By: David Schultz

This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, the 3 day music festival in Bethel, New York that helped define the Sixties. The commemoration of the event starts today with the reissue of Michael Wadleigh’s Academy Award winning documentary Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music, on which a young pre-Mean Streets Martin Scorsese toiled as editor and helped create the film’s multi-panel presentation.

The summer months will likely see a whole host of Woodstock remembrances of varying quality. One which doesn’t seem probable is the rumored anniversary celebration in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York put together by Michael Lang, who helped organize the original festival. With the actual anniversary dates, August 15-18 unavailable, the Brooklyn event seemed doomed from its inception.

On a more definite note, on August 18, Rhino will release 40 Years On: Back To Yasgur’s Farm, a 6 CD set which will recreate the festival in chronological order over its 77 tracks. Those hoping to get those long unheard Quill, Bert Sommer and John Morris tracks as well as the continual updates on the quality of the acid being passed around can rejoice but anyone looking for music from The Band’s set will have to keep searching. Listeners can judge for themselves if The Grateful Dead’s harsh self-assessment of their set was accurate: 40 Years On contains their complete version of “Dark Star.”

The most authentic anniversary celebration will take place in Woodstock at the Bethel Woods Center For The Arts, which sits on the site of the original festival. On August 14, Richie Havens will once again open the festivities with a show featuring the “Heroes of Woodstock” taking place the next night. The Levon Helm Band, Jefferson Starship, Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Mountain, Tom Constanten (Grateful Dead) and Country Joe McDonald are scheduled to perform.

The festivities will stretch into the fall; on October 25, West Fest, a left coast celebration of the festival, will take place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The free show will feature performances by Country Joe McDonald, poet Michael McClure and Ray Manzarek of The Doors, The Chambers Brothers, Barry “The Fish” Melton, Blue Cheer, Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks, guitarist Harvey Mandel and Denny Laine of The Moody Blues.

The low key celebrations will hopefully restore the dignity to a festival whose legacy of brotherhood and communal goodwill has been consistently raped by those trusted with its care. Woodstock 94 in Saugerties, New York cast the first stain upon the storied festival’s reputation and five years later, the commercialism and lawlessness of Woodstock 99, held on an Air Force base in Rome, New York, destroyed any shred of the festival’s status as an ongoing symbol of love and peace. Co-opting Woodstock’s peaceful ideals as a marketing tool, Woodstock 99 marked the lowest point in the uncomfortable shotgun marriage between art and commerce.

The entire festival season is premised on recapturing the magic that occurred at Woodstock in 1969; it's a feat unlikely to ever be repeated. To put things in persepctive as to how things have changed in 40 years: this year's Bonnaroo featuring Phish and Bruce Springsteen costs roughly $250 not including food, drink and travel and you will not get on the campgrounds without a ticket; at the original Woodstock, where The Who and Jimi Hendrix performed, tickets were $18, people shared everything they had and most people were let in for free.

Labels: Woodstock