The 50th anniversary of Woodstock is coming up
Apparently, that’s a thing.
But Woodstock passed me by almost completely at the time. I read about it right after it happened, and it was just one of many hippy-ish events that happened during those years, albeit a photogenic one that was hyped to the skies as meaningful.
At the time, my mind was very much on other things. My boyfriend had just come home from fighting in Vietnam. I was looking for a place to live while in law school. I was very young, rather confused, and already utterly sick of the 60s.
The 60s had already not been especially kind to me. I was of the generation that started college in one world and ended college in a very different one. Whiplash. We began college subjected to rules about curfews and no boys in the dorm except in the public rooms (“four feet on the floor”), and we ended up with a free-for-all that never felt completely comfortable to me and in which I always felt like I didn’t belong.
Impulsiveness and dancing naked in the rain was not my natural element. Most of the social skills I had laboriously learned while growing up were no longer valued, and what was sought after now was a kind of mindless hazy hedonism mixed with mindless hazy thinking.
The fashions were fun. The music was fun. The rest of it made me very uneasy.
I still remember going to a single SDS meeting and being thrown by the anger, the nihilism, and the sheer stupidity I saw and heard there. Not for me, not ever, and that experience helped to inoculate me against the more extreme movements that happened during the 60s. But that doesn’t mean I emerged unscathed.
Neither did the US. As Paul Mirengoff writes in the article I linked at the outset of this post:
If Woodstock helped define a generation, that generation wasn’t the one at Woodstock. In the decades after the festival, radical holdouts gained control of America’s colleges and universities. The jury may still be out on the extent to which these misfits have helped define later generations, but arguably they have done so to a considerable degree.
If I may quote myself, quoted in Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons:
“It was the very acme of consumerism. You had several hundred thousand people willingly reducing themselves to a condition of infantile dependence and passivity in the expectation that competent adults would take care of their physical needs. It was that, more than the doping and fornicating, that was really most disgusting and even frightening about it. I think of the Eloi and Morlocks in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine–the Eloi are these pretty, sweet, stupid creatures who frolic on the surface, while the Morlocks live underground and do all the work necessary to feed and clothe the Eloi. The catch is, the Eloi are also the Morlocks’ food supply.”
Not that I objected to the doping and fornicating at the time. I was all for that. I did not go but my roommate did. He thought it was rather overhyped.
Paul Mirengoff ends his post on this note:
Nothing I have said here should be viewed as attacking the Woodstock festival itself or as suggesting that it’s not worth commemorating up to a point. I recommend skipping the PBS documentary and watching, if you have the opportunity, the 1970 documentary film directed by Michael Wadleigh with help from Martin Scorsese.
I still enjoy watching “Woodstock” now and then. I have better memories of the hippie times than most here.
There was a crazy Charlton Heston movie from the 70s, “Omega Man,” in which most people have died and the others have mutated except for Charlton Heston who may be the last real human. Anyway his daily ritual is going into downtown LA and watching “Woodstock,” presumably for the human crowds to assuage his loneliness.
There was a joke making the rounds on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock: that the surviving hipsters wore T-shirts that read: “Hey, baby, wanna drop some antacid?”
Anyway– Neo, my college experience was much like yours. I was more concerned with my studies and working hard to get into graduate school to pay more than fleeting attention to the Summer of Love or the goings-on at Max Yasgur’s farm. Unlike you, I can’t say that I found either the fashions or the music “fun”– they made me as uneasy as the rapid abandonment of rational thought and conventional good manners. I have no regrets about being an outsider looking in on the follies of the late ’60s.
I was of an age to go to Woodstock, but as I was 3000 miles away in Berserkeley, I didn’t go. Two peers from my hometown went to Woodstock. One later became a cop. The other, I am told, was depressed by the scene and spent her time at Woodstock drawing feet. She became an artist, and had some showings in Noo Yawk.
Three months later, I went to Altamont. I remember feeling that if the crowd/mob were to tear down a fence- just for the hell of it, as we were inside- I would willingly go along. I was far, far from the stage, so I didn’t find about Hell’s Angels and the death until I read the Chronicle and the Gazette the next day.
