The novelist Graham Greene once wrote: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” When you consider that in his teenage years, Dave Grohl left the cushy suburbs of his youth and was living in a van, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to realise that for the Foo Fighters frontman, it was the adventurous promise of rock ‘n’ roll that prognosticated his future when he was a young whipper-snapper wondering what his place in the world would be.
Thankfully, he also turned out to be a naturally gifted musician, so he got to follow his dream to fruition, even if the moment that first awakened him to the ways of rock was a documentary depicting an unattainable cultural zenith, a renaissance coming to a culmination, the last days of Rome, if you will. The documentary in question was, of course, Woodstock.
Back in 2013, the Nirvana drummer told Mojo: “I saw it as a nine-year-old child and was so blown away that the live versions of these classic rock songs by Jimi Hendrix, Crosby Stills and Nash or The Who sounded different from the studio versions. Watching Jimi Hendrix drowning in feedback – that’s better than the album!”
The line-up also included Joan Baez, Blood, Sweat and Tears, The Band, Credence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, Grateful Dead, Joe Cocker and more. But aside from the mammoth names, there was also the wallop of sentiment that Grohl reflects upon, stating: “Seeing these people slacking and gritting their teeth, it was such a raw vision of live music. More than watching any sports, or science fiction, watching the Woodstock movie as a kid took me to another place”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of love, it was the age of folly, it was Woodstock 1969 – the high point of the counterculture movement in every which way. The famed festival marked the fuzzy peak of spring’s hopeful intoxication and forecasted the despair of winter’s comedown.
For three days in August ’69, just north of New York City, in a small town in the Catskill Mountains, the great unwashed came together, and the world has been reeling from the miasma kicked up ever since. As Jimi Hendrix poeticised: “500,000 halos outshined the mud and history. We washed and drank in God’s tears of joy, and for once, and for everyone, the truth was not a mystery. Love called to all; music is magic.”
It’s a cliched appraisal of the concert film to say, “It makes you realise what it would have been like to be there.” While Woodstock might not achieve the impossible feat of transporting you back to the era-defining festivities, it serves up enough peace-and-love-addled carnage to at least offer a glimpse. It was enough for Grohl to start doubting religion and start believing in his rock heroes, Led Zeppelin, anyhow.
The show itself represents a pivotal moment in music. Few concerts in history continually pop up in the discourse of culture, quite as frequently as Woodstock. Upon release, it was rightfully acclaimed as a fine piece of counterculture filmmaking featuring some spellbinding performances, but now the film has been imbued with the fascinating edge of retrospect.
Woodstock not only features Jimi Hendrix at his spellbinding best, but it is also a wonderful kaleidoscopic encapsulation of a moment in time that transfigures the film a piece of art to the heights of an important historical document, brilliantly captured by director Michael Wadleigh – “with a cast of half a million outrageously friendly people.” However, if you ask a solid selection of those folks, they’d probably tell you that you’re better off just watching the film rather than being there.
ASSOCIATED PRESS A police officer inspects the spot after a stampede at the venue of a music concert at the Cochin University of Science and Technology in Kochi, Kerala state, India, Saturday, Nov. 25. Four people died and dozens of students were injured in the incident. NEW DELHI >> A stampede during a music festival at a university in southern India on Saturday killed at least four students and injured 60 others, according to news agency Press Trust of […]
