AUGUST 2019 — 105IMAGE: ALAMY (JIMI HENDRIX), GETTY IMAGES.
I
was not a part of the Woodstock generation. That
dubious honour belonged to my parents, the
bell-bottomed men and women of the 1950s and
1960s, who grew up in a Bombay that didn’t look
askance at youth in tie-dyed clothing. They were
the ones who tacked up posters of The Who, torn from
magazines sold second-hand on the streets of Fort, the
ones who passed around vinyl records of Woody Guthrie
and Joni Mitchell and the ones who nodded along to
the sounds of Jimi Hendrix in bars that have long been
taken over by banking institutions.
When I look back at how I was introduced to the
music of Woodstock, it’s with surprise because so much
of what I took for granted wasn’t necessarily familiar to
the rest of India. While the festival took place between
August 15 and 18 in 1969, Indira Gandhi was Prime
Minister, and our country was dealing with a problem
that’s never really gone away. There were communal
riots in Gujarat that year, less than a month after the
festival in New York. If there was something simmering
in the air in the months before that tragedy, it’s safe
to assume music had no part of it. Some reports claim
that 2,000 people lost their lives, which presumably
made it hard for millions of people to focus on “3 days of
peace & music”, even if Rolling Stone magazine would
eventually say it had changed the history of rock ’n’ roll.
There were other momentous diversions, including
the splitting of the Indian National Congress and the
death of movie star Madhubala, both of which took
up a lot more newsprint than reviews of an American
music festival. It’s why I often wonder at how my
parents – in small Roman Catholic nooks of Colaba and
Byculla – had access to what so many of their peers
were effectively denied. In an age of state-controlled
television, decades before YouTube and streaming
services, the possibility of stumbling upon live
performances of Woodstock was remote.
I first heard it on cassette, a double edition culled
from the original triple-LP set sold by vendors on DN
Road. It could have been a pirated copy. This was in the
1980s, and I had been steadily moving past the hair
bands and synthesiser pop of my day in an attempt to
understand where it had all come from. As a habit, it
has served me well, this refusal to accept the present
without attempting to explore its precedents. A number
of names on the back of the cassette seemed familiar
anyway, thanks to the mixed bag of records owned and
played by my parents, so I picked it up and popped it
into my Walkman for the train ride home.
There was no epiphany, despite what scores of music
writers and critics may have felt, presumably because
they had expectations I didn’t. My culture simply
didn’t permit me to understand the nuances of what
Woodstock meant, what it stood for or what it was a
movement against. That knowledge came much later,
with repeated listenings over the following decades.
Some songs managed to age well (will the Hendrix
interpretation of the “Star Spangled Banner” ever get
old?), while others lost their potency. What it started to
become, as I grew older and the events of 1969 began toreveal how they fit into a larger scheme of things, was a
historical document.
When I listen to the soundtrack now, I have specific
reactions to some of the tracks, and a subtle appreciation
not just for the snippets of banter, but the implications
of what the artistes were singing about. The opening by
John Sebastian of The Lovin’ Spoonful, for example, was
supposedly an impromptu appearance, but sets the tone
for so much of what Woodstock hoped to accomplish.
“I had a dream last night, What a lovely dream it was,
I dreamed we all were alright, Happy in a land of Oz”
ought to sound twee any time after 1970, but doesn’t
because it is informed by the music that follows it.
Then there was Richie Havens, whose three-hour set
was reduced to something he came up with to stall for
time, a reworking of the spiritual “Motherless Child”
that was eventually titled “Freedom”. As more of his
music from that day was revealed in later editions
of the soundtrack, it is marvellous to consider how a
throwaway filler song catapulted him to stardom and
continues to define his legacy. It was followed by Joan
Baez’s cover of The Byrds’ “Drug Store Truck Drivin’
Man”, with its reference to the Ku Klux Klan, Sha-Na-
Na’s doo-wop “At the Hop”, Neil Yong’s broody “Sea Of
Madness” and “The Fish Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-
Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish that continues to
be a benchmark for call-and-response live recordings.
I still turn to the soundtrack, sometimes because Joe
Cocker’s cover of “With A Little Help From My Friends”
is the best way to end a drunken evening, at other times
because the Sly & The Family Stone medley can inject
a shot of adrenaline into the most melancholic day. So
much of the music is now familiar to millions across the
rest of the world, which doesn’t make sense given how
local it was meant to be, and how far from its original
profit-making origins it was. Its organisers didn’t know
what hit them – as the celebrated documentary makes
painfully obvious – but they couldn’t possibly have
known what the repercussions of their venture would be,
or how it would continue to have an influence on not just
the idea of a music festival, but the way artistes would
start to believe in their ability to usher in change.
The fact that issues relevant to the cause of
Woodstock are still pertinent half a century on is what
makes listening to it a bittersweet experience in 2019.
It is that continued relevance though that also makes
it special.
Lindsay Pereira writes about music, literature and the odd music festival from
a distance