The next year I went back East and also went back to school. In 1971, I hitched to the Newport Jazz Festival. Tickets were quite affordable from what I had saved from my dishwashing job. A tall chain link fence separated the paying customers from those who didn’t pay. The music was well amplified, so I surmised that those outside the fence could readily hear the music. Those on the outside pushed the fence down, resulting in the cancellation of the rest of the festival. Idiots.
A high school friend was scheduled to sing with her group at the Newport Folk Festival that year. Because of what occurred at the Jazz Festival, the Folk Festival was cancelled. She never got to appear at the Newport Folk Festival. What a shame. She had a wonderful voice. I can still hear her, in my mind’s ear, singing Some Day Soon, which I hear her sing at a local club.
Only thing I enjoyed was the music of the era, some real gems that I still listen to occasionally today. The hippies were silly to me. “All You Need Is Love” was their silly anthem.
I was too young to participate, grew up to love the music, always turned off by the stories of what else went on then. Never been a fan of those hippies.
I left the USA in May of 1967 and spent three years overseas wearing Army green cloths, I came back in June of 1970 and processed out of Fort Hamilton, New York feeling ever so strange in a different world three years later. All I know about that crap was what I read second hand as our nation had a lot of slippage, most everywhere.
The luminous Grace Slick. Captivating enough to make your teeth chatter. https://youtu.be/2EdLasOrG6c?t=54 Well, she is if you look at the video and do a little projecting.
Wasn’t old enough to be anywhere near there. And never saw the video till years later.
And now? Last image I saw of that whale made my teeth chatter too; but not in a good way.
Did see her on TV when I was a kid though if not at Woodstock. Saw The Doors on some variety show too. I recall being impressed that some of the suit wearing studio trumpeters brought in to play a few bars, seemed to be “digging” the music too. Not the reluctant bigots we were to assume..
I think the networks used to try and work in a segment that would “appeal to youth” on these variety hours. Usually, as I recall, it was jarringly out of sync with the rest of the show. But in fact, segments from such shows as Sonny and Cher, and The Smothers Brothers, and whatever else was running in those days, provide an interesting take on the music of the time. And some of it is great.
What does become clear though, in spite of the occasional amiable seeming gesture by the featured musical rebels toward the host, was their unmistakable, insufferable, fulminating, self-indulgent and prideful narcissism.
People talk about the rebellious Vietnam era youth as if they really do believe along with Bill Clinton, that they were something historically special. They were not. I saw these weak limbed self-regarding assholes in operation, if not quite as peers or exact contemporaries, since they were anywhere from a decade to just a handful of years older. Now they are weakening and even getting feeble as a result of their years of dissipation,
F**k ’em.
I was born in the mid-Sixties. My fondest wish is to live long enough to not see any more God-damned Woodstock commemorations.
Hahahaha Same age as my “kid” sister. And she, and most especially the one a couple years younger than that, would emphatically agree.
I still remember going to a single SDS meeting and being thrown by the anger, the nihilism, and the sheer stupidity I saw and heard there.
neo: You might take some minor satisfaction in knowing that Pete Townsend of “The Who” clubbed Abbie Hoffman with his guitar when Hoffman jumped onto the “Who’s” stage at Woodstock to rabble-rouse for a political cause.
For me the nightmare then was family life, the Catholic Church and the cruelty of high school. Plus my fear of nuclear war. The hippie thing looked like a better deal and it was.
It gave me hope, it gave me a place to fit in that was fun and relatively gentle compared to straight high school, and it was in line with the writers, poets and mystics I was reading, most certainly including Aldous Huxley.
I have no regrets about being a hippie. That period enriches me to this day. I still take the stand that good things, as well as bad, came out of that movement.
For those of us — and there were many of us — who took it more seriously than sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, it was akin to a religious conversion.
Another Woodstock era (1967) event came to a close today and was captured in a Thread by Jackson Proskow: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1159498431641075712.html
What put me off SDS was sitting in on a conversation on the college quad. A prominent SDS person said that Lenin should be a part of the college curriculum. Rest assured that she wasn’t saying that in the sense of “know your enemy.” Her gushing tone made it quite clear that she considered Lenin among the greats, such as Plato or Shakespeare.
