Any board members were at the orignal Woodstock?

[AndrewHill]

Woodstock concert's undercover lovers

Shit! They got old; I thought it was just me...

Saw a special on the History Channel last night called Woodstock: Now and Then that featured a segment on this couple...and yes they got old!

[fasstrack]

Woodstock concert's undercover lovers

Shit! They got old; I thought it was just me...

Saw a special on the History Channel last night called Woodstock: Now and Then that featured a segment on this couple...and yes they got old!

Wavy Gravy looked like a white-tressed toothless fairy in that show.

[GA Russell]

I mentioned the other day that I listened to music from the festival on Sirius all weekend.

I heard only two songs that were better than mediocre - by the Keef Hartley Band and Santana.

[Chuck Nessa]

Woodstock, are we talking about that little bird?

[kenny weir]

From this morning's Melbourne Age ...

I used to work for the same newspaper as Shaun - the one he mentions. I started in 1986 or thereabouts, and at that point women were still not allowed to wear trousers.

I agree with many of his points.

Certainly, I adore the ease with which I can access information and music and so on.

And my ultra cheap, small Korean car is sure as hell a lot safer, quiter and more reliable than its equivalent was 30 years or more ago.

But music? I dunno ...

**************

Get over yourselves, boomers! The '60s weren't that flash

Shaun Carney

August 19, 2009

Forget 1969. We have it so much better right here, right now.

WAS 1969 really so interesting? Certainly, a lot happened that year, as evidenced by the regular 40th anniversary pieces that have run in the media in recent weeks. There was the first moon landing, the great event of exploration. There was Woodstock, supposedly a great expression of a mass social movement merged with the dominant youth culture.

The Beatles made one last monumental album, Abbey Road, an event celebrated recently by the pathetic middle-aged fans who last week gathered at the site where the cover picture was taken 40 years ago. Outrage became a constant. It was the year that Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and the stage show Oh, Calcutta! first appeared.

There was a bit going on, and from time to time it was pretty exciting. Levels of conformity and modes of expression were changing. But it shouldn't be oversold. Often I feel bad for today's young people when they are served up excessive and regular rhapsodies about the 1960s, with their implicit messages that the modern era doesn't quite measure up.

So let's get it out in the open: 2009 is better! The 1960s weren't that great! Yes, the music was amazing, and the exponential manner in which fashions and art and the vernacular language developed during that decade was unique to that time.

But there was another side to it, which is explored in the American TV series Mad Men, the third season of which premiered in the US at the weekend. Superficially, Mad Men is an utter delight. It's the most meticulously art directed show ever, surely. Set in the pre-youthquake early 1960s, it re-creates the sharp visual lines of the clothes and furniture of the time, as well as the clearly defined reporting lines of industrial societies in that era - in the workplace and the home.

And yet, despite all those imposed certainties, everybody in the show is unhappy and frightened. They're scared of a nuclear cataclysm. The men are worried about the women, who want more. The women are worried about the men, who want to stand in their way.

The social and cultural revolutions that led to Woodstock were supposed to obviate those tensions and fears, raising consciousness about peace, love and understanding. For some, they did.

It seems ridiculous to dismiss Woodstock altogether, as some have during the 40th anniversary week, as little more than a poorly serviced festival of sloppy music, but it's also dishonest not to acknowledge the limits of its effects. Four months later, the Rolling Stones organised a festival at Altamont, in California - a sort of West Coast Woodstock - which resulted in a stabbing homicide, a drowning and two deaths from a hit-and-run, with the Hells Angels providing security. That was how the decade of peace and love saw itself out.

Similarly, when considering the success of the Apollo moon program, it was not all about discovery. Its genesis lay as much in America's desire to win a propaganda war with its nuclear rival, the Soviet Union, as in the pure desire to push out past the existing scientific boundaries.

And it has to be noted that all of these events took place a long way from Australia. In 1969, far from sending someone to the moon, you could not even take an international flight from Melbourne. First, you had to take a TAA or Ansett plane to Sydney.

In Australia 40 years ago, debates about censorship were never far away from the front pages. We were still three years away from enshrining the concept of equal pay for women in our award system.

And change came slowly. When I first started working at The Herald, which in 1978 sold more than 400,000 copies a day in Victoria, the stylebook forbade the use of the ''Ms'' honorific in the paper. It was several years before female journalists were allowed by the paper's executives - all of them men - to wear trousers to work.

Of course, the freedoms and the entertainments and gadgets we enjoy today are the sum total of all that's gone before, and some of those are down to what happened in the 1960s.

But nostalgia for those times ignores the downsides. Perhaps it's hard-wired in most of us to tell ourselves that simpler times were better times, but I'll take today's safer cars, cancer cure rates, public transport, workplace safety laws, instantaneous communications, cheaper consumer durables, ease of global travel, and access to news and entertainment from around the world, to the way we did things in 1969 any day, thanks.

And is it just possible - despite the recklessness that's led to successive economic bubbles, leading to a financial crisis in most of the industrialised world - that we've accrued sufficient knowledge and a sense of our interconnectedness to avoid a complete economic crash?

There are some signs that co-ordinated action through the G20 might just have averted a near-bottomless financial plunge. That sort of thing would have been unachievable in 1969 and even as recently as the early 1990s, when national economies operated autonomously and global economic forces were often viewed as immutable. Surely the joining of hands didn't all begin in an alfalfa field in upstate New York 40 years ago.

Shaun Carney is associate editor.

[sidewinder]

I was interested to read that the Keef Hartley Band was in the lineup at Woodstock. At the time, Hartley was recording for Deram Records and some of his recordings feature trumpeter Henry Lowther. I wonder if Lowther made the Woodstock show? These days Keith Hartley runs his own joinery business in Preston, Lancashire I believe.

Im told you played at Woodstock. Which artists do you remember most from that?

I played at the famous Woodstock festival in August,1969, with the Keef Hartley Band. We played on the Saturday afternoon. Whether you played or not depended on whether you could manage to get on a helicopter. We were never included in the Woodstock film because our brilliant (sic) manager wouldn't let them film us without money up front! What a genius! During the two or three hours we were there I saw Santana and the compere, John Sebastien. The Incredible String Band were playing as we were leaving.

From: http://www.artsinleicestershire.co.uk/jazzinleicestershire/

Thanks - that clears that one up !

[medjuck]

The iTunes store this week offers what they claim are the complete set-lists of each day (usually not using the Woodstock performances) and they seem to have skipped Keef Hartley.

Also I always thought Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner was the final thing he played but their listing suggests he played several other numbers after that. Anyone know for sure?

[papsrus]

The iTunes store this week offers what they claim are the complete set-lists of each day (usually not using the Woodstock performances) and they seem to have skipped Keef Hartley.

Also I always thought Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner was the final thing he played but their listing suggests he played several other numbers after that. Anyone know for sure?

In the film it's his opening, then he goes into Purple Haze.

(I think)

[dave9199]

After what you see in the film, he did Hey Joe. That was the last song at Woodstock.