Woodstock Then and Now

Description

In August of 1969, a dairy farm in the state of New York hosted a pivotal moment in the history of pop music. Taking place only two years after the “Summer of Love” and one year after the tumultuous events of 1968, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair put an exclamation point on the transformational decade of the 1960s. Joni Mitchell did not attend Woodstock, but her song of the same name captures an opposition inherent to the turbulent and divisive era. “We are stardust . . . caught in the devil’s bargain,” Mitchell sings, “and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” In order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, Berklee College of Music hosted a week-long celebration that included conversations with luminaries from the era. Participants included Woodstock co-founder, Michael Lang; emcee, stage and lighting designer, Chip Monck; audio engineer, Bill Hanley; photographers Henry Diltz and Elliott Landy; public relations officer, Rona Elliot; and Gerardo Velez, drummer for Jimi Hendrix. Woodstock Then and Now commemorates the discussion between these Woodstock luminaries, making available the transcripts of this historic event.

Sujets

• Styles
• Genres
• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• History of classical music traditions
• Musician
• Woodstock Festival
• Rock
• Woodstock

Informations

• Publié par: Clemson University Press
• Date de parution: 31 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781638041047
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Contents Cover Page Half-title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1: Behind the Scenes at Woodstock 2: Woodstock Fifty Years Later 3: Woodstock's Stardust 4: Playing With Jimi Hendrix Profiles of Featured Woodstock Luminaries Rona Elliot Bill Hanley Elliott Landy Michael Lang Chip Monck Gerardo Velez
Landmarks Cover Table of Contents



then and now : a 50th anniversary celebration



edited by
Alex Ludwig and
Simone Pilon




© 2022 Clemson University
All rights reserved
Paperback edition
ISBN: 978-1-63804-047-7
First hardcover edition published in 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63804-005-7
Ebook edition
ISBN: 978-1-63804-104-7
Published by Clemson University Press.
Please visit our website: www.clemson.edu/press .
Interior designed by Andrea Reider.
Cover designed by Lindsay Scott.
Front cover image courtesy of Elliott Landy.
Back cover image courtesy of Henry Diltz.


Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Berklee College of Music’s Celebration of Woodstock
About This Book
1: Behind the Scenes at Woodstock
2: Woodstock Fifty Years Later
3: Woodstock's Stardust
4: Playing With Jimi Hendrix
Profiles of Featured Woodstock Luminaries
Henry Diltz
Rona Elliot
Bill Hanley
Elliott Landy
Michael Lang
Chip Monck
Gerardo Velez


Acknowledgments
We would be remiss if we did not thank the many people who made the 50th anniversary celebration of Woodstock at Berklee College of Music and this book possible. This was a team effort, and many members of the Berklee community helped make it happen. A big thank you to Mike Mason, Kali Noonan, Darla Hanley, Kate Kelleher, Allen Bush, Tracey Gibbs, and members of the Conference and Events, David Friend Recital Hall, Public Safety, and Video Services teams. We would like to recognize the efforts of the Liberal Arts work-study students who took a first pass at the transcriptions—Christine Bernard, Samuel Chong, Charles Fuertsch, and Aarya Ganesan—and Kali Noonan, who supervised that work.
In addition, we would like to recognize the faculty and staff members who led ensembles, organized exhibits, gave talks, or moderated sessions during Woodstock Week. These include Tom Baskett, Sofía Becerra, Deborah Bennett, Mason Daring, Kenwood Dennard, Wayne Marshall, Maureen McMullan, Rekha Menon, Gretchen Moore, Bob Mulvey, Patricia Peknik, Zoë Rath, Mark Simos, and Aja Burrell Wood. We would also like to acknowledge the members of the conference committee who helped select the academic presentations: Alicia Bower, Patrick Burke (of Washington University in St. Louis), Patricia Peknik, and Ron Reid.
While the contributions of the Berklee College of Music community were invaluable, this event would not have been possible without the participation of our Woodstock luminaries: Henry Diltz, Rona Elliot, Bill Hanley, Elliott Landy, Michael Lang, Chip Monck, and Gerardo Velez. Because it was the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock, 2019 was a particularly busy year for all of these people. Michael Lang was in the middle of organizing the Woodstock 50 festival, which was set to begin just a few months after the Berklee celebration; Henry Diltz talked about the increased interest in his photos because of the anniversary; and Rona Elliot was preparing to teach a course, “Woodstock at 50,” at New York University in the summer of 2019, with Karen Curry, former network executive and adjunct professor at NYU. Everyone’s willingness to take time from their other projects, travel to Boston, and share their experiences and insights with us was most appreciated.
However, the contributions of our luminaries did not stop after the April 2019 event, since each of the participants contributed to the content of this book. In particular, we would like to thank Henry Diltz and his partner Gary Strobl, Elliott Landy, and the estate of Dan Garson for contributing their photos to this publication. Michael Lang provided information for the sidebar on Woodstock 50, and Tom Jablonka contributed background information about the creation of the Woodstock site drawings. Rona Elliot not only wrote the profiles included at the end of the book, but also worked with the other roundtable participants and members of the Woodstock community to confirm some of the names and information. Rona has a wealth of Woodstock knowledge.
Finally, a big thank you to Alison Mero and the Clemson University Press staff for believing in this project.
Michael Lang passed away shortly after the hardcover release of this book. His humanity, focus on community, love of music, and respect for people and the planet forged Woodstock into one of the most iconic events in music history and its impact is still felt more than fifty years later. The editors of this book had the privilege to spend time with Michael in April 2019 when he came to Berklee to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock. He lived up to his reputation as an incredibly passionate, down-to-earth, and laid-back person. Michael was supportive of the event we held and contributed immensely to the book that you are reading now. We would like to dedicate this work to his memory.


