Woodstock 1969

[Purple]

Can anybody help me a bit with the political part of the Woodstock festival? what they stood for, reasons, etc. Everywhere I look I always get "yeah, it was all drugs and music..." responses... As far as I know they were against the war, but anything else, and what?

[Purple]

somebody...............?

[Valkyrie]

Hey! I live about a stones-throw from the Woodstock Festival grounds. It's mythical porportions are huge around here in that anybody who had even the remotest possibility has fabricated their proximity, date of birth. etc. to have put themselves in attendance in 1969! (much like Bob Avakian!) It's Gets to the point where you ask to see the ticket stubs. No stub.. no go!

They were protesting against the US invasion into Vietnam, as well as the drafting of young U.S. American Males to fight for a very unpopular war, and the presidency of newly elected Richard M. Nixon.

They were celebrating the music, the free love, the drugs and the rain.

[Eastside Revolt]

Woodstock 1969....

No different from the recent woodstocks, with the exception that our generation is a tad more violent. They were all just festivals based on profit.

[Sabocat]

Originally posted by [email protected] 21 2004, 06:56 PM
Woodstock 1969....

No different from the recent woodstocks, with the exception that our generation is a tad more violent. They were all just festivals based on profit.
You couldn't be more wrong. The Woodstocks of today are nothing but an attempt to rip off the vibe of the original. They became nothing more than a gigantic MTV style marketing ploy.

The mood was different, the times were different. As far as the profit, they stopped trying to sell tickets very early on. There were approximately 500,000 people there, and maybe 10,000 paid to get in.

Here's a few notes from people that were there in '69.


Woodstock was not a concert. This was a coming together. What the Byrds called a Tribal Gathering. We came together in Bethel. Yes like Bethlehem, this was a meeting of the essence of the thing. The music was just the background music of our lives. We were doing what great men like our High Priest Timothy Leary had led us to do.
"All I'm about is empowering individuals to explore with your friends the great wonders and mysteries of life...Tim Leary.
Hippies were at that time visually, small groups of people. On the coasts the cops knew who they were. They would see a few, think it was a squashable problem, and leave us alone. Estimates were that there were about 150,000 hippies world wide. When 500,000 showed up at one place at one time. Exploring with friends the great wonders and mysteries of life. When they saw sympathetic hippies in the bedrooms of there own homes. They freaked. They sold the look to jocks, and watered the stock.
In hind site many people see Woodstock as a concert. The press tried to defuse our religious experience. They made people think that Hippies were a bunch of drug users. It was not true. That is not what it was all about. Not all true spiritual hippies did or do drugs.
The Woodstock movie glorified the music. This was the same music at a half a dozen similar concerts that summer. How could the music have had anything to do with it. Some people never even found the main stage. Without the hippies those groups would have been nothing. Nixon wiped the term LSD out of the press and movies for decades to come. The DEA attacked the peace loving Dead Heads. Why? Who had they harmed?
There was something much greater that pulled us all together at Woodstock that day in August. Something unformed, only hinted at in Timothy Leary’s original Psychedelic Prayers. Something Spiritual, unnamable, unseeable, metaorganic.
Many people dropped out, stopped wearing and eating decaying animals, began to respect our setting. This is not the responcs of people at a concert. These responses were predicted by Tim before Monterey. Why! What really happened here? How were you effected? How are you being effected now?
Dr. Jan Pitts

more.... http://www.woodstock69.com/woodstock_mem.htm

[seen_che]

69 :) YEEAAHHHHH
:P :P :P :P :P :P

[Eastside Revolt]

Originally posted by Disgustapated+Jan 23 2004, 10:47 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Disgustapated @ Jan 23 2004, 10:47 PM)
[email protected] 21 2004, 06:56 PM
Woodstock 1969....

No different from the recent woodstocks, with the exception that our generation is a tad more violent. They were all just festivals based on profit.
You couldn&#39;t be more wrong. The Woodstocks of today are nothing but an attempt to rip off the vibe of the original. They became nothing more than a gigantic MTV style marketing ploy.

The mood was different, the times were different. As far as the profit, they stopped trying to sell tickets very early on. There were approximately 500,000 people there, and maybe 10,000 paid to get in.

Here&#39;s a few notes from people that were there in &#39;69.


Woodstock was not a concert. This was a coming together. What the Byrds called a Tribal Gathering. We came together in Bethel. Yes like Bethlehem, this was a meeting of the essence of the thing. The music was just the background music of our lives. We were doing what great men like our High Priest Timothy Leary had led us to do.
"All I&#39;m about is empowering individuals to explore with your friends the great wonders and mysteries of life...Tim Leary.
Hippies were at that time visually, small groups of people. On the coasts the cops knew who they were. They would see a few, think it was a squashable problem, and leave us alone. Estimates were that there were about 150,000 hippies world wide. When 500,000 showed up at one place at one time. Exploring with friends the great wonders and mysteries of life. When they saw sympathetic hippies in the bedrooms of there own homes. They freaked. They sold the look to jocks, and watered the stock.
In hind site many people see Woodstock as a concert. The press tried to defuse our religious experience. They made people think that Hippies were a bunch of drug users. It was not true. That is not what it was all about. Not all true spiritual hippies did or do drugs.
The Woodstock movie glorified the music. This was the same music at a half a dozen similar concerts that summer. How could the music have had anything to do with it. Some people never even found the main stage. Without the hippies those groups would have been nothing. Nixon wiped the term LSD out of the press and movies for decades to come. The DEA attacked the peace loving Dead Heads. Why? Who had they harmed?
There was something much greater that pulled us all together at Woodstock that day in August. Something unformed, only hinted at in Timothy Leary’s original Psychedelic Prayers. Something Spiritual, unnamable, unseeable, metaorganic.
Many people dropped out, stopped wearing and eating decaying animals, began to respect our setting. This is not the responcs of people at a concert. These responses were predicted by Tim before Monterey. Why&#33; What really happened here? How were you effected? How are you being effected now?
Dr. Jan Pitts

