I wasn’t at Woodstock. I didn’t want to be at Woodstock. I wasn’t even consciously aware of Woodstock until long after it happened. I have my excuses: I was not quite nine years old at the time, for a start. I point this out not because of any wanna-be-boomer longings, but because Jon (my former virtual landlord) frequently accuses me of being a hippie, or at least wanting to be one.
P.J. O’Rourke, however, has a different excuse:
I was slightly disappointed to be missing Woodstock until the nightly news reported that it had turned into a catastrophic, drug-addled, rain-drenched disaster area lacking food, water, shelter, and Port-A-Potties. Then I was furious to be missing Woodstock.
What this says about 21-year-old boys I needn’t tell anyone who has been, dated, or raised one. Furthermore, Sunflower’s suicide attempt was the result of a fight with her mother about a department store charge plate bill for a $128 peasant blouse and had nothing to do with Sunflower’s desperate romantic feelings for me.
To top it off, a few years later I became a Republican.
What with one thing and another, I was always touchy on the subject of Woodstock. I’m over it now, thanks to various books celebrating the 40th anniversary of too many people in bad haircuts going to an upstate New York dairy farm for no good reason. I’ve counted three of these books so far. Since counting to three was as much as most Woodstock attendees could manage on goof butts and silly pills, three is where I stop.
This is actually from a review of three books about the Woodstock phenomenon (or cultural disaster, take your pick):
The Road to Woodstock is “by” Michael Lang, one of the two original promoters, “with” Holly George-Warren who is coeditor of The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll and thus, presumably, knows the alphabet. I have no idea how much of the book Lang wrote, but he doesn’t seem to have read it. He is described therein by a pair of ex-business partners as having “a face that is, by turns, evil, wanton, fey, impish, and innocent.” This is more than I would let ex-business partners of mine say about me in my book.
And yet, if you reverse the order of the adjectives, you get the progress of the sixties, perfectly delineated.
It was not, by the way, a decade: The sixties were a strange episode of about 80 months’ duration that started when the Baby Boom had fully infested academia (roughly the 1966-67 school year) and came to a screeching halt in 1973 when conscription ended and herpes began.
