Woodstock 40th B'Day today: Woodstock is a Living Thing-Melanie Safka
is Melanies take on Woodstock 40 years ago today. Woodstock is a living thing!
Some strange reason, the vid is not showing up in the picture here, so just click that link! (peace)
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It’s forty years ago this week that hundreds of thousands converged on a plot of land in New York state and became part of a now legendary event. The organisers were businessmen and were out to make money but they could never have predicted the numbers that would flock to the site. The gates were thrown open and it ended up being a free festival epitomising the zeitgeist of peace and love, plus a bit of sex, drugs and rock’n'roll. The story was epitomised by one performer.
Melanie was a relative unknown in the music business but she asked the organisers if she could get involved. Just before she went on stage, candles were being handed out as part of an unrelated silent protest. As Melanie nervously picked up her guitar, the enormous crowd was so taken by her performance, they started waving their candles. In the decades that followed, music fans would relive that moment time and again at their own concerts, with lighters rather than candles.
On Thursday’s Connect the World, I sit down with Melanie in a famous London Sixties hangout and relive Woodstock and everything that comes with it. Was it really that special? Why is it just as fascinating for people who didn’t go as for those that did?
------Woodstock story at link
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- added this
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One of Melanies songs: "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)"
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- WorldPeaceTV
- 3 months ago
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Woodstock will never be forgotten.. Omg WPTV i have not heard this song is such a long time. thank you for posting this
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I wish the kids of today could enjoy good music, meaningfull music like we had. There are good bands now a days but it's nothing like Janis,Jimmy,CCR.
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Where did the music go, full of words that actually meant something...sigh...I guess I just went to a party in the sixties and never came home...
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Woodstock is actually happening! Woodstock IS a Living thing!
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- WorldPeaceTV
- 3 months ago
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I found this press release fro Melanie about her statement above:
WOODSTOCK IS A LIVING THINGWoodstock, the culmination of a notion~ people coexisting in harmony, consideration with music art and beauty interwoven into every day life. All the makings of Peace and Love, and not just ‘as’ catch phrase or a kitch emblem on a tie dye t-shirt
Somehow Woodstock seemed to beckon as an embodiment of the Aquarian ideals.
And now we have physicists and all sorts of right brainers giving credence to one of my favorites:
The power of our thoughts to change this planet once and for all.Woodstock is a living thing.
It is now, and yet an event that was. And because it materialized in 500 thousand people gathering (making a pilgrimage is more accurate) some who needed it had proof.
Media takes and reality sometimes differ. Over the years I’ve seen the media slants go from serious wonder to making cynical jokes ridiculous …sex drugs, rock n roll, even the name ‘hippie’. Someone given a name sets them apart as being different, than say…you! It’s divisive.Woodstock somehow got people together before they got meddled with. It was immaculate in its chaos and forever gave me the reality of mankind’s connectedness. Now, we’d better all know this. At this point it would be wise for everyone to know this:
we are connected.I’m not sure performers are the ones to ask about Woodstock. We weren’t in it! I wanted to be, I was there, and not there!
So my personal subjective recall has very little to do with what it really was. I would like to tell you I was rolling around in the mud getting naked, but mostly I watched and sensed. I observed a situation that reminded me of some distant yet existing ideal.~It was right. The walls were coming down and I was witness, about to go through an ordeal that I instinctively felt was life or death. I lived.
Even though, and I quote my own song, “I tried to Die Young”.Woodstock and the Mything years. My life, My life, the story of my life…
Over the period of 40 years since, I’ve met more people who didn’t go to Woodstock than ones who did. I’ve met loads who say they were there, but they really just saw the movie or confused Gooselake Michigan, one of the many following festivals, with Woodstock. Details~the older I get, the surer I am, that a true account of anything cannot be found, with or without footage. Because if all the people who say they were ‘there’, those 4 million or so would just be getting home right about now.
And this is why we seek the truth because it is not readily available as when a celebrity dies they are so not available, that’s when everyone seeks to find them. And the mythisizing begins.My life My life, the story of my life is much too long and complicated and most of it… untrue.-Love Melanie