more.... http://www.woodstock69.com/woodstock_mem.htm [/b]
The truth is that the "hippies" are a spoof. Yes jazz, blues, and rock culture is always going to have a "mystical feel", they are powerful. The are only two differences I see between, woodstock 1969, and the recent ones.

1. At woodstock &#39;69 a smaller percentage of the people hade to pay admition.

2. At woodstock 1969 people did mass quantities of acid, instead of rioting.

Other than that they were the same profit driven, under-accomadated festivals.

Ever noticed all the nostalgia about the "hippies" and "the 60&#39;s", tends to over-shadow the horrible war against the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, and the Yippies?

[Sabocat]

Try getting a major name band today to play a concert for 500,000 people for basically nothing. Good luck. :lol:

How could the nostalgia of the "hippies" as you put it, overshadow the civil rights crisis and the war, the Black Panthers? They were inextricably tied to these movements. The actual yippie movement was relatively small and was a catalyst for the "hippies".

Who do you think was doing the rioting/protesting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago?

Maybe Hunter Thompson describes the feeling and sentiment of the times better....


"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas.
Has it been 5 years? 6?
It seems like a lifetime.
The kind of peek...
that never comes again.
SF in middle 60&#39;s was a very special time and place to be a part of,
but no explanation,
no mix of words or music or memories,
can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive,
in that corner of time in the world
whatever it meant.


There was madness in any direction at any hour.
You could strike sparks anywhere.
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right;
that we were winning,
and that I think was the handle.
That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil.
Not in any mean or military sense,
we didn&#39;t need that,
our energy would simply prevail.
We had all the momentum.
We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.


So now,
less then 5 years later,
you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas, and look west
and with the right kind of eyes,
you can almost see the high water mark,
that place where the wave finally broke,
and rolled back."


- Hunter S. Thompson

[Rastafari]

besides being the second concert for CSN, Woodstock pales in comparison musically to Monterey or Isle of Wight. Sure, they had the numbers at Woodstock, but it was really rainy and hard on the instuments. Recent Woodstock attempts have all been jokes. To begin with, there isn&#39;t a band today that played at Woodstock &#39;99 or whatever that was nearly half as talented as even the rougher acts at the original. Also, the people who went to #2 are even more likely to be "poseurs" than those who attended the first (Hippies were sweet people, no doubt, but a lot of them did it b/c of the free ride, and not for politics/zen buddhism/etc.)

[Comrade Zeke]

Woodstock.......hmmmm I think it was one of the coolest festivals of the 20 century&#33; Free love,Free Beer,Everything Hippie yeah it was all cool

[redstar2000]

Its mythical proportions are huge around here in that anybody who had even the remotest possibility has fabricated their proximity, date of birth. etc. to have put themselves in attendance in 1969&#33; (much like Bob Avakian&#33;) It gets to the point where you ask to see the ticket stubs. No stub.. no go&#33;

And not just Woodstock. Pretty much any event that becomes retrospectively "significant" generates the same response: people "edit" their memories to place them "there" if it can be done with any plausibility at all.

I don&#39;t think they really "mean to lie"...it&#39;s just a way to add significance to their lives that "doesn&#39;t hurt anyone".

I recall reading once that there were at least 600,000 people claiming to have been in Yankee Stadium to watch Don Larsen pitch his perfect game...roughly 10 times the stadium&#39;s capacity.

As far as the "politics" of Woodstock, I don&#39;t think there really was all that much. Yes, most or all of the kids were against the war in Vietnam...but there was nothing very unusual about that.

I was not there, by the way; the political people that I worked with then didn&#39;t really pay much attention to musical events. There was "too much else" going on.

:redstar2000:

The Redstar2000 Papers (http://www.redstar2000papers.vze.com)
A site about communist ideas

[Hegemonicretribution]

I would say there were differences, people in near by town put together food to help feed the hungry kids, there was a very liber attitude...the world was a different place.

Not all festivals are purely profit, Glastonbury is probably as close (but no where near the same) as you can get to Woodstock. There a lot of the profits go towards various causes..eg Greenpeace, Oxfam WaterAid (from 2003) and into the local area, improving local wages. No matter how profit driven people may claim, I have never been abl;e to buyt so many things I felt good about. Hell there is even free food and accomidation if you need it.

[SittingBull47]

yea, i think this was one of the more pure music festivals of the time. It was all about the music, there was some political opinions flying around, and yes, there were tickets that had to be bought. Fortunately, people snuck in and etc., not like there were armed sentries anywhere. Now, though, it&#39;s all about money and image, people claim it&#39;s preserving the spirit of woodstock when really it&#39;s just perverting it.