Woodstock: Forty years later, a hazy legacy

“Man, I loved Woodstock,” said Jim Shea in The Hartford Courant. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, the mud and the acid, the sharing and the caring ... it was all too groovy. “Of course, I wasn’t actually there.” No matter, said Chris Vognar in The Dallas Morning News. Long before its 40th anniversary this week, the three-day music and love fest had morphed into “pretty much anything you would like it to mean.” For the half-million flower children who descended on Max Yasgur’s upstate New York farm, Woodstock was a peaceful celebration of humanity. “For those who wanted to direct the revelers to a barber and a bathtub, Woodstock is still an epithet.” What isn’t debatable, though, is that a slew of documentaries, books, and tchotchkes has redefined Woodstock as a bona fide brand—purveyed and consumed by the same baby boomers who once despised the kind of commercialism it now represents. “The show lives on as a cash cow, one more commodity in the marketplace of nostalgia.”

“As an authentic Woodstock attendee—or should I say victim?”—I find that nostalgia baffling, said Mark Hosenball in Newsweek.com. For me, Woodstock was “colossal traffic jams, torrential rain, reeking portable johns, barely edible food, and sprawling, disorganized crowds.” Yes, some of the music was great, but in hindsight, Woodstock’s primary legacy is the fact that “500,000 people jammed into a mudhole didn’t fight, riot, or annihilate each other.” Even as a music festival, “Woodstock was pretty much a bust,” said Jim Fusilli in The Wall Street Journal. Many of the artists—the Who, John Sebastian, and Crosby, Stills & Nash among them—didn’t play well at all. That’s why when Atlantic released the concert album, it “intentionally disguised some of the flaws.” This artifice helped ensure the myth of Woodstock as a “cosmically significant cultural event.”

Okay, so Woodstock didn’t change the world, said Leonard Pitts in The Miami Herald, and many of its idealistic attendees grew into corporate conformists. But they did prove for three days in August 1969 “that avarice could be stilled, hatred could be silenced, and the disparate tribes of humanity could find reconciliation, in the chords of a song.” United in one voice, the children of Woodstock dreamed of a world in which music could set you free. “Absurd? Maybe. But as generational signposts go, you could do a whole lot worse.”

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