I had taken a Politics class in 9th grade. Reading A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch convinced me that Communism was evil. Writing a term paper on Soviet agriculture convinced me that as an economic system, Communism was the equivalent of a five year old trying to manage a factory.
In addition, my hometown had a disproportionate number of Iron Curtain refugees. Most of them said very little about the countries they had fled, but their reluctance to talk about it said a lot to me. In high school I went out with the daughter of an Iron Curtain refugee and also with the daughter of parents who had fled Hitler.
So, I was immune to the Commie-loving pitch of SDS.
The Lenin-loving SDS person didn’t go off the deep end, though. She didn’t go the Weatherperson route, took a low-paying, difficult job related to her major, eventually got a doctorate, and for decades been a tax-and-spend Democrat state legislator who delights in getting her picture taken with those higher up the political food chain.
huxley:
I was in the belly of the beast during the 60s, at a center of counterculture college life, during the most hippyish years. 90% of what I saw was negative. As I said, the music and the fashion I liked. I liked the idea of “peace/love,” but the execution (I couldn’t help but notice) was full of hypocrisy, violence, cruelty, and in some cases destruction—of minds and psyches in particular.
That’s what I saw. Some people think the 60s were great at first, and then they turned into something dark before they faded out. I perceived the darkness as being part and parcel of it from the start.
I read all that philosophical/religious stuff, too; I took it very seriously. Alan Watts, Suzuki, etc.. It was warmed-over Eastern philosophy and religion that had been there for millennia. It certainly had value, but it wasn’t invented in the 60s, and for most of the people looking into it, it didn’t seem to go all that deep.
I’m not insinuating that was true for you, by the way. I am pretty sure that for some people the 60s was good, and the net result was good. In my case, I just don’t know. I just know that it was not a happy time for me.
huxley:
Read this for the Rashomon-like version of that incident.
I’ll let y’all know when my book about the ’60s, part memoir and part cultural analysis, is published.
Neo, that darkness was indeed there from the beginning, though that’s not all there was. I strongly recommend Joan Didion on that period, Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album.
I was in the belly of the beast during the 60s, at a center of counterculture college life, during the most hippyish years. 90% of what I saw was negative.
neo: From my perspective you were still a tourist, which is what it is and not necessarily a bad thing. But I’ve never taken your pronouncements about the counterculture as anything other than your opinion.
And mine is different.
Mac:
I read both of those books by Didion back when they were first published. Interesting stuff.
The sixties were a curious time. People remember the excitement, the music and the drugs, but seem to forget how much of a crisis that period was. We had come through the Depression, WWII and were embroiled in the Cold War, which might have turned nuclear at any moment and almost did. (I still remember the looks on my teachers’ faces when they sent us home during the Cuban Missile Crisis.) Then there were the riots, the assassinations and the seeming futility of the Vietnam War.
There was a deep despair which informed the Beat and Hippie movements. It seemed our elders didn’t have a better plan either. If their children wanted to chuck Western Civ and go live in the woods, as I recall, they didn’t object all that much. It didn’t seem anyone had the answers.
“Darknes, darkness, be my pillow
Take my head and let me sleep
In the coolnes of your shadow
And the silence of your dreams.
Darkness, darkness hide my yearning
For the the things that can not be
Keep my mind from constant turning
Towards the things I cannot see now.
Darkness, darkness, long and losesome
Is the day that brings me here?
Is the day that brought me here now
I have found the edge of sadnes
I have known rhe depths of fear
Darkness, drarkness be my blanket
Cover me with endless night
Take away the pain of endless knowing
Fill the emptiness of not knowing, right now.”
Above wddas from memory, may have made mistakes. It is from the Youngbloods LP Elephant Mountain. Stuck with me as a dirge for the demise of hippiedom. But parsing song lyrics to fit your mindset is iffy at best, wrong and stupid at worst.
Young Neo at an SDS meeting!
I’ve tried and failed to find a transcript of an old interview the actor Michael Cain gave in his middle age, about being recruited by some Marxists (probably communists, but possibly anarchists) in his youth in the U.K. He came up from a very working class community.
