I No Longer Belong at Music Festivals
A sign of fading love
When I tell my students that I was thirteen when Woodstock celebrated youth and music and even certain counter-cultural moments, they look at me like I’m either some museum exhibit or that I was a fool not to attend.
“But I never really wanted to go,” I say. “I was barely a teenager; I didn’t get high, and I was still more into pop music than to the heavier, headier sounds of Jimi, the Airplane, Canned Heat, Richie, and Country Joe.”
The only one of these I didn’t have to explain was Jimi.
“Besides, I don’t like camping — failed at it even as a would-be Boy Scout — and I can take big crowds for a few hours, but not three days. I also like to be washed and clean when I go to bed, and there are plenty of moments in the day when I prefer silence. And I hate port-a-potties.”
As you can imagine, none of this helped my cause with the college students who had formerly considered me cool.
Or maybe I’m not giving them enough credit, for when I showed some of the footage from Woodstock — Jimi playing the national anthem — they did seem a bit stunned.
All those people crammed together in a big field. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Back then, while some were worried about the earth, ecology, and global…
