A time to remember

Thirty-seven years ago, music promoters Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman, through their company Woodstock Ventures, Inc., planned a gigantic music festival to be held in the Town of Wallkill, NY in Ulster County. The town declined the honor, fearing that as many as a million people might attend, and the event was staged instead at Yasgur’s Farm in the Town of Bethel in Sullivan County.

As it turned out, “only” about half a million people turned up at the Woodstock concert (named, incidentally, after the company, not the town.)

Among the many performers in the legendary lineup, which performed round the clock from August 15 through 18, was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Since then, that group has, perhaps more than any other, come to symbolize the iconic event. That may be, in part, because it was they who made a hit with the song “Woodstock” (written by Joni Mitchell), with its refrain encompassing both the wistfulness and the aspiration of a generation:

“We are stardust

We are golden

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden.”

It’s been a long time, but Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are finally making it back to (the erstwhile) Yasgur’s Farm, and on a date, appropriately enough, only two days off from the Woodstock anniversary. Sunday’s performance is part of their first tour in four years, “Freedom of Speech ’06.” The repertoire will include classics from their ensemble work, and music produced in the course of their individual careers. The tour marks the concert debut of songs from Neil Young’s new album “Living With War.”

Between the name of the tour and Young’s new songs, it’s clear that the group’s activist tendencies have not abated with the passage of time. Given the current state of the world, which has not changed as much as one might have wished since 1969, that seems appropriate. The human race does not seem to have made much progress getting back to the garden in the intervening period; it is not Mitchell’s vision of bombers turning into butterflies, but of them “riding shotgun in the sky” that has been realized in the present.

The original Woodstock festival was not an unmixed blessing, as some who lived in the neighborhood at the time will tell you, and some of the ideals of the Woodstock generation, from its naively indiscriminate anti-war stance to the “free-love” revolution, are, at least, questionable. But it did embody an attitude of passionate involvement in world affairs, a longing for connection to nature, and a willingness to question and rethink societal assumptions about what is good, that sometimes seem sorely absent in today’s materialistic, self-involved and technologically distracted culture.

All the more reason, perhaps, to revisit a type of music that rises above the banalities of boy-meets-girl or the chip-on-the-shoulder macho of gangsta rap to present us with a social and moral vision. That’s a big part of what Woodstock was all about, and a special legacy to Sullivan County, if we should choose to take it up. It’s good, on the Woodstock anniversary, to be reminded of that.

Dr. Punnybone

Free Fall