Unsurprisingly, they pitched him the wonderland of their group’s free love, free sex, philosophy. But he asked them what happened when he was attracted to the pretty girl over there, who obviously seemed to be attached to the boss man making the pitch. It quickly degenerated into a very short and unsuccessful pitch.
____
DNW. I don’t know if I’d call Grace Slick luminous, but OMG that voice and the intensity. Captivating as heck. I’ve watched many rockumentaries, including a few with her music and interviews from her youth, and some interviews in middle age. One of her big hits was originally written as a band member of The Great Society. What an amusing band name.
Like Gringo.. I was in Berkeley at the time, and immersed in the lifestyle and the music, and missed Woodstock (didn’t seem like a big deal to go across country for) and also went to Altamont. Unlike Gringo, I was down in front for most of the day into the evening when all hell broke lose.. My take is that the brief shining star of the “hippy” moment had already dimmed, and all it took to kill it off completely was the foolhardy combination of the Grateful Dead, The Stones, and the Hells Angels acting in consort. The Dead (and their managers) contracted the stage and sound, and hired the Hells Angels as bodyguards, and stage security. The stage was built at the bottom of a large natural amphitheater-like valley, and yet was only about 5′ off the ground.. this for a crowd that grew during the day to almost half a million fans… for most of the day the crowd sat back maybe 25′ to 50′ from the stage, then as the Stones started to come on – all half million were up and moved in a wave to the stage.. pushing up to and almost on the stage itself… knocking over a bike the Angels had parked as a totem in front … it went downhill (literally) from there… Like the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the scene (once Mick decided he better get the hell out), turned to chaos and horror… fires were started, rocks & beer bottles raining down on the folks in front, and people running to get away from the stage area… so much for peace, love, and flowers in your hair! Haven’t been to a large outdoor music festival since then… 50 years … love the music and playing it too, not enough to die for…
It is now the 9th, as I write this, the 50th Anniversary on the first Manson killings. I was seven at the time, but I remember how it shocked people.
Neo:
I’m a couple of years younger than you. In high school, I was one of those kids who was all over the place, and that included being a reluctant hippy. I thought most of hippieness was completely ridiculous, but I wanted to get out of what was going on all around me. A utopian impulse. I was smart enough to recognize that, and read a lot about utopian movements and their history. That didn’t completely immunize me me from the urge to want a different world, but I was absolutely certain that Woodstock wasn’t that place. Mobs have always horrified me. When the Woodstock movie came out, in 1970, I happened to be hitchhiking through Las Vegas. A cop told me to get off the road, so I went to a movie — Woodstock. I remember liking the air conditioning. Some of the music was good; but, on the whole, it was overrated, and the people were terribly embarrassing.
Parker:
The Youngbloods were one of the first bands I saw in concert. That was during the hippy era, at Grinnell, a hippy school near you.
Boy, I have never heard a description of coming of age in the ‘60s that so closely paralleled mine. I was a bit younger, in high school not college. I attended a Catholic girls’ high school where we chanted in Latin for school Masses during my freshman and sophomore years. By junior year, we were singing “Kumbaya” accompanied by folk guitars. And we finally knew what color St. Therese Eleanor’s hair was thanks to the spiffy new habits that appeared on most of the sisters. Not all of the changes were bad, of course. But it was evident even to a 17 year-old that a lot was upended with very little thought given to consequences.
I find it despicable and telling that none of the people adamantly encouraging harmful philosophies like drug use, free love, rioting and theft have never apologized for being wrong or for all the damage they have done. Their philosophies led to much misery; addiction, divorce, child abandonement, racial unrest, poverty, ill health, death…
I was 6 when Woodstock took place and much of my life has been spent in the wake of the destruction those navel gazing narcissists wreaked. Maybe a few songs or books came out of it, but a tremendous net negative of a movement and philosophy.
(Sorry for the unintended double negative in my first sentence.)
I was in Las Vegas with friends who insisted we see the Cirque du Soliel show on the Beatles. As we were walking through the enormous gift shop conveniently located along the exit one of them commented they were surprised by all the merchandise and steep prices. When I stopped laughing I said, “The Beatles were always about making money.”
