Musings: Do we have time to get back to the garden?
Some of the more than 400,000 music fans exit the Woodstock festival in 1969. Credit: AP
More than 400,000 attended the Woodstock Music & Art Fair 56 years ago this month, but I was not among them. I wish I was.
Many of the era’s events are worth remembering, but a handful stand out. Rolling Stone magazine cofounder Jann Wenner is reputed to have said the 1969 rock festival was the final, ending bookend to the countercultural expression of freedom and optimism from the 1960s. Wenner said the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 was the beginning bookend for the baby boomers’ desire for hopeful endemic changes in the United States.
The decade had been torn asunder by assassination, civil rights resistance in the South and elsewhere, and the Vietnam War being presented to us as winnable.
In San Francisco through the mid-’60s, beatniks, free spirits, artists, and peaceniks formed an alliance and created weekend arts and music festivals. The center of their creative movement was the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco.
At coffeehouses, bookstores, and universities, the youth discussed utopian worlds and how they could start living these ideas by practicing open love; making their own clothing and furnishings; and growing their own healthy meals.
The counterculture was born, and these young Americans had the money and interest to demonstrate their new model for daily living.
Yes, I’ve always wondered if I would be different if I had gone to the Woodstock festival. Joni Mitchell did not make it either, yet the festival inspired her to write the definitive song about it, titled appropriately enough, “Woodstock.” In a lot of ways, I too have been trying to “get back to the garden.” Her lyrics still ring true today.
Over the years, right up to today at 74, I can hear “Good morning!” shouted to the crowd. It still sounds fresh and welcoming. What a lovely thing to have as a dream.
Even wearing my tie-dye T-shirt these days, or not, I can still imagine a white dove flying over this great country and world. Many may recall the dove sitting on a guitar neck on a Woodstock poster. We must make the dove want to start a new nest in our world’s garden.
— Joe Abate, Island Park
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