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Saturday, August 8. 2009
By the Time We Got to Facebook
Next week, Saturday, August 15 marks the 40th Anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. All the news, idealism and mythology will be on display in print and on TV for the next eight-to-nine days. MSNBC has started with a piece from New York Times writer John Harwood; a mother comparing the physical “community” of Woodstock (whether you were there are not, if you were like-minded, you were part of the community) to her son’s “community” on Facebook.
Interestingly, MySpace is no longer the social network of choice.
Although the “Woodstock Nation” and Facebook are two completely different experiences, some would like to compare the two and find similarities. The only similarity, and maybe one that would count, is that friends can meet and communicate through the social networking site.On the other hand, Woodstock brought people together through a collective, shared interest in not just the music of the event, but a lifestyle and emotional connection to the spirit of the counter-culture of the hippie nation. Facebook bears no resemblance to that.
Woodstock remains the single biggest and most influential anti-establishment event in U.S. history. Maybe world history. A half million people showed up, about 450,000 more than the organizers had intended, lured by the music of the era’s best known and some unknown artists as well as the communal spirit that they would share an event.
How it became a shared event, whether you were there or not, is simple: most of us heard about Woodstock by word of mouth. This was an era without instant communication. The only way to get news about such an event was through the alternative news or hippie music radio stations in the FM spectrum. It was like being let in on a great secret, one the establishment wasn’t privy to, except those establishment people handing out the various permits for Max Yasgur’s farm.
I remember friends talking about it and then reading a blurb in one of the local, counter-culture newspapers of the time, possibly the Kaleidoscope. There were going to be all these bands, many of them fresh to our ears, but others wildly popular, like Janis Joplin, the Who, the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix.Many of us wanted to go, but being only 13 at the time, my parents were not supportive of me going to a “hippie” event in New York, to put it kindly.
When news programs had segments about the festival, those of us who had heard of it before hand cheered, if not openly, in our thoughts. The young, the hip, the hippies, had pulled off this event and it was bigger than anyone had imagined. Woodstock was the victory the counter-culture had worked for since 1965 when the anti-war demonstrations first began.
In our junior high school, identifying with the Woodstock Nation wasn’t broad, there were only about 10 of us in a school of a thousand, but we wore our hair longer, dressed in our best hippie attire and met on the grass at lunch, mimicking to the best of our ability, what we thought was the hippie lifestyle and attitude. We were dreamers.It’s no surprise it was that summer of 1969 when I smoked marijuana for the first time. That following school year, when we sat on the grass at lunch in our little hippie conclave, my grades jumped. Civic became my favorite class and the young teacher, Mrs., Fehrer (she was such a hottie) encouraged my interest not just in Civics, but also on a much broader scale, political and social science. I picked up Mao’s Little Red Book and Marx’s Das Kapital.
It was about that time I shoplifted for the one and only time in life. While friends were rooting around a convenience store, looking at all the goodies, keeping the cashier’s eyes busy, I was looking at books in the spinning rack. Right there, staring me in the face was Abbie Hoffman on a book titled, Steal This Book. So I did.Before that school year was over I could buy pot and LSD without problem, I knew the dealer. Can’t remember his name now, but it was a secretive, done in the shadows affair.
And then the film and triple LP album of Woodstock was released. The movie had an “R” rating, because of the nudity, but I went with some older guys to a midnight showing and saw it in the theater. We would go to someone’s house and play the entire album, all three LP’s, imagining we had been there.
Even though Woodstock is widely regarded as the last charge of the hippie generation, the feeling — the air — of the festival lingered long after. But it wasn’t all peace and love that weekend. While Woodstock was taking place, the Manson Family was committing mass murder in California. It was a shock because the killers looked like “us.” How could they become so gruesome?Like every other facet of society, the counter-culture had a dark side and Charlie Manson was the face of it. For the most part, we ignored it because were into the music and the music was evolving. We were listening to Pink Floyd’s Meddle and Jethro Tull. In spite of the world swirling around us, we did our best to keep the Woodstock Nation alive, if only until 1972 when we were going to rock concerts on a regular basis and there were TV shows like In Concert and The Midnight Special
It’s interesting to note the seminal film looking back on the 60’s and what it meant, The Big Chill, didn’t mention Woodstock at all, despite being released only 13 years after the fair. The biggest event of the 60’s hippie culture left out of the biggest movie about that same culture. That wasn’t an error. For many, in the 20 the years following Woodstock, it was a melancholy memory of failure; the ideals dead, the music a footnote in history. Nobody was listening to it anymore.Except for the Deadheads. And the Dead played Woodstock, their worst set ever according to them, but if you ever went to a Grateful Dead outdoor concert during the 1980’s, as I did many times at Alpine Valley Music Theater in New Berlin, WI, the Woodstock Nation was alive and well.
Forty years after, Woodstock is the defining moment for the hippie culture. Some of that hippie culture is now mainstream, part of the establishment. We just take it for granted. You like FM radio? Thank the hippies who made it popular.Maybe there is a deeper connection between Woodstock and Facebook. I don’t see it, but Facebook is connecting us as no other system has. And it’s part of the establishment. Wonder what people will say about Facebook in 40 years.
Now, after listening to the music again, viewing the photos, it’s so apparent how lucky I am to have lived long enough to have experienced Woodstock (albeit from afar) and everything that went with that entire era. And 40 years later we have the Internet. Something to ponder when I wish I were 25 years younger.
Facebook is nothing like Woodstock.
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