What does a preying mantis have in common with Yoko Ono? They both survive off of dead beatles.
Eric Idles Rutles parody, with their song, “All you Need is Cash” is spot on.
For those of you of that generation, maybe you can answer a question I’ve always had, “How did such a great generation of parents raise such a selfish, hedonistic generation of spoiled narcissists?” I ask that sincerely. Me, my parents, my grand parents are all out of sync with that chain, skewed by about 10 years, but I don’t think our lives were that different. My grandparents would not have tolerated my parents acting that way and my parents would have disowned me, had I. I don’t think the “love children’s” parents were less hard working or strict. How did their kids get so narcissistic?
I was aware of Woodstock but, just having finished high school, had no money to go and less interest. Not long after that I did go to the Moratorium March on Washington which took place on November 15, 1969. I was more interested in the experience than the protest. (“I’m going as an anthropologist.”) I was impressed with the orderliness of the march and not so impressed with my fellow college students.
As a Boomer (17 at the time of Woodstock), I look at Woodstock as the defining moment of the Boomer generation. In terms of music, Boomers are the most musical generation in a long while. To me, just compare the music produced from mid 60’s to the mid 80’s and compare to other eras. There’s more innovation mixed with a solid grounding in forms from jazz, blues, country, foreign rhythms, and standard classical music.
But, are musicians the type of people to lead us to Utopia? Many of my contemporaries seem to view 1969 as some sort of nexus of history and self-definement. God, just look at the 70 year olds still sporting ponytails on balding heads, or the women with long stringy greying hair. It is these Boomers who made it their mission to take over academia, the media, and the Democratic party in order to fulfill the “vision” of Woodstock. Look where that’s got us.
“talking bout my generation”; great music, but generally f**ked up everything else.
““How did such a great generation of parents raise such a selfish, hedonistic generation of spoiled narcissists?” I ask that sincerely. Me, my parents, my grand parents are all out of sync with that chain, skewed by about 10 years, but I don’t think our lives were that different. My grandparents would not have tolerated my parents acting that way and my parents would have disowned me, had I. I don’t think the “love children’s” parents were less hard working or strict. How did their kids get so narcissistic?”
Rufus: great question! I once stated to my mother (who just died a few months ago at age 92) I couldn’t understand how my generation turned out so bad. She said, with some great remorse and sadness, “It’s our fault'” This from a Greatest Generation member. She continued, “We lived through the Depression, and we lived through a terrible war. After that, all we wanted was for our children never to experience such horrors. So we sheltered you, and gave you everything, and made your childhood as idyllic as possible…exact opposite to what we experienced. As a result, our children grew up thinking that this is how life really is. And when you found out it wasn’t, like the spoiled children you are, you threw a temper tantrum.”
And that tantrum continues to this day.
Rufus T.,
Speaking only for me…
I grew up on a farm, I was schooled on that farm to know that hard work was required to live a good life. I learned that nothing was for free, you had to earn it. I was surrounded by a conservative extended family, including not just my own family, of uncles, aunts,many cousins. Farmers all. After WW2 my elders left Appalachia for a better life in Iowa. But they retained the habit that kinship came first. Government was at best unreliable.
My father, my uncles, and one of my aunts served in WW2. I had 2 uncles that I never knew. I am a native American.
parker,
It’s a small sample size, but everyone I know who grew up on farms are exceptional people. They are well grounded, diligent, intelligent… (I just noticed the adjective, “well grounded” may be a pun here, and may even provide a reason.)
I was a city boy and had a “Beverly Hillbillies,” “Green Acres,” “Hee Haw” bias against rural people, until I got to know a few.
physicsguy,
Thank you for sharing that! What an interesting exchange with your mother. I have tremendous respect for that generation, and the hardships they endured, but I’ve also assumed they deserve some of the blame for the self-inflicted devastation our nation endured in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I am very hesitant to blame them, but apparently your mother did feel some culpability.
Obviously she did right by you, however! 😉
Fifty-year-old memories are kind of a jumble, but I’m fairly certain that extensive and fawning coverage from the likes of Life magazine put the myth into place. Further, I don’t think Woodstock truly became !!WOODSTOCK!! as it is currently viewed and “remembered” until the movie came out.
