Dagnabit (‘scuse me fer cussin’, Mom), I missed the Woodstock Music and Art Festival again. First time was Aug. 15-18, 1969, 56 years ago, on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y. Seems I missed it again on Aug. 16, when Green Valley Lake again celebrated its annual Woodstock Fair.
Well, I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road and I asked him, “Tell me, where are you going?” And this he told me: “I’m going down to Yasgur’s Farm. Gonna join in a rock ‘n roll band. Got to get back to the and, set my soul free.” (“Woodstock” – Penned by Joni Mitchell and performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – 1970)
I remember it well – three days of peace and love, not to mention sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. And where was I when all of this was goin’ down? When I was teaching, my students wanted to know, so I told them that Woodstock was 3,000 miles from Orange County and, as a responsible student at the time, I had to be back at Chapman College at 9 a.m. on Monday for the final exam in Dr. Booth’s summer school macro-economics class.
Besides, I never would have made it to the Woodstock Art and Music Festival – which, by the way, didn’t happen in the town of Woodstock, but rather Bethel, N.Y., some 47 miles away – in time for the concert, which was slated to begin at dusk on Friday, because I didn’t even know it was happening until I first heard about it on a Friday evening news broadcast showing tens of thousands of free spirits walking down the road, toward the festival grounds. It was sort of like the TV commercial where you see hundreds of free spirits, high on Wegovy marching down the road, singing, laughing, skipping and jumping.
The closest thing to Woodstock I ever experienced was the 1970 Christmas Festival in Laguna Canyon, three days of…Well, you know. But the Woodstock movie I watched at the Balboa Theater in Newport Beach was a totally cool, mind-blowing experience that changed a generation, and changed me for more than a generation. Overnight, I became enlightened, my mind expanded, my hair grew longer, my pants blossomed into bell-bottoms, and I became an environmentally aware peace activist.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon, and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
Keep it flyin,’
Uncle Mott
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