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MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2009
Woodstock 1969 remembered with 40th anniversary approaching
ASSOCIATED PRESS
BETHEL, N.Y. — Forty years after Richie Havens sang and strummed for a sea of people at Woodstock, he still gets asked about it and he still gets requests to sing "Freedom."
He's not surprised.
"Everything in my life, and so many others, is attached to that train," Havens said.
The young hippies who watched the sun come up with The Who in 1969 are now eligible for early bird specials. Many of the bands are broken up or missing members who died. But Woodstock remains one of those events — like the moon landing earlier that summer — that continues to define the 1960s in the popular imagination.
Consider the crop of Woodstock nostalgia marking the 40th anniversary. There's a new director's cut DVD of the concert movie, a remastered concert CD, director Ang Lee's rock 'n' roll comedy "Taking Woodstock" and a memoir by promoter Michael Lang. There are also performances scheduled by Woodstock veterans at the old site, now home to a '60s museum and an outdoor concert pavilion.
The town of Woodstock didn't want the concert and promoters were bounced from another site at the 11th hour. Lang settled on a hay field in Bethel owned by a kindly dairy farmer named Max Yasur. The concert did come off
Aug. 15-18, 1969, but barely, Fences were torn down, tickets became useless. More than 400,000 people converged on this rural corner 80 miles northwest of New York City. Then the rains doused everything.
It should have been a disaster. But Americans tuning in to the evening news that weekend saw smiling, dancing, muddy kids. By the time the concert movie came out months
later, Woodstock was a symbol of the happy, hippie side of the '60s spirit.
Bethel's onsite museum has logged more than 70,000 visitors since last summer, a fair number of them college students born well after Woodstock.
"I remember telling myself, 'Don't forget this! Don't forget the way you feel right now!"
"It's almost a pilgrimage," Wade Lawrence, director of the Museum at Bethel Woods, said. "It's like going to a high school reunion, or it's like visiting a grave site of a loved one."
ILENE MARDER
Woodstock 1969 atendee
From Lollapalooza to All Points West, there have been plenty of big festivals focused on youth culture. The continent-hopping Live Aid shows of 1985 did that and more, enlisting top names such as U2 and Madonna to fight hunger in Africa. None have the cultural cachet of Woodstock. Who would ever ask a Generation X-er: "Were you really at Live Aid?"
of Woodstock has become legend:
lots of nudity, casual sex, dirty (and
muddy) dancing, open drug use.
People who went to Woodstock say the crowd set it apart as much as the music. The trippy anarchy
Many who were there recall Woodstock as an oasis of good vibes during a time of unrest over the Vietnam War. Ilene Marder, then an 18-year-old who hitched from the Bronx, saw people feeding one another and respecting one another. She knew she found her tribe.
"The music was nice, but it was being with so many people who looked like us, who looked like me." Marder, who later moved to Woodstock some 50 miles away, said. "I remember telling myself 'Don't forget' is! Don't forget"
the way you feel right now!"
Former Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten remembers hearing buzz that something special was up at the nearby hotel where the band was staying. The scale of the event sunk in when the band choppered in over the mass of people. While artists like Joe Cocker and Santana boosted their careers at Woodstock, the Dead were notoriously flat.
As they say now, Woodstock went viral.
Constanten contends the music and spirit of Woodstock was not a revelation to the people there. But it was to the millions who saw the movie and listened to the album.
"This juggernaut of a music scene burst in their awareness," he said. "It didn't feel different to us. It was their response."
Promoters staged a 25th-anniversary concert near Woodstock in 1994 that was a musical success. But a 30th-anniversary performance at a former Air Force Base in Rome, N.Y., ended in disaster after crowds lit bonfires and looted on the last night.
Yasgar's old farm, meanwhile, has gone establishment in recent years. Local cable TV billionaire Alan Gerry quietly snapped up the land in the 1990s and started a not-for-profit foundation to run a museum and concert space. The gently sloping hill that provided a natural amphitheater in 1969 is nicely tended and fenced in.
Concerts are regularly scheduled over the hill from the original stage at a modern, 4,800-seat amphitheater.
