Hacker Cinema
Woodstock
1970 · Film · documentary · 224 min
Directed by Michael Wadleigh
An intimate look at the Woodstock Music & Art Festival held in Bethel, NY in 1969, from preparation through cleanup, with historic access to insiders, blistering concert footage, and portraits of the concertgoers; negative and positive aspects are shown, from drug use by performers to naked fans sliding in the mud, from the collapse of the fences by the unexpected hordes to the surreal arrival of National Guard helicopters with food and medical assistance for the impromptu city of 500,000.
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9 comments on Hacker News
First time I saw this subject arise: the film(s) about the 1969 Woodstock festival. Finally getting some attention these days.
"It’ll settle once generational churn claims more Boomers and GenX"
Maybe, but I'm not alone in believing there's more to it. Check my reply to giantg2 about Brokaw (for context the thread starts early): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716734
"Boomers have unequivocally failed to accept generational churn and prepare."
That's undoubtedly true but look at the circumstances. The generation to which Brokaw refers did not want their Boomer kids to go through what they experienced and went to great trouble to shield them. Unfortunately, they became spoiled, less resilient and expected everything on a patter. That overcompensation wasn't their fault but the legacy hasn't been nice.
If you havent seen the film about Woodstock you ought to, it's good background material (it shows the other side of the Boomer generation).
Right, that's not physics, it's sociology and political philosophy—metaphysics (defn: above and beyond physics).
I wonder how many people on HN have even heard of Paul Butterfield? Maybe they watched the Woodstock movie and that might be their entire reference. As a life long blues fan he was a favorite.
But as this story illustrates his career was a huge arc of immense fame and then a decline into obscurity after he turned thirty. He turned a lot of boomers onto the blues. He was also responsible for convincing Bob Dylan to adopt electric guitar. I predict some future generation will rediscover him - he was simply too great to be ignored forever.
"Memphis '69: The 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival" is a remarkable music documentary produced by Fat Possum Records. In my opinion, the quality of it is a lot better than the Woodstock documentary. https://youtu.be/aVhyv-S3R0g
Oh yeah, that Woodstock documentary was really good. Didn’t know what happened back then, and was surprised to learn that there was another Woodstock.
"You left out the 8-tracks."
Yeah, I know it was deliberate on two counts. First, my post was pretty long and second, the topic was about Lou Ottens of Philips, 8-track was RCA and others. Besides, 8-track never achieved the large following that the cassette did. Where I saw it being used most (and that was its professional variant) was in radio and TV stations for audio inserts, etc. The number of times I saw it used in say a car was trivial when compared with cassettes. That said, the quality was much better but ultimately it was doomed because it was too big and other commercial considerations.
"<…>small reels of full-size 0.25 inch tape (you still had to thread them yourself).<…>"
I remember those, the quality was pretty terrible and most of them didn't even have electronic [RF-driven] erase head, instead they used a permanent magnet erase head for the purpose. I think everyone was pleased to see the end of them.
"Remember Woodstock came out on stereo LP's, 8-tracks and cassettes,<…>"
Didn't know that but I'm hardly knowledgeable about 8-track releases. I saw the Woodstock movie sometime in 1970 and about four or five times since. I've been meaning to get a copy but not managed to do so yet. It really is a must-own movie given that incredible performance by Hendrix.
"<…>By 1969 mono vinyl was not for any major releases.<…>"
That's my recollection too.
"<…>But FM still cost extra for years to come so plenty of cars were still shipped with the tradtitonal stock AM radio only.<…>"
I'm very familiar with that situation, in the early 1970s I had a lot to do with the transmitting side of FM broadcasting.
"<…>Capitol records, Sergeant Pepper was the only one made at the time.<…>"
There were very few pre-recorded ones around where I was at the time, they were more popular in some areas of the world than others.
"<…>Then Ampex got kicked out of the consumer market<…>"
OK, I can't recall that incident at all. All I know is that the market narrowed for 8-track pretty quickly then essentially it all but disappeared (I never owned a player so I suppose my interest wasn't there to note). Anyway, Ampex wasn’t in the domestic recorder business much after the early 1960s, essentially it had become a pro-recorder only company. My first experience of Apex was with its VR-1000A and VR2000 2" quadruplex machines and the multi-track audio recorders.
"<…>And they had just invented Memorex tape, before that you could not record a live rock concert very well.<…>"
Well, Memorex tape was better than Ampex 406/407 and especially the rotten 'melting' Ampex 456 which shedded the coating in a sticky gooey mess. It was a disaster.
"<…>The Dark Side of the Moon, which was Quadrophonic in concert and also available quad on vinyl.<…>"
Wasn’t aware of quad on vinyl on that recording. About two years ago, I went to a friend's place who has an excellent hi-fi setup, he owned the vinyl recording of The Dark Side of the Moon and I the CD one. We did a critical listening test between the two recordings (I'm not going to enter the debate about which recording sounds best).
Quad was just too much mucking about to take off.
Kids in the 60s were similarly entitled. Watch the Woodstock documentary to see a bunch of hippies trash a small town and leave the townspeople and federal gov't to keep them safe and foot the bill.
The difference is that a hippie who got bored with a commune could get a job and in less than a year had disposable income to pay for goods and services.
Now take a 20-something today who gets bored playing fortnite and decides to get a job. It's the same as the hippie, except a) they have something like 50K of debt (and rising), b) from day 1 their place of business starts getting telemarketer calls for student load consolidation, c) debt collectors call their employer in an attempt to intimate and harass them, d) at worst their wages are garnished to pay the interest on their loan, e) they are depressed because of a-e. (Aside: when that employee leaves the organization the debt consolidation telemarketers very quickly cease calling, which is super creepy.)
That last point about depression is key. Imagine the existential crisis of a hippie who must challenge their idealism and come to terms with the much more limited (yet realistic) freedom that comes when working for a living. Now for the fortnite player add a sense of interminable dread from a sea of debt that cannot be unloaded even in bankruptcy. The small joy of choosing what to do with the money one has saved is gone when one cannot save any money.
I can't think of any persuasive argument that says the hippies wouldn't have been swimming in debt if college had been funded that way in the 60s.
Upshot-- I can't figure out the source of your mixed feelings. If students today are entitled, they are no more entitled than previous generations of students who didn't deal with this kind of debt crisis.
Anyway, a critique of a human institution almost always involves humans who are not acting responsibly. If every institutional critique devolves into a discussion of how irresponsible a critical mass of the actors are, what's the point of doing the institutional critique?
I used to hold an opinion of hippies similar to yours. Then 1. I watched the documentary on Woodstock and saw the disaster they made out of that place and 2. Spent a lot of time around my cousin and her friends when she was in art school. My conclusion was that hippies aren't any better or worse than other people. They suffer the same flaws as everyone else. The downside is that they seem to put forward this air of high-mindedness that rings pretty false to me.
And they have worse hygiene :)
Sheesh, that much I know. I used the "Braveheart" label for aesthetic reasons; I choose the film because it's at once virile, chivalrous and patriotic, while also being synthetic, a cheesy Mel Gibson experience that reminds more of his drunken antics today than anything else (though the "Primae Noctis" scene stuck with me.)
Ditto with Woodstock, it's the largest gathering of insignificant nobodies in recent history (when judged by the values of their society and era.) But it turned into an epoch of its own, and everyone there became significant to history just by virtue of their presence. Just like Tahreer square today.
Hacker News, you're not keeping up.