AUGUST 17th - Music Does More



On this day in 1969, the Woodstock Musical Festival was winding down as Jimi Hendrix strummed out "The Star Spangled Banner" to the hundreds of thousands of people who had descended upon a dairy farm near the tiny New York town of Woodstock. Basically, four guys got together and decided to throw a party. We’ll keep it fairly small they said. Just a nice intimate gathering. Like that poor high-school kid, Jimbo, whose parents went out of town for the weekend, and he decided to have just a few of his friends over. Only by the end of the school day everybody had heard that poor Jimbo’s parents’ were out of town, and they would be damned if they were going to miss out. Next thing Jimbo knows he has the whole school in his living room and some kid is puking in his the priceless antique vase Grandma Louise gave his mom. Woodstock was just going to be a few hundred thousand people on the old dairy farm out by Woodstock. We’ll have some good music with some good people. Maybe smoke a little grass. Completely under control. It was like the whole Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come mantra. Only instead of baseball and ghosts, it was really good music, drugs, and love, man. But they came. The sheer numbers forced the organizers to open the concert up and let the crowds in for free. 500,000 people worth of crowd. Incredible music will do that. Richie Havens, Ravi Shankar, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Santana, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker, The Band, Johnny Winter, Blood Sweat and Tears, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Jimi Hendrix, and others. That's incredible. All that great music in one place at a certain moment in time. Counter-culture. Peace. Love. Hippies. It was a perfect mix for immortality. But it was the music that drove. As a lover of words, and the ideas they can convey, I still feel that music may be the strongest force in the world. A sonnet can be beautiful, a story can make you cry. But a song. A beautiful voice. A sweet melody. It does more somehow. And though I can’t say I would have enjoyed everything that went along with the original Woodstock, it would definitely be one of my top events to go back and see. I just need a DeLorean and some plutonium. Don’t laugh. Lexus has the hoverboard coming. Anything is possible, just ask the four guys who threw the biggest concert ever. (Time-travel to the past probably isn’t possible because of paradoxes, but that weakens my point, so let’s ignore that).

This Day has been Marked

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