BACK TO THE GARDEN

AN AQUARIAN EXPOSITION in WHITE LAKE, N.Y.

FIFTY-FIVE YEARS ago on August 15, 1969, the Woodstock Music & Art Fair commenced at Max Yasgur's Farm in Bethel, New York, at exactly 5:07 p.m., which was the very moment rhythmic folk 'n' soul singer/songwriter Richie Havens took the stage. World culture-popular, political, and sociological-has never quite been the same ever since Havens strummed the opening chords of "From the Prison" on his battered Guild D40 acoustic guitar, and the first sounds of Woodstock rang out into eternity.

Indeed, the deeply felt vibes of three-well, technically, four-days of music, communion, and collective harmony instantly catapulted that long, heady, extended weekend of August 15-18, 1969, directly into the history books. The zeitgeist event that was Woodstock showed everyone how the counterculture ethos had spread and bled into the mainstream. Over a half-century-plus later, the core tenets of Woodstock are constantly being revisited and re-evaluated by generations old and new alike in their daily livesnot to mention by way of the voluminous related aural/visual offerings that have been shared across many a multimedia option in the interim.

We Are Stardust, We Are Golden

To say there were challenges in capturing both the sound and the vision during a weekend strewn with all sorts of natural and man-made strife for the planned Woodstock film and soundtrack releases would be an understatement. "It was a big moment when Richie Havens hit the stage, and the sound worked," Michael Lang, the event's chief organizer, told me the first time we spoke about Woodstock over a decade ago. "Everybody could hear him, and he made that connection with the audience. That was a big moment of relief." (Sadly, Lang passed away at age 77 on January 8, 2022.)