Colin McGuire – Woodstock
This week’s film Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music was a very interesting and powerful documentary. A music festival and concert turned into something much larger and more popular than what was planned. Half a million young people peacefully came together for three days and listened to music. For them, the music was much more than just music. It spoke to them. It had much deeper thoughts and ideas that everyone there agreed on. Woodstock happened during a year full of tragedies and violence. There were the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, race riots, the beatings at the Democratic convention, and the continuing Vietnam War (lecture). At this point in time, the youth of the nation had a much different way of thinking than their parents and elders. The youth population was all about peace and communication. And for them, Woodstock provided the perfect opportunity for just that. In the movie Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music there was a quote about “people coming together, communicating, and helping each other out.” Mind you some of the help was the announcer informing the massive crowd of 500,000 people of the bad acid circulating, but there was nothing but peace. In our reading “Remembering the Dangers of Rock and Roll: Toward A Historical Narrative of the Rock Festival” Schowalter mentions “The theme of a spell-bound audience – rather that spell-binding musical performances.” This goes to show that it was not all just about the music, it was again about people being there together in peace making a statement to the world. The youth population wanted change. They were even more anti Vietnam War than the rest of the country. There were many peaceful protests across the country. In a sense, Woodstock could be categorized under this. Woodstock was huge, and it an appropriate impact. From the movie referring the festival, “The thing was big, too big for the world.”