First of all, I must say at the outset that I didn’t attend Woodstock in the summer of ’69. It wasn’t as if I didn’t try --- I knew about the event and when I finished my summer’s tour of duty in the Grand Central Post Office on that eventful Friday, I met a bunch of friends and we drove off to spend the weekend at a summer concert weekend in the Catskills.

We didn’t get very far. The car was stopped in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the NY State Thruway and, after 90 mind-numbing minutes, we turned around and drove home.

So much for attending the seminal event of my early adulthood.

I didn’t really feel so bad when I saw news coverage of attendees sitting on a garbage-strewn hill and smoking more weed that I would have thought possible. I though to myself that I was just a little too bourgeois to have tolerated the 3 days of squalor that was being played out on the TV.
Plus, it was some consolation that Joni Mitchell missed the event as well, on the advice of David Geffen, who wanted her to be fresh for the Dick Cavett Show scheduled for the Monday night after the big summer weekend of love.

And yet … there were friends who actually stuck it out and made it to Bethel, NY and came back with stories to tell their grandchildren.

While Joni Mitchell missed the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, her buddies Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young made it and joined her on the Dick Cavett Show and David Crosby publicly proclaimed to Joni: "Man, you shoulda seen it, the biggest bunch of gypsies."

Joni went on to sing her mournful tunes on the Cavett Show. Much more relevantly, Joni later wrote and released “Woodstock” which included lyrics about us being “stardust” & “golden” “getting back to the garden” and “bombers in the sky turning into butterflies above our nation.”



In the intervening 40 years that have passed, haven’t we all been trying to get ourselves back to the garden? There was “song and celebration” then and we were just beginning to understand the power of our baby boomer muscles. Who knew that we would go on to exert so much influence on popular culture? And, that so much of the influence would derive from music?

Think about it … in the 1-2 years preceding Woodstock, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated and there was rioting in the streets of Chicago for the Democrats’ Presidential Convention.


Lou Yank, the Monticello police chief told The New York Times: “Not withstanding their personality, their dress and their ideas, they were and they are the most courteous, considerate and well-behaved group of kids I have ever been in contact with in my 24 years of police work.”



Woodstock was our coming-of-age. We proved that we could come together and start to make a difference and we would do it “our way.” The weekend made legends out of Richie Havens, The Who, Country Joe & The Fish, The Grateful Dead, Jimmy Hendrix, Joe Cocker, the Jefferson Airplane, Ten Years After, The Band, Canned Heat, Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Sly & the Family Stone and Janis Joplin.

Nothing would ever be the same again.

The music industry listened and slaked our thirst. The New York Times reports that a week before Woodstock, the Jefferson Airplane and Joe Cocker shared a double bill at the Fillmore East and barely filled the auditorium’s 2,700 seats.

After Woodstock, hundreds of thousands would show up at the Isle of Wight (1970) and Watkins Glen (1973) and the recurring Newport Jazz Festival. Later, our children would populate Lollapalooza and Lilith Fair events.

Not to mention the crowds attracted by Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, U2 and Michael Jackson. Woodstock started the ball rolling and our world has never been the same since.



In current terms, the event to rival Woodstock has to be President Obama’s inauguration. It was an equally spontaneous, urgent and not-to-missed occurrence in the minds of the millions who attended. And, it was also a once-in-a-lifetime gathering about which you could tell your grandchildren.

Like Woodstock, no one was arrested, there was no violence, people were grinning ear to ear and their souls were nourished.

Yes, Woodstock takes us back to a more innocent time. But the spirit of Woodstock lives within our baby boomer memory banks for a lifetime even if we didn’t manage to attend.

After all these years, we are still “stardust” and “golden” and “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”