“How did such a great generation of parents raise such a selfish, hedonistic generation of spoiled narcissists?”
Well, the question itself greatly oversimplifies the history. American culture, and Western civ in general, were, as a civilization, in spiritual and psychological crisis long before that. My oversimplified response is that what we call “the Sixties” was the moment when the crisis reached a level and involved enough people that it erupted into the open in the form of what later began to be called the “culture war.” You can’t have a *war*, in the full sense, without two pretty strong forces. Up until then one force had been small and weak.
As huxley says above, “For those of us — and there were many of us — who took it more seriously than sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, it was akin to a religious conversion.” Exactly, except that for a great many you can leave out “akin to.”
I was born in 1957, so I was still fairly young during “the 60s” …. and I despised, and continue to despise, the mindset and consequences of that era.
physicsguy,
Regarding the music, I think that was more an accident of the progress of invention, rather than anything inherent in that generation’s blood, or in the politics of the time. But it’s nearly impossible to separate it all out.
In music, like all art, when new technology comes along artists are typically the first to experiment with it and exploit it. The initial efforts are often crude, but refinements come quickly. I think that’s a big reason why we are in such a pop music desert right now; no real innovation in instrumentation or technology in the past two decades, or so.
When production techniques and tool manufacture became consistent enough that instruments could be made that would tune to a certain key and remain in tune through a song we saw the boom of the Baroque era. Composers and artists quickly adapted to the new technology and write incredibly entertaining and complex pieces for a handful of instruments. Which created more demand for good craftsmen and good musicians, resulting in entire symphonies of instruments that composers used to create incredibly entertaining and complex pieces. Of course, the piano, organs and harpsichords happen before, during and after this, and a similar arc happens with them. Almost as soon as the manufacture of a decent organ is possible we have Bach writing and performing pieces that have yet to be topped today. The piano forte was a relatively new instrument when the likes of Mozart, Liszt and Beethoven were stretching the boundaries of the instrument, producing works that are still the sine quo non of the art.
The industrial revolution continues and eventually music manufacture becomes so efficient that a lot of instruments can get to the hands of lay people. There was already folk music on fiddles and concertinas and harmonicas and other cheap instruments, penny whistles…, but now trumpets, upright basses, tubas, saxophones, even pianos could be accessed by most anyone. And we saw incredible innovation for groups of all sizes. There are still pieces from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s that are as good as any music ever written; complex and melodic with wonderful lyrics.
And electricity and the phonograph and the radio start to play their part. Now musicians can make money aside from simply playing live. And the era of the pop singer begins because microphones allow the singer to be heard above the band. And, as soon as the technology permits this evolution we have a wonderful bevy of fantastic lyricists; Porter, Parker, Berlin, Gershwin…
And a guy named Les Paul starts monkeying around with the electronic pick-ups on his guitar and some kids hear it and that begins a glorious era of guitar rock, which was greatly augmented by new recording technologies being invented simultaneously.
Then Robert Moog invents his synthesizer and thus begins an era of prog rock, also greatly augmented by new recording techniques (digital).
Quite quickly, after each innovation, we get amazing music exploiting the new technology and pushing to the limits of what is acoustically possible.
I think this is the longest gap with no significant, technological breakthrough that we’ve had in pop music innovation since about 1900. And I think that explains the dearth of good, new music. There are still amazing artists exploiting the old methods; classical, jazz, prog, blues, folk, country… but no new genre.
As Steve Winwood sings in Traffic’s, “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys;” “We were children once, just playing with toys.”
physicsguy: “So we sheltered you, and gave you everything, and made your childhood as idyllic as possible …”
The foundations of the Participation Trophy culture of recent years was laind in those years.
I recall in first grade (that would have been 1963-64), soon after moving back to the suburbs, as she was setting up the film projector (Yay! an easy day), the teacher telling us that we were the most intelligent, best-educated generation ever … and mentally rolling my eyes.
