So there's going to be another Woodstock movie? I missed it, the real Woodstock I mean. They didn't have much of an advance team. Just word of mouth and no mouth near me had the word. What were we doing? How could we have been so tuned out? We were busy. We had a lot going on, getting ready for our first year of high school, hanging out at the beach but never actually on the sand, mailing letters in anything but envelopes to our best friends, who lived down the street, watching the war on TV over our TV dinners, sharing beads and secrets and record albums. I was 14 in 1969. I had no idea. My friends had no idea. Their friends had no idea. We thought sneaking out in the middle of the night to hang at the Royal Castle was the epitome of cool. Even if we had known about Woodstock, we'd never have gotten there. Partly because at fourteen we had no wheels and partly because even if we'd convinced my mother to drive us, Woodstock didn't happen in Woodstock. My mother could follow a map with the precision of a cartographer. She would tease out the most obscure location from any collection of cryptic, creased and sometimes greasy lines and symbols, be they Triple A issue or penciled on the back of a wet restaurant napkin. But for all her navigational talent, she was also rather literal and goal oriented and if we had set out that August to find Woodstock, then we darn sure would have found Woodstock! And we still would have missed the defining event of my generation because Woodstock, the concert, was held more than an hour and a half over the Catskills in a town called Bethel Woods New York. I can only think that as a generation so determined to find itself, we could have used a little more Geography, and a lot less Film as Literature on our college syllabi.
My youngest son will be 14 on Monday next. No chance of him missing the Woodstock of his time. Anything important is on cable, dish, Yahoo, ITunes, Twittered, texted or blogged. Oh, and we still have phones, sort of, though no one actually speaks into them anymore. The thought of my son and half a million of his Facebook friends turning up in person for anything seems rather remote to me. There were no cell phones at Woodstock in 1969, no Starbucks, no hair gel. Just a lot of people face to face, on a farm, in the mud, listening to music and getting stoned, because mud and manure and people up close are much better tolerated stoned. They say it was the largest gathering of people anywhere in history. They say it was all about peace and love and goodwill and of course, music. Was it one of those things that can only be idyllic in retrospect? I dunno. Go see the Ang Lee movie or better yet, catch the Michael Wadleigh documentary on VH-1 and shoot me an email. I'm kind of --- busy.
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