Not Going Back:
I'm not goin' back to Woodstock for a while,
Though I long to hear that lonesome hippie smile.
I'm a million miles away from that helicopter day
No, I don't believe I'll be goin' back that way.
The quote above is from Neil Young's “Roll Another Number”, from Tonight’s the Night, and it pretty much sums up the mood of the entire album. It was 1973 and it was already clear to Neil that the sixties were never coming back. Always ahead of the times, he was already facing down the dark side of the seventies.
And that was over forty-five years ago.
Does anyone listen to Woodstock anymore? Aside from the odd cut played on Classic Rock Radio, probably not. I doubt that anyone pulls out the vinyl to play a side or two. Did anyone buy it on CD? Has anyone played it more than once since 1971?
It’s not an album that one is “in the mood for”. What would that mood be? I feel like hearing a live album - one with lots of crowd sounds - and a lot of different bands because I happen to like them all, so a sustained mood is not what I want. There is no such mood. Not anymore, anyway.
You might put it on if you’re feeling nostalgic. Now there’s a feeling I’m not comfortable with. Neither was Neil, at least until he made Harvest Moon.
Woodstock came out in the Spring of 1970. I remember seeing it in the window of the local record store, right next to Let it Be. If the latter was telling us the sixties were officially over, we’d use the former to squeeze out whatever we still could from the decade.
As was usual, I didn’t own Woodstock, and so had to rely on friends to play it. And we’d never play it all the way through. We barely played one side all the way through. But we all loved it and listened to it incessantly that summer. But not after that.
For those reasons, it looked like it would turn into yet another of those records - my memory of which was incomplete to begin with - that would fade over the years. And, really, who wants to buy a triple album you’ve already heard before? But amazon $5 mp3s saved the day. So I downloaded it and for the first time listened to it all the way through.
After all these years it’s more or less what I expected it to be. A long-ago favorite replayed to ever so slight disappointment now. That's okay. It still brought a tear to my eye at certain points.
But even the most nostalgic among us don’t want to spend too much time dwelling on the event, which we remember with a mixture of embarrassment and wonder. We’re too jaded to embrace it wholeheartedly. Plus it was a goddamn mess and who - except those who were actually there - can imagine themselves in that environment? (My hat’s off to you if you can.)
But it was an ideal momentarily realized. For all their faults, those hippies were a lot less destructive than the supposedly better-behaved yuppies.
I’m not sure how the baby boomers who experienced it - even second hand - square it with their current politics. By revising history, I guess. It must be slightly embarrassing to those who want to remember the fun part then and say, deny climate change now. We were so much younger then, we’re older than that now.
Maybe it’s best for all concerned to limit our attention to the actual music. So let’s take a look at this big sloppy mess of an album, documenting something that couldn’t possibly have happened.
Choosing Sides:
Side One doesn’t really quite kick off until Richie Havens provides a Defining Woodstock Moment with "Freedom", which pretty much overshadows everything else here. But song for song, it’s pretty good. Just all over the place. Which, I guess, is kind of the point.
I think the theme is the Pursuit of Freedom via Drugs. What a bad idea, right? We’ve since wised up and now escape reality via prescription meds.
Side Two starts off with another DWM: "The FISH Song", of course. In 1970, I was shocked that a record would actually have that word on it.
We listened to it a lot on a friend’s stoop over the summer. One night, we had it on when someone noticed my dad approaching. He was on his way home from the corner bar and stopped to say hello - something he never did. We frantically tried to turn it off before he got to us and Country Joe got to f*ck. But in the confusion, we only succeeded in turning up the volume. He got there just as Country Joe was asking WHAT'S THAT SPELL?!?! and the crowd answered F*CK!!!. It was probably the last thing he expected to hear, and so, he didn’t.
I’m trying to imagine/remember what we were thinking at the time. We were all pretty conservative, and if pressed on our opinion of the war we would have been strongly in favor of it. And yet we could still enjoy the song without getting offended, either because of the sheer gusto of the performance or the novelty of the cuss word. Then we’d go on our conservative way. I listen to this now and get chills.
And in walks Joan Baez, who is usually a major buzzkill. But I have to hand it to her. She brought the first tear to my eye with “Joe Hill” but that may just have been because it made me think of Phil Ochs.
Neil Young contributes the weird (for CSNY, and for Neil) “Sea of Madness”. It's generally regarded as a terrible song but I've always loved it. It's probably as funky and poppy as Neil ever got, and it gives CSN a little kick in the ass. (Y was haunting CSN even then, their second gig.) It's really the only CSN song that is "new" and not a waste of space.
The theme? The War. Oh and pushing that new supergroup. Things are so different now.
Side Three starts off with “Wooden Ships” which while offering nothing new musically that the studio version didn’t already, reinforces a theme of post-apocalyptic brotherhood. And Joe Cocker re-inforces the theme.
Theme: Fellowship? What the hell is that, anyway?
Side Four consists of Santana and Ten Years After who keep the energy level high. I did have to put up with hearing how great a guitar player Alvin Lee was. Aside from Hendrix, the best one at Woodstock, people said. I wasn’t even sure he was the best guitar player on this side.
The Theme: Guitars, of course. Which are great, but politics-free, and thus the most likely to be played now.
Although Side Five kicks off with Jefferson Airplane, everyone knows it really belongs to Sly. And listening to it now, I could almost succumb to that dreaded nostalgia, it’s that powerful, Sly was able to rock a bunch of conservative white teenagers on that Brooklyn stoop. It’s truly the high point of the record. This is the side that almost gets played all the way through. What the hell is John Sebastien doing after it?
Theme: Transcendence. How silly!
Half of Side Six is given over to a badly dated and mostly forgotten “Love March” by Paul Butterfield. And even though Hendrix saves it, we were really just listening to the “Star-Spangled Banner”. A shame, since he’s on fire throughout. But Hendrix is facing up to the war, which, despite every attendee’s wish, continued after the show.
Is the theme Resignation? Or acceptance of Reality, such as it was?
For the Record:
Playing a three-record set all the way through is kind of exhausting to begin with, especially since I’ve heard it all before. If I owned it then, I could see myself doing it then, while everyone else got bored and started playing stickball, leaving me alone on that stoop. I’d be bored too, but that’s how I roll.
Once you wipe away the nostalgic haze of the sixties and the aura of the event, this holds okay as an album, albeit one with many different artists and thus one without a consistent musical identity. There’s some music that doesn’t age well, and the crowd noise and announcements, while not helping to make a tight record, certainly help make an expansive document of an event.
And Woodstock was always about more than music. Which is why we don’t listen to it now.
B+
