Friday nights at our house are music nights. We settle in, dim the lights, and watch one of the DVDs in Bob's extensive collection. For the past month or so, our Friday evenings have been spent in the Sixties. We started off with D.A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop, about the festival that kicked off the Summer of Love in 1967. We've watched this before, of course, but this time it felt strange and sad as we watched Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, the Mamas and the Papas, and the Jefferson Airplane. They all seemed so young and sweetly innocent; so many of them would be gone in just a few years.
We moved on to Woodstock next: first, The Director's Cut, the 1994 release of Michael Wadleigh's film, then this year's 40th anniversary edition that includes The Director's Cut as well as two discs of extras. We're still entrenched in that rain- and music-drenched three days that have so resoundingly impacted the music and culture. The footage showing the crowds as seen from the stage is breathtaking, astounding, scary—a sea of young faces that seems to flow beyond the horizon. The musicians themselves frequently remark on the unprecedented size of the crowd, noting even as the days were passing the historic nature of the event, the somewhat frightening position they were in as they stood before this untrammeled mass of humanity.
The times were a-changing, to be sure—the context for this event was much different from the Monterey Pop Festival. Vietnam, and those news clips putting war for the first time in Americans' living rooms every night, were beginning to absorb the country and especially the young people who would likely be shipped off to that distant, war-torn land that few had even heard of 10 years before. Many of the songs performed throughout the Festival were—explicitly or implicitly—anti-war protest songs: Country Joe McDonald's "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag", Richie Havens' "Handsome Johnny," Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers." Six-months-pregnant Joan Baez spoke about the recent arrest of her husband David Harris, who was still in jail at the time for refusing military induction. Most moving of all the performances is Jimi Hendrix' iconic and immortal “Star Spangled Banner”, which Jimi turns into a heart-wrenching plea to remember who we are, where we came from, and what we are capable of in our best moments.
Soon Bob and I will be moving on, no doubt, to Gimme Shelter, the Maysles' brothers' rockumentary about the Rolling Stones 1969 tour and Altamont Festival, which took place just a few months after Woodstock but seemingly in another world. Originally billed as Woodstock West, Altamont degenerated into violence amid repeated, futile pleas from Mick Jagger, "Brothers and sisters, why are we fighting?" Indeed. The fabled Sixties was unraveling.
Up for grabs in the SwapItGreen inventory as I write this are two Woodstock entries, the two-disc special 40th anniversary edition of Woodstock: Three Days of Peace & Music Director's Cut and the two-CD release of Music From the Original Soundtrack and More: Woodstock. Both are priceless slices of American life, the American struggle, symbolizing the bonds that music forges in a society undergoing painful transition.