An Aquarian Diarrhea Explosion

Just a top-notch article over at The Phoenix about the myth that was Woodstock.

The story my students told was reported not from a helicopter passing overhead
but from the (muddy) ground. There were way too many people there, they said,
and you couldn't see or hear anything. There was no place to camp properly, and
the whole thing, as one guy put it, "was like Boy Scout survival camp with
dope." The grounds got filthier and filthier; since there was no place to
dispose of garbage, it smelled. And when the members of their little group had
found each other again and decided to leave, that too was almost impossible
because of the mobs coming in. (It didn't help that they'd decided to hitchhike
there and back, of course.) "And the worst of it was, we'd spent all this bread
for tickets, and they just let everyone in for free. If we'd known that, we
could've saved a lot of money."
They quickly forgot about Woodstock;
meanwhile, I read a totally different version in Rolling Stone. This
account, the result of a reporters' pool the magazine had sent to the festival,
didn't ignore the sanitation and the crowd issues, but it played up a
hippie-idyll angle my students seemed to have missed. What's more, the reporters
had enjoyed backstage access and had gotten to hear the music very well, and
they wrote about it with their usual skill.

So it was all bullshit. Go figure. Fucking hippies. And to think growing up I believed all of that shit about Woodstock being vital. Sounds like it was just as pathetic as the Woodstock show from '95, or whenever. The biggest difference was that the first Woodstock wasn't brought to you by Mennen.
My old man had Woodstock Two on 8-track and I listened to the Hendrix bits religiously. There's a lot of people that dismiss his performance as sloppy-and there's some truth to that. But I liked the fact that he's trying new things-challenging people along the way-and the fact that his mind is blown on acid during the performance and he's still able to fret a chord amazes me.
And then there's "Star Spangled Banner."
Nuff said.
Jefferson Airplane's bit wasn't bad either. Grace sounds positively gone, and in one of her momentous bits of stage banter, she advises the crowd that the band has "a whole lot of orange."
And no, she's not talking about the amplifier either.
Everything else, from what I can tell, just sucks shit. Jefferson Airplane's bit isn't too bad I suppose, but Sha Na Na? (Argh!!) Ten Years After? (Please. Stop. Playing.) Arlo Guthrie (Dude sounds like he's so baked that someone needs to make him lie down.) It's just a bloated turd that really only got traction after those spoiled journalists gave it wheels and Joni Mitchell romanticised about it in a song she gave to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Scared Shitless.
I remember recording the movie on VHS when the public television station ran it uninterrupted during pledge week. After watching it for the first time, I remember thinking two things:
1.) Jesus Christ, that's a lot of people
and
2.) Wow, they really sucked.
Hold on, there was a third:
3.) I think that Richie Havens cat is missing teeth.
Even the cinematography was annoying, with its split-screen bullshit and lack of any decent bush shots. Look, I don't want to see some naked dude washing his balls in a muddy pond while Canned Heat plays in the background. I want to see stoned-out-of-their-mind hippie chicks with unkempt beavers parading around. Don't tell me that didn't happen.
And don't tell me that Woodstock was some kind of monumental event that showed the world how the youth could live in harmony. Nearly every single attendee has disputed that notion, choosing instead to remember it as a filthy, shit-encrusted clusterfuck of spoiled middle-class college students who gate-crashed one of the decade's most environmentally unfriendly events ever.
I see how the hippies are now trying to round up another perennial celebration to wax on once again about the event, but thankfully, the spin doesn't seem to be holding up. Even the box set (yes, the hippies have learned a thing or two about marketing) is getting panned as a bloated, unnecessary affair.
Much in the same way that Woodstock was to begin with.

Thanks to Rock Critic for the heads-up on that great article.