Four Million Muddy Toes

The Woodstock Music Festival was one of the defining events of the late 1960s. Forty years ago on August 15, 1969 400,000 people gathered on a dairy farm in Bethel New York and listened to some of the best Rock & Roll music of all time. There was lots of rain, mud and exhaustion experienced by those who had gathered but they survived even though the entire concert site was declared a disaster area by the State of New York. Peace, love and music continued for three straight days even in the face of disaster.







As decades roll by the festival seems more like a fluke. Nothing like it could ever happen today. Today's idealism would certainly over take Woodstock's excess if such an event was held today but the music would probably be just as good.
In 1969 there were pockets of "Hippies" or what normal people called "Freaks" in every community but most felt like outsiders among the population. To them Woodstock was a revelation that really had nothing to do with the music played on that Woodstock stage during the three day festival. It was their coming of age. Proving to the world that Hippies and Freaks were not the same negligible minority but a much larger culture the world was going to have to embrace.
The music of Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills Nash Young and Jimi Hendrix can still be heard today. When those performers played on the Woodstock stage it was a different kind of time and music. It was an adventure, bewildering and estatic period of my life
Woodstock proved that there really was love and peace in the world. Today Woodstock would not stand up to everyday human nature because love and peace are fleeting and all too innocent but even after 40 years the sensations still linger.