th Anniversary
This weekend Baby Boomers celebrate Woodstock 40th year anniversary.
Today, Saturday, August 15, 2009 at 5 p.m. there will be a "Heroes of Woodstock" Concert (Sold Out), featuring a number of the graybeard performers who are still around from the original Woodstock in 1969. Country Joe McDonald Tom Constanten Big Brother and the Holding Company Canned Heat Ten Years After Jefferson Starship Levon Helm Band and Mountain
BETHEL, N.Y., Aug. 15 - Forty years ago today, they came here to a stretch of farmland in the middle of nowhere, to tune in and turn on. Nearly a half-million people gathered for four days of music and mud, camaraderie and chemicals, at the festival known as Woodstock, which came to define the generation.
Woodstock Music & Art Fair (informally, Woodstock or The Woodstock Festival) was a music festival, billed as "An Aquarian Exposition", held at Max Yasgur's 600 acre dairy farm in the rural town of Bethel, New York from August 15 to August 18, 1969. Bethel, in Sullivan County, is 43 miles southwest of the town of Woodstock, New York, in adjoining Ulster County.
Thirty-two acts performed during the sometimes rainy weekend in front of nearly half a million concertgoers. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest moments in popular music history and was listed on Rolling Stone's 50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll.[2]
The event was captured in a successful 1970 documentary movie, Woodstock; an accompanying soundtrack album; and Joni Mitchell's song "Woodstock", which commemorated the event and became a major hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
Mud and illegal drugs notwithstanding, it represented a rare moment when thousands of strangers congregated together, suspending fear and suspicion and feeling intrinsic connections with their peers, an unparalleled intermission of social harmony.
Typical crowd behaviors, such as avoiding eye contact, suspended for three days, leading to everything from unabashed public nudity to strangers hugging and high-fiving.
More important than actions were feelings: a sense that a generation had come into its own, an experience of optimism in spite of the divisive Vietnam War, a moment of idealism that innate human hostility and warring could be rocked into irrelevance.
Flash forward - August 14, 2009 -The very notion of a "sold-out" Woodstock show, able to accommodate only a certain number of people, indicates how much things have changed. Many of the 15,000 concertgoers expected by organizers will be in seats, not sprawling on blankets. And attendees will mainly be overnighting at inns and motels up to 60 miles away, not . . . sprawling on blankets.
