75. Woodstock, the album cover.
Photograph by Burk Uzzle, who called it Two in half a million, Bobbi Kelly and Nick Ercoline greet the dawn on August 17, 1969.
Saw the Woodstock movie, in some theatre near the top end of Bourke Street, but didn't sing along with County Joe & The Fish, but thrilled to the rest of it. Wondering, if I'd been there, would I have taken the brown acid that was being passed around that was, apparently, not specifically too good, or would I have swum naked with all the others, would I have boogied to Canned Heat, would I have slid in the mud while Santana played, would I passed the joint on or smoked it til' the end, and while I know I would have listened with rapt attention while The Who performed Tommy, would I have stayed until Jimi Hendrix finished wrapping it all up in the morning of the fourth day,or gone home after the three days was up, like most of the half a million people did, tired and hungry, and missing out on the greatest guitar solo of all time. But afterwards, I'm walking back to Flinders Street Station filled with the hippie ethic of peace, love and understanding. Still am, mostly, except for the times when I'm not.
The hippie in me still wants to rant and rave and yell at all those right-wing hard-line fuckers in most governments with their absolute and unthinking and total commitment to economic rationalism and neoliberalism and the free market that's screwing everything, absolutely everything, right up. The realities of today are not what they could have been.
The photograph is the proof of Weegee's dictum that the action is not what the audience is looking at, the action is the audience. But reading somewhere that Bobbi Kelly and Nick Ercoline are still together, as of 2009, but the rug apparently disintegrated years ago. |