The Road To Woodstock Quotes

This is the way to hear music, I think, surrounded by rolling hills and farmlands, under a big sky.

Greil Marcus: Rain simply meant it was a good time to meet new people.

At Woodstock, we would focus our energy on peace, setting aside the onstage discussion of political issues to just groove on what might be possible. It was a chance to see if we could create the kind of world for which we’d been striving throughout the sixties: That would be our political statement—proving that peace and understanding were possible and creating a testament to the value of the counterculture. It would be three days of peace and music.

Jimi, a red scarf around his head and wearing a white fringed and beaded leather shirt, looked almost like a mystical holy man in meditation. His eyes closed, his head back, he'd merged with his music, his Strat--played upside down since he's a lefty--his magic wand. Though he was surrounded by his band, he projected the feeling he was all alone. ... Tom Law of the Hog Farm (on Jimi's rendition of the national anthem): I felt like he was the defining poet of the festival with that piece of music. It was like taking you right into the heart of the beast and nailing it.

My monk had to be a man of wide worldly experience and an inexhaustible fund of resigned tolerance for the human condition. His crusading and seafaring past, with all its enthusiasms and disillusionments, was referred to from the beginning. Only later did readers begin to wonder and ask about his former roving life, and how and why he became a monk. For reasons of continuity I did not wish to go back in time and write a book about his crusading days. Whatever else may be true of it, the entire sequence of novels proceeds steadily season by season, year by year, in a progressive tension which I did not want to break. But when I had the opportunity to cast a glance behind by way of a short story, to shed light on his vocation, I was glad to use it. So here he is, not a convert, for this is not a conversion. In an age of relatively uncomplicated faith, not yet obsessed and tormented by cantankerous schisms, sects and politicians, Cadfael has always been an unquestioning believer. What happens to him on the road to Woodstock is simply the acceptance of a revelation from within that the life he has lived to date, active, mobile and often violent, has reached its natural end, and he is confronted by a new need and a different challenge.

On Max Yasgur’s six hundred acres, everyone dropped their defenses and became a huge extended family. Joining together, getting into the music and each other, being part of so many people when calamity struck — the traffic jams, the rainstorms — was a life-changing experience. None of the problems damaged our spirit. In fact, they drew us closer. We recognized one another for what we were at the core, as brothers and sisters, and we embraced one another in that knowledge.

Fifteen years ago, the cultural critic Greil Marcus wrote of Jimi's performance of our national anthem as "his great NO to the war, to racism, to whatever you or he might think of and want gone. But then that discord shattered, and for more than four and a half long, complex minutes Hendrix pursued each invisible crack in a vessel that had once been whole, feeling out and exploring and testing himself and his music against anguish, rage, fear, hate, love offered, and love refused. When he finished, he had created an anthem that could never be summed up and that would never come to rest. In the end it was a great YES, both a threat and a beckoning, an invitation to America to match its danger, glamour, and freedom." ... In late 1969, Jimi Hendrix wrote a poem celebrating Woodstock, saying with words what his music had in August: "500,000 halos outshined the mud and history. We washed and drank in God's tears of joy. And for once, and for everyone, the truth was not still a mystery.

The Boston Globe: The Woodstock Music and Art Festival will surely go down in history as a mass event of great and positive significance in the life of the country ... That this many young people could assemble so peaceably and with such good humor in a mile-square area ... speaks volumes about their dedication to the ideal of respect for the dignity of the individual ... In a nation beset with a crescendo of violence, this is a vibrantly hopeful sign. If violence is infectious, so, happily, is nonviolence.

Down the Woodstock Road towards them an elderly, abnormally thin man was pedalling, his thin white hair streaming in the wind and sheer desperation in his eyes. Immediately behind him, running for their lives, came Scylla and Charybdis; behind them, a milling, shouting rout of undergraduates, with Mr Adrian Barnaby (on a bicycle) well in the van; behind them, the junior proctor, the University Marshal, and two bullers, packed into a small Austin car and looking very elect, severe and ineffectual; and last of all, faint but pursuing, lumbered the ungainly form of Mr Hoskins.

Harrison’s visit to Dylan’s Woodstock sessions and his invitation to Eric Clapton to solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” convinced him that an outsider could revive stalled sessions. Dylan and the Band treated Harrison as an equal, while in his own band, Lennon and McCartney persistently patronized his material, even as it began to peak. (Lennon, in fact, sat out most of Harrison’s Beatle recordings from here on out.) Taking in an ally could only ease Harrison’s reentry into the contentious Beatle orbit. Along with lobbying for Ringo Starr to replace Pete Best, bringing Preston into the Get Back project stands as a defining move for Harrison: he single-handedly rescued Let It Be, and pushed his material throughout 1969, until Abbey Road featured his best work yet.

As I watch from the stage, I see more and more people wandering away. Jimi notices too, and says, “You can leave if you want to. We’re just jamming, that’s all. You can leave, or you can clap.” He looks up at the streaks of sun pouring through the clouds — some of the first rays we’ve seen in a while. “The sky church is still here, as you can see,” he murmurs.

Melanie: [Chip Monck] said that if you lit candles, it would help to keep the rain away. By the time I finished my set, the whole hillside was a mass of little flickering lights. It was an amazing experience to be there, to be in that time and live through that group of people who were acknowledging each other, as if we were all in one family. Woodstock was an affirmation that we were part of each other. The lighting of candles would set a precedent that carries on to this day. The candles became lighters, which have since become cell phones.

The word “counterculture” was used a lot in the late 1960s, but Day was living according to a true counterculture, a culture that stood athwart not only the values of the mainstream culture of the day—the commercialism, the worship of success—but also against the values of the Woodstock counterculture the media was prone to celebrate—the antinomianism, the intense focus on the liberated individual and “doing your own thing.” The Woodstock counterculture seemed, superficially, to rebel against mainstream values, but as the ensuing decades have demonstrated, it was just a flipside version of the culture of the Big Me. Both capitalism and Woodstock were about the liberation of self, the expression of self. In commercial society you expressed self by shopping and building a “lifestyle.” In Woodstock culture you expressed self by casting off restraint and celebrating yourself. The bourgeois culture of commerce could merge with the bohemian culture of the 1960s precisely because both favored individual liberation, both encouraged people to measure their lives by how they were able to achieve self-gratification.

Take charge and keep moving; step back just enough to think clearly; and trust your instincts.

If you’re talking, you’re not learning.

Over the years, the Ompah Stomp developed a reputation of being a wild party. Maybe it was the setting, in a remote rural area, that led people to believe that it was a bit like a country music Woodstock, brimming with sex and drugs.

It seemed you gave up control of your mind to your spirit.