Word: woodstock
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...anniversary of Woodstock arrived and waned, much like the first time around. It was mostly a convenience for the media, a way to get a handle on an upstart pop phenomenon. For music, a fan remembered, all the festival symbolized was a washout. Lysergic mud and bad amplification. The rest was a fairy tale...
...course, the audience has had a summer of softening up. The Who, who had played at Woodstock, had already come back, getting a jump on things when they were meant to be gone for good. Keith Moon, their great drummer, had taken some of the band's careening keenness with him when he died in 1978. Pete Townshend, their great songwriter and guitar player, his hearing shredded by more than two decades of high decibels, could not even re-create all his lead parts. Still they soldiered on, three bowed veterans suffering the onset of shell shock from a barrage...
...just the sound track for the '60s. It spurred on and helped shape a whole culture. It was central to change in a way that nothing -- certainly no music -- has been since. Rock was always a music of turbulence, and history, for a while there, caught the beat. Woodstock was a dodge, a growth industry that tie-dyed much that was fierce and righteous in the music into something stuporous and evasive. The seeds of nostalgia were planted in those sodden, trodden New York State fields before the festival was over. Memories were rolled like joints. Smoke...
Nostalgia was the only dirty word in the rock vocabulary. This music had never looked back before. But history could walk away from rock once it had been put snugly into that Woodstock pasture. Rock reacted by turning inward, to the softer personal speculations of the '70s singer-songwriters, then reacted again, first by exploding (punk), then by chilling out into the cerebrations of the New Wave bands like the Talking Heads and the slick, slightly spooky amusement-park soul of Michael Jackson...
...suicidal nostalgia" surrounding a lot of contemporary music: "People have been sold a bill of goods about the '60s, as if it were some kind of social Golden Age, when there was no Viet Nam, no social conflict. There weren't any Negroes, nothing bad happened. You have Woodstock, but you don't have the war. You have Jim Morrison as some image of sexual nirvana, but you don't have Janis Joplin for the miserable junkie she was. But Dylan, the Beatles, Aretha, the Stones, all the good music cannot be separated from the fear and the terror that...