Well, here we are celebrating the 50-year anniversary of Woodstock. Wow, man, how groovy is that?Like far out! If you weren’t there digging the scene, man, you would think that it was like the most fab, really out of sight, man, happening ever. At least that is what all the specials and news write-ups are saying, but was it really?
I didn’t make that scene man, but I watched it happen all around me so I have a far different perspective than many may have.
What really happened at Woodstock? Well a half-million young people trucked on out to upstate New
York and overwhelmed the promoters of a rock and roll concert that were only prepared to handle a
fraction of that number! There was not enough food or restrooms and on top of that it rained, but
there was plenty of mud, R&R, drugs and “free sex”. Woodstock ushered in R&
R concerts all over the western world.
I sadly watched many of my schoolmates and friends leave school on Friday as a normal student to
attend a concert, drink the “electric Cool Aid” and return on Monday as a new self-proclaimed hippie
acid head AKA a space cadet. They said, “doing acid” was a new religion that promised an experience with “god”.
Things continued downhill as my generation was duped by people like Harvard drop-out professor
Timothy Leary. Leary grew his hair out and stuck flowers in it and donned a white robe to travel from
campus to campus inciting students to rebel while spouting his mantra “turn on, tune in and drop out”. (He actually looked ridiculous.)
Up to that time there had never been a generation in all the history of the world that had as much as
that generation yet rebelled against anything and everything; rejecting and throwing it away to do our
own thing. There are a lot of old “Woodstocker’s” that might disagree, saying “that was some
happening man!” as they glory in their Woodstock days.
But, is that living in realsville man? Only if you are still trippin’, can it be. No. The Woodstock’s and the whole 60’s hip scene was a bad trip that opened a Pandora’s Box of rebellion into America that also spread through much of the world and can never be closed without the Lord’s intervention. As one former Berkley hippie told me recently, “We just rebelled against anything our parents or their
generation valued. We didn’t know why, but if they were for it, we were against it.” So, they replaced
marriage with “free love”. Christianity was replaced with all sorts of Eastern religions that were
compatible with their newfound drug culture. And, disobedience, lawlessness and rebellion have
become the celebrated norms.
Happy Birthday Woodstock!
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