Introduction
I n the summer of 1969, a dairy farm in upstate New York hosted an event that would be marked as a pivotal moment in the history of pop music. Two years after the so-called “Summer of Love” and one year after the tumultuous events of 1968, the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, which was billed as an “Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace and Music,” took place during the weekend of August 15–17, putting an exclamation point on an undeniably transformational decade. Watching the coverage of the festival from a New York City hotel, Joni Mitchell wrote the song “Woodstock,” which captures the opposition that defined the turbulent and divisive era in which she was living. She wrote, “We are stardust . . . / Caught in the devil’s bargain / And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
Her evocative lyrics highlight the multivalent impulses at the heart of Woodstock. The musical lineup included not only Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix, but also Ravi Shankar, Carlos Santana, and Sha Na Na, an anachronistic doo-wop group. The behavior of the audience at Woodstock was exceedingly peaceful, whereas several other festivals in the 1960s were marred by violence, particularly Denver Pop, in June 1969, and Altamont, in December 1969. Woodstock functioned as an idyll amidst much of the social and political turmoil of the 1960s because cofounder Michael Lang imbued the festival with the fundamental characteristics of the counterculture: three days of peace and music, as it was billed on the poster. Woodstock dedicated space not only for music but also for progressive organizers to proselytize in a tent known as Movement City, and for audiences to view art in a pavilion displaying work by Native Americans.
But the question remains: why does Woodstock have such staying power in popular culture? Woodstock was neither the first festival to feature pop music nor the largest of its generation; the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 is generally regarded as the first major festival in the United States, and the Watkins Glen Summer Jam in 1973 hosted over six hundred thousand people, more than the highest estimated attendance at Woodstock.
Woodstock’s place in American culture rests in part on its reputation as a hotbed of chaos, owing mostly to behind-the-scenes complications. Initially, festival cofounder Michael Lang and his partner Artie Kornfeld sought funding to build a recording studio in the bucolic town of Woodstock, in the Hudson River valley of New York. Lang and Kornfeld approached John Roberts, heir to the Polident fortune, and his partner Joel Rosenman for financial support, with the quartet forming Woodstock Ventures. But Roberts and Rosenman, who had just built a recording studio in New York City, were more interested in funding a music festival. When an adequate location in the town of Woodstock could not be found, the foursome turned their attention to the town of Wallkill, in Orange County, New York. In Wallkill, the organizers found an appropriate site, but citizens of the town banded together to thwart the festival. Authorities in Wallkill denied the application for permits with only three weeks left until Woodstock’s advertised opening day.
Growing more desperate by the hour, the organizers searched throughout the region for a natural amphitheater, even using a helicopter to look from the air. They soon discovered a dairy farm owned by Max Yasgur in Sullivan County, but were left with just three weeks to adapt the plans and build the infrastructure for a major festival. The festival organizers planned for fifty thousand attendees, but on the first day the gates were quickly overrun, forcing the organizers to make the festival free and open to the public. In the end, various estimates put the attendance somewhere between four hundred and five hundred thousand people. The unexpected number of attendees put a strain on the festival’s facilities, and organizers struggled to provide basic necessities, like food, water, and portable toilets. Despite the overcrowding, the festival doctor, William Abruzzi, reported that no injuries were incurred from violence during the festival.
A number of bands used Woodstock to launch their careers. The backing group for Bob Dylan, known collectively as The Band, had released their first album, Music from Big Pink (1968), the previous summer. The Band’s live performance at Woodstock, and later that year with Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight Festival in the UK, cemented their legacy