I was in the Navy during Woodstock but I could have gone if I was interested. I was stationed at beautiful Naval Station Brooklyn. I always thought the person who sent me to New York was having a little joke since I had applied for shore duty in Japan or the Philippines. I was disappointed at first but quickly learned to enjoy NY City. As far as I know, the Navy no longer has any presence in NY City.
lion
That was very perceptive- and precocious- of you. Most kids would have unreservedly lapped up that praise.
That reminds me of an eye-rolling response I had during my year in Berserkeley. Two adult professionals whom I knew in my work as an eco-activist were talking about the Bay Area. One of them said that in future centuries, the Bay Area would be viewed the way we currently view Renaissance Italy. This was NOT a reference to the many Nobel Prize winning scientists out of U Cal Berkeley, but to the hippies and political radicals in the area. Even as a still wet-behind-the-ears teenager, I knew that was pure hype. Not as perceptive as your first grade reaction, I would add. Your reaction was off the charts.
Rufus,
Interesting take on technology vs music innovation. However, I think maybe you take it too far. I may also place a bit of blame again in education..that is music education, which maybe goes along with the general decline in that area.
I’ve had several students who are also musicians; seems to go hand in hand with physics and math. So they are doing the usual rock band thing and I asked them if they know a basic blues riff…no, how about some classical counterpoint…no. Can they play a standard country song…didn’t know any. Sad…
Technology innovation can certainly drive new music, but where are the likes of the Moody Blues, the Stones, or the Eagles, who combined different genres to such great effect?
physicsguy,
I too notice a link with music and some folks drawn to mathematics. Oddly enough, I’ve known a lot of history majors who are also good, natural musicians. Not sure what’s going on there, but the mathematics link I get.
Regarding your students. I’m not sure what is going on there either. Several centuries of popular music have been pumped into a computer database and analyzed for complexity, and it is irrefutable the current stuff is bollocks, vis a vis musical quality. However, that’s pop music. I promise you there are musicians the age(s) of your students who can play blues, country and/or classical counterpoint very well. I doubt the premier conservatories like Julliard, Berklee or Peabody are seeing a drop off in talent, or lack of over-qualified applicants. They may not become youtube stars or show up on a TV talent show, but they’ll end up in the world renowned symphonies, or make a living as studio musicians or play in jazz combos, and they play every bit as well as the greats who came before them. I recently saw Donald Fagen perform Steely Dan songs with a backing band. His band were some of the best musicians I had ever seen live, and none of us would recognize any of their names. I google’d several of them; they’re all active studio musicians (I guess Donald is continuing the Steely Dan tradition).
(It was funny, these musicians were so talented, and so used to the studio, that they didn’t know you’re supposed to make it look hard. I noticed most of the audience were not reacting to their solos, because the musicians made them look too easy, even though they were playing incredibly difficult solos. The guitar players conservatory professor should have taught him to bite his lip, lean back and squint when soloing!)
“… where are the likes of the Moody Blues, the Stones or the Eagles…” I hope you put the Stones in there for comedic effect. The only genre I’ve seen them master is pop. They managed to keep pace with changes in pop; from blues/rock to disco, but they’ve always only been a pop act. The Eagles melded rock with country, and had a few songs with a disco beat too, but there are plenty of great acts similar to them today. The Moody Blues were one of those acts exploiting new technology (keyboards and recording techniques) to great effect. I doubt they’ll last much beyond their generation.
The biggest change in the past 20 years has been distribution, and that, more than anything explains why you don’t believe there are current acts like the Moody Blues, Stones or Eagles. From 1900 to about 2000 the technical barriers to recording, transmitting and distributing music were costly enough that production companies held all the power. If you didn’t get a recording contract your music couldn’t reach a mass audience. If that record didn’t play on the radio you couldn’t break out. If that record didn’t get into juke boxes you couldn’t make it big. There are almost definitely acts contemporaneous to the Moody Blues, Stones and Eagles, and as talented as the Moody Blues, Stones and Eagles, that we don’t know of today because they didn’t land a record deal, or were unwilling to dance to the tune their record company demanded.
Today artists can record, produce and distribute their music at nearly no cost. There are wonderfully talented writers, singers, musicians and writer/singer/musicians making music. Most of it never gets on the radio and, unless you have kids of a certain age, or seek it out independently, you won’t know it’s out there.
