Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2005Well maybe it is just the time of year THIS TIME OF YEAR is the anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, held August 15, 16 and 17, 1969 in Bethel, New York. Usually, I post a photo from the festival on the cover, but I wanted to use something new, and I'm having trouble getting a hold of my colleague Eliot Landy in [the actual town of] Woodstock, who took a lot of pictures at the festival and is a busy guy. So I'll leave it to a mention, a little reminder that the event happened. The Sixties proceeded very rapidly from that day in late 1963 when John F. Kennedy was killed. Less than 16 weeks later, the Beatles arrived at the airport that would soon be named for JFK, and poured a whole lot of energy into American culture. Consciousness about Vietnam had been raising for some time (in part thanks to Bob Dylan, the first cultural figure to raise the issue). This was even before the war's official start in 1964 with the Gulf of Tonkien non-incident; an reported attack on a U.S. vessel that was really a fraud, but which President Johnson used to persuade Congress to get more fully involved in the war. Up to that point, the U.S. provided weapons, CIA "advisors," money and most of all, instigation. As the years between 1964 and 1969 went by in a blur, the peace movement built momentum, the chaos of change, drugs, sexual energy being turned loose, progressive politics and insane politics carried life along at a pace nobody had ever seen. Everything was changing, all at once (since this is an astrology site, I can say that was about Uranus conjunct Pluto, opposite Chiron). The Beatles infused the culture with a message and a feeling of love. But the year 1968 brought Richard Nixon to office, the same year that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered. By the summer of 1969, there seemed to be such mixed feelings that nobody knew where to turn. They turned to one another, on Max Yasgur's farm in the Village of Bethel, Town of White Lake, New York. I've been there, and it's a place you don't think of when you say those mythic words New York. It's really a huge pasture and two lane roads. It takes nearly an hour just to get to to the New York State Thruway, and two hours more to get to the city. You're quite literally in the middle of nowhere. But it's still the East Coast and it's still close enough to the city that many thousands of people came -- as did all the great musicians of the day, save for Dylan, the Beatles and a scant few others. (The Grateful Dead played what is regarded as their worst show ever, as rain fell on the musicians and they got electrical shocks from their guitar strings during a very short set, pardon the pun.) What happened those three days was remarkable because young people were able to transcend the turmoil and bitter controversy of the time and hang out together in relative peace for a long weekend. This, at the height of Vietnam, of Nixon, of the loss of all the great heroes of the American left who were mysteriously disappeared. Here is an interesting web page with lots of history. http://www.yasgurroad.com/history.html I'll leave you with the lyrics to the song Woodstock by Joni Mitchell. And hey -- thank you Max Yasgur, dairy farmer and revolutionary.
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