RobKirkpatrick.com

Read my column on Altamont, the flipside of Woodstock, on The Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-kirkpatrick/the-day-the-music-died-th_b_381731.html

Okay, so turns out I was on NPR’s All Things Considered afterall.  It’s kind of a funny little skit on 40th anniversary burnout.  You can hear it and read the transcript at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120652963 

I don’t know that I would cite the Wendy’s burger as a huge anniversary moment, but to each his own…

Thanks again to Travis Larchuck at NPR for including me in the spot.

- Rob

Bobbi and Nick Ercoline in the seminal photo from the 1969 Woodstock festival. © Burk Uzzle/Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery, New York.

While attending the Awards for Excellence banquet for Mid-Hudson Valley (NY) school system teachers, staff, and administrators last night – where my mother received a career achievement award for her work as a Reading Recover teacher and trainer- I had the opportunity to meet Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, the “undercover lovers” of the 1969 Woodstock festival who were captured in the iconic image that appeared on the cover of the original soundtrack album. The Ercolines married two years after the festival and still live in the area, and the image of their embrace amid the peopled landscape in Bethel, New York, that momentous weekend stands as one of the more poignant images to come out of the summer of ‘69.  Here’s a link to a Daily News story about the couple from this past summer:

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/2009/07/07/2009-07-07_woodstocks_undercover_lovers_.html

When I was introduced to the Ercolines, I feared that they would be annoyed by yet another person wanting to talk to them because of a moment that occurred 40 years ago.  As seminal a photograph as it is, it was 40 years ago, after all, and people go on to live their own lives.  (Case in point: Bobbi was also honored at the ceremony for her work as a nurse in the Pine Bush school district.)  I asked Nick if he ever gets tired of being asked about the photo, but he smiled and spoke of welcoming a sense of responsibility for talking about the photograph and the moment it was taken, as he and his wife realize how much the photo represents for the Woodstock generation and those that have followed. And Bobbi even flashed a peace sign at my mother – how cool is that?  My sincere thanks to the Ercolines for graciously humoring my curiosity – and congratulations to her and to my mother for their awards.

And on the subject of my mother’s award…Earlier in the day, my 1969 book surpassed the sales goal I’d set for it on BookScan.  But you can sell thousands of copies of a book, yet the one thing that gets you truly emotional is seeing your mother receive some long overdue recognition.

- Rob

To mark the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s performance at Woodstock – which occurred on August 18, 1969, the morning after the festival was officially scheduled to end – here are a couple of related excerpts from 1969: The Year Everything Changed…

American Indians seemed to be much on the minds of counterculture members at the end of the decade. In his short story, “Because my Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock,” Sherman Alexie wrote, “During the Sixties, my father was the perfect hippie, since all the hippies were trying to be Indians.” As part of their back-to-the-land yearnings, many hippies took to Native American fashions as a gesture to the peoples who originally had the land to themselves, before the onset of industrialization brought by European whites. Even Hendrix, himself part Cherokee, performed his famous Woodstock set in a fringed tribal jacket and moccasins. Historian Philip Deloria said that such hippies were merely “playing Indian”: “‘Indians’ could be both civilized and indigenous. They could critique modernity and yet reap its benefits. They could revel in the creative pleasure of liberated meanings while still grasping for something fundamentally American. … Not only in the communes but in politics, environmentalism, spirituality, and other pursuits, Indianness allowed counterculturists to have their cake and to eat it.”

***

By the time Jimi Hendrix, the final performer and the festival’s true headline act, took the stage Monday morning, all but roughly 50,000 of the festival crowd had departed, driven away by filth, hunger, and exhaustion. “Having waited up all night, the audience understandably seemed as groggy as we were, and it was horrible to see people packing up and leaving as we came on,” Mitch Mitchell said. “Monday morning was back to the grind for a lot of people who’d come and it couldn’t be helped.”

Monck incorrectly introduced the group—with Mitchell on drums but Billy Cox on bass, Larry Lee on backing guitar, Jumma Sultan and Jerry Velez adding percussion—under the old name of the “Jimi Hendrix Experience.” Hendrix came out dressed in his fringed Native American tribal shirt and jeans and moccasins and red bandana. “I see that we meet again, hmmm…,” he said to the crowd, and reintroduced his new group as Gypsy, Sun and Rainbow….[F]or his instrumental interpretation of Francis Scott Key’s patriotic tune, Hendrix pulled out all stops, bending and torturing the tune’s melody to create an anthem for the land of free love and the home of a brave new world. In his pyrotechnic sound effects, one heard machine guns and falling bombs, the sounds of chaos straight out of the Southeast Asian jungles. David Fricke writes: “If the Experience tried to play power-jazz at the speed of light, Hendrix at Woodstock was a rough prototype for a new black-rock futurism, the missing link between Sly Stone’s taut, rainbow-party R&B and George Clinton’s blown-mind, ghetto-army funk: ‘Dance to the Music’ plus ‘Message to Love’ equals ‘Cosmic Slop.’” “It was the most electrifying moment of Woodstock, and it was probably the single greatest moment of the sixties,” wrote Al Aronowitz of the New York Post. You finally heard what that song was about, that you can love your country, but hate the government.” Hendrix would describe: “They made me sing it in school, so it was a flashback. We’re all Americans, aren’t we? When it was written then, it was played in what they call a very, very beautiful state, nice and inspiring, your heart throbs and you say, ‘Great, I’m American!’ But nowadays when we play it, we don’t play to take away all this greatness that America’s supposed to have. We play it the way the air is in America today. The air is slightly static, isn’t it? You know what I mean?”

MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 1969, BETHEL, N.Y.

Spilling over into Monday morning…