As much as artistic talent is wonderful, magical and worthy of praise, there are a plethora of truly talented artists in the world. My wife has barely spent any time thinking about, or studying drawing, yet she is an incredible sketch artist. One of our children also has that ability, and pretty much had it out of the womb. If either one of them devoted more time to drawing and painting, and studying technique, they would certainly attain a professional level. One of my kids is quite a classical pianist. He was always interested in it. When other kids were listening to pop he was teaching himself Russian concerti. If he spent more time at it he could play at a professional level.
I play in a band and often find myself at venues waiting for other acts to finish. They’re almost always quite talented. Often good at keyboards and strings and quite capable singers. There seem to be no shortage of people willing to take no more than $100 for a chance to play 3, 45 minute sets in public. Quite a few of my bandmates have masters degrees in music performance and we’re lucky to get a grand/night for the whole band. And if we won’t play for that, or often less, the club owner has no trouble filling our spot. As amazing as artistic talent is, and it is, it outstrips demand!
physicsguy,
How much music education in school did George Gershwin have? Louis Armstrong? Scott Joplin? Carole King? I don’t think any member of the “Talking Heads” picked up an instrument until they met in Art School in their 20s. I’m pretty sure Paul McCartney and Wolfgang Mozart’s only music teachers were their respective fathers. I think you can “make” an artist through education and focused practice, but many, many great artists developed their talent without the benefit of formal instruction. The muse lands everywhere; on poor and rich alike.
To the above comment, I should have also added that I am, however, a big fan of music education in the general school population. It’s a fundamental part of life, it can open doors to other things, even computer programming, and an understanding of the physics and math behind why we like what we like is a great tool to understanding biology and other elements of nature.
Also, like a knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology and the Bible it is an essential foundation for comprehending literature, visual art, architecture and history.
I too was only 7 during the summer of Woodstock. The event that captivated me was the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen in 1973. We had relatives that lived in Syracuse, and we visited Watkins Glen on a trip to see them that summer.
The publicity poster for that event was awesome.
Yes … My personal opinion is that there was a tremendous difference in attitude and critical stance between the earliest, and the middle to late baby boomers.
In fact, as far as psychological leanings go, I’d probably put the somewhat older pied pipers of the early “we are special” boomers into the same mix, and extend that we-are-special portion of the “boomer” class back into the late war years. And I’d stipulate that it was a phenomenon largely confined to university students.
Although those of us who were born later in that cohort had more thoroughly suburban and mid-century modern lives, there was something about those in the first seven or so years of the “special” cohort who seemed really to believe that they represented destiny itself.
And if you think about it, mid and late boomers were part of a student population glut, a superabundance, a surplus straining the infrastructure and the environment; and by the time of the first Earth Day, we were being reminded by our teachers that we ourselves were the problem, and not the solution embodied in a vanguard class.
Thinking even more critically and reflectively about it, I’d go on to say that even the Korean War era vets that I knew as adults while I was growing up, seemed to lack the dignity, calm, moral straightness and general purposefulness that I saw and took for granted in my close generation’s fathers. The guys who were ten years younger that my own dad, who served in the last year of the war at age 17, were to my young perspective clearly a cut in quality below the men I looked up to as completely reliable and trustworthy.
Frankly, I think it (meaning a recognizably general positive moral effect) was due to the effects of the Depression and the war experience on a certain, relatively narrow bandwidth age group. I don’t believe it did anything to improve the virtuousness of those who were say, over 12 when it hit; and I am persuaded that as soon as its economic effects ended, so did any of the virtue enhancing effects that went along with it.
As a kid in the 60’s, I knew people who were born early in the century, and they seemed to carry no special virtues with them. I knew many who would have been of fighting age in the early 1950’s, and they were nothing great. And for the born ’43 – to 1951 crowd … nothing special across the board there either, though they were convinced that The Spirit of the Age had descended on their heads like a tongue of flame, to enlighten them, free them, and anoint them to judge and to lead.
But as others have pointed out, a great deal of good music was generated. Just who gets credit for that, is hard to say.