In the Woodstock film by Michael Wadleigh, the legend is both enhanced and altered somewhat by the very real conditions of the festival: God hates East Coast festivals, and that joke would continue to endure for the next 40 years and beyond. “How come the fascist pigs have been seeding the clouds?” states one festival attendee during a particularly heavy Vietnam-like downpour (probably a New Yorker, and begs the question: “if in doubt, why would you not hold a hippie festival in California?!”). Other festival attendees make what they can of the festival, but from personal experience, altered substances can be a much finer form of drugs than our own version: TIME. Time doesn’t exist when you’re young and/or high; it just makes things seem a bit more pleasant and fun, and in 1969, America and the world needed loads of both traits.
So…the legacy—what is this drug called time, and how does the Legacy of Tomorrow’s Children endure despite a billion little kaleidoscopic cultural explosions since 1969? How did Woodstock appear to supersede man’s trip to the moon just one month prior? The August 1969 three-day festival doesn’t so much endure because Jimi Hendrix played “Star Spangled Banner” to a tiny Woodstock crowd early on an August Monday morning after hundreds of thousands of festival-goers had left to return to the chaotic oblivion that was America in 1969. It also doesn’t endure because Hendrix topped that performance earlier on with the underestimated improvisational swing through “Jam Back at the House,” which was one of the darkest, funkiest pieces of music that he ever played—certainly in a live vein. If the joy of Woodstock was hammered home with the high musical moments featured in performances by the Who, Sly, CSN, Arlo, and Havens thrilling the druggy masses on Friday through Sunday, then the moment of true transcendence occurred when Hendrix and his mixture of old bandmates, friends, and ex-Nam warriors tore through a set that marked Woodstock as a once in a millennium event. Gods who built the pyramids walked the earth during “Jam Back at the House,” or so it seems as Hendrix towered above the crowds of astonished and exhausted masses. The piece is sloppy, redundant, and rhythmically less than complex, but there is a taut line that Hendrix walked between heavenly and human that places this song above the rest.
Jimi is still considered the best guitarist in rock history, but I’m not sure if he gets enough credit with dismantling our human notions of recording history via…ahem…outdated “time” constraints. Hendrix found a way at Woodstock, two thousand years since the origins of another great cultural legend, to deliver his own Sermon on the Mount. And it is ironic that his almost alien sound sculptures speak while using a universal translation system: music. I cannot define why I smile when I think of the original Woodstock festival. I just do, man, and that is something that perhaps stands outside of any history books—individual interpretation of events doesn’t always have to be written by the victors, or the intelligentsia. The legacy of the Woodstock Generation endures because those sometimes hilariously inept hippies tried to do something good for each other, despite its origins as a way for a pair of young monied individuals to invest in youth culture, and whether they succeeded or not, that cosmic idea will always be open to fresh interpretation by tomorrow’s children of vastly different cultural origins.
– Randy Ray stores much of his work at www.rmrcompany.blogspot.com. Drop him a line and ask him to politely update it.
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