RIP to the original #Woodstock 1969 organizer/promoter #MichaelLang who, at the age of 24, and against impossible odds, pulled off the first and most historic outdoor #music #festival ever. In a sea of a half-million muddy, hungry, wet young people, somehow no one was seriously injured or died during the three-day fest. That's otherwise unheard of in most big cities that size and smaller. I had just turned 2 years old the week before the festival. Growing up in western Mass. my hometown was only about an hour's drive to the location of the festival. Growing up, I heard many stories from the hippies all around me - especially a number of our teachers in grade school. Say what you want about the hippies, they had a huge positive impact on my life. The 'true hippies' original agenda was the pursuit of a simple, peaceful, compassionate, happy, self-sustaining, healthy and humble lifestyle filled with music, arts, meditation, books, social gatherings, organic farming, and yeah, some pot-smoking and occasional LSD 'sessions.' For the most part, 'hippies' did not drink alcohol - it was frowned upon in many settings and groups of socially-conscious, educated young people at the time. In fact, abstinence from alcohol was a central value of the hippie lifestyle, and still is today. One of my teachers, Ms. Myers, was one of the original, true-to-spirit hippie girls - not simply a tag-along who wanted to be popular and party. Ms. Myers was probably no older than 23 or 24 (at the time I'm thinking of - circa 1973-74), very pretty with shoulder-length, straight blond hair that glistened in the sunlight. But most memorable were her big blue eyes and gorgeous white teeth. She not only left an impression with her attractiveness, but more so with her personality - happy, smiling, loving, calm and collected, and obviously committed to her kids, as if we were her own children. That generation; basically the baby boomers, who turned on and understood what they wanted from life, people, their country and the world - and who truly wanted to help make the world a better place, left us with so many good things that it would take considerable time and ink to fetter it all out. Just a few are music and arts, organic food, spiritualism, yoga, meditation, activism, civics, inclusion, legalization, and of course - festivals. Ms. Myers was a shining example of the best of her generation - one that sought out and celebrated the best of and from and for humanity, and thus their own lives and those of all children. She told us about her Woodstock story. In fact, she had gone with a couple of friends, including one of the janitors at school. I remember she said a long section of the interstate thru-way had been closed by the New York state police because of the amount of traffic trying to get to the Woodstock fest. I remember her talking in front of the class about all of the people who were parking their cars on the side of the highway and walking once the word got out that the interstate was closed and traffic wasn't going anywhere. The janitor, I never forgot, gave her a piggy-back the rest of the way when she was unable to continue walking. I was jealous I guess because he got to be her hero that day - at Woodstock. The original Woodstock. The one cultural event almost everyone - despite their age - has heard of. Despite popular urban tales, however, the festival was held in #Bethel, NY, not Woodstock, NY. Lang had originally booked the festival for the Woodstock location, and promoted it as such, but when the location was changed at the last minute, Lang, and his crew, somehow pulled it off again. Even though the festival was a financial failure - due to the crashing of the gates from the hundreds of thousands who flocked to the site from all across the northeast - it is still considered the best outdoor festival ever held - in the world. That record seems to still hold today despite the fact that there have been hundreds of outdoor music festivals since the original Woodstock. If you've never seen the festival movie Woodstock, definitely see it. Look out especially for performances from Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Crosby, Stills Nash and Young, The Who, Richie Havens, Sly, and Ravi Shankar. My personal favorite moment of the festival footage is Santana's performance of "Soul Sacrafice" that went on for some eight minutes of blazing, impossibly-fast, brilliant and other-worldly performances by the individual band members, including the 19-year-old drummer Michael Shrieve. Carlos Santana, who was completely tearing it up, said years later in an interview that he was tripping on mescaline and that's why he is making so many faces because he was trying to hold on to the guitar which he said was (but it wasn't) melting, moving, and falling on his hands. For real? It's hard to believe watching (or even just listening) to the performance. That captivating, electrically-charged and unified performance made Santana. At the time, Santana was a relatively unknown band from San Francisco. Woodstock minted many historic music acts. Thank you to the original hippie promoter Michael Lang and may he rest in peace. And may his vision of the perfect music festival be present wherever it seeds and grows. RIP.