Constanten and Havens are among the 1969 performers returning to the site on the 40th anniversary weekend. Havens will play a solo show that Friday, a day before 'a larger show featuring other Woodstock veterans such as Levon Helm, formerly of The Band, Ten Years After and Canned Heat. Though long separated from the Dead, Constanten said he'll play the band's songs that weekend.
"Then is then" Constanten said,
"and now is now"
In this photo, taken August 1969, concert-goers sit on the roof of a Volkswagen bus at the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair at Bethel, N.Y.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ANNIVERSARY
Hundreds gather to cross Abbey Road
Beatles fans join together to walk across the road featured on their last album cover
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LONDON — Hundreds of Beatles fans swarmed Abbey Road on Saturday, singing songs and snarling traffic to mark 40 years since John, Paul, George and Ringo strode across the leafy north London street and into the
iconic pop photos.
The famous photo graced the cover of the Fab Four's "Abbey Road," the last album recorded together, and
ists to the site every day, turning the street into "a shrine to the Beatles," said Richard Porter, who owns the nearby Beatles Coffee Shop and organized Saturday's event.
Crowds spilled into the street, cameramen jostled for angles, and exasperated drivers honked their
TSCHALE HAAS German visitor at Abbey Road
"I didn't expect so many people to be here."
horns.
shows the bandmates walking purposefully across the zebra-striped asphalt.
It remains one of music's best-known album covers, endlessly imitated and parodied. Although the shoot itself only took a few minutes, so carefully studied was the cover for signs and symbolism that some die-hard fans came to the conclusion that Paul McCartney — who appears barefoot and out of step with the rest
McCartney himself made fun of the bizarre conspiracy in the title of his 1993 concert album, "Paul is Live."
- had secretly died.
Conspiracies aside, the ease with which fans can imitate the scene has drawn throngs of tour-
"I didn't expect so many people to be here," German visitor Tschale Haas, 50, who was dressed in a Sgt. Pepper jacket, said.
Abbey Road, which cuts through London's well-to-do
neighborhood of St. John's Wood, is home to the eponymous studios where the group recorded much of its work.
The group decided to shoot the photograph in August 1969 while recording music for the last time together. For the shot, photographer Iain Macmillan stood on a stepladder and police held up traffic while the Beatles walked back and forth across the street.
In "Five Minutes of Heaven" Neeson plays a former member of an outlawed Northern Ireland paramilitary group who's haunted by memories of murder. The movie opens in select U.S. theaters Aug. 21.
The enduring popularity of the site has caused headaches for local authorities, who have had to move the Abbey Road street sign up out of reach to prevent theft and repaint the wall every three months to hide fans' graffiti.
MUSIC Neil Young to be honored as person of the year
Neil Portnow, president of the MusiCarest Foundation and The Recording Academy, named the 63-year-old Young on Tuesday as the honoree for his "standard of artistic integrity and iconoclastic creativity for more than
LOS ANGELES — Neil Young has been named the 2010 Musi-Cares person of the year.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
four decades."
Young will be saluted at a dinner and concert in Los Angeles on Jan. 29, two days before the 52nd annual Grammys. The event marks the music industry charity's 20th person of the year tribute.
Past recipients include Aretha Franklin and Neil Diamond.
Young's hits include 1972's "Heart of Gold" and 1989's "Rockin'in the Free World."
Associated Press
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A tribute band dressed as members of the Beatles walks across the famous pedestrian crossing on Abbey Road, London, in a recreation of the Beatles' Abbey Road album cover as hundreds of people gathered to mark the 40th anniversary of the album Aug. 8.
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8/14
Conceptis Sudoku
Difficulty Level ★★★★
FILM
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CRYPTOQUIP
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UIJUDB HR UINPHRHRW OQRW,
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FILM Laim Neson continues career after wife's death
Today's Cryptoquip Clue: K equals F
NEW YORK — Actor Liam Neeson has walked the red carpet for the first time since the death of his wife, actress Natasha Richardson.
Publicists at the New York City screening of Neeson's new film, "Five Minutes of Heaven," told members of the press Tuesday
Associated Press
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