Published On: 08-22-2009 11:26 PM
Blog Category: No Category
Blog Tags: woodstock, viet nam war, music, the who, beatles, rolling stones, santana, summer of love, 1969, monterey pop festival, beach boys, rock concert, rock festival

Well, it’s been 40 years since Woodstock.  No, I’m not going to lie and say I was there.  I wasn’t.  I was only 13 and I lived in Idaho.  New York was quite a way out of my neighborhood and too far to ride my bike.  And of course my parents wouldn’t have let me go either.  But I would have liked to have been there.

At 13 I was impressionable and very much in awe of rock and roll and those that played it.  I worshipped the Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys, and lots of others that weren’t there.  I also worshipped the Who, Jefferson Airplane and others that were. At the time, I hadn’t yet heard of most of those that played Woodstock, but I certainly heard of them after.  Either my horizons were expanded or because Woodstock propelled many of those that played it even higher in the Rock and Rolls hierarchy; certainly so for Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

After Woodstock, rock festivals started happening everywhere; even a few in my neck of the woods.  Soon after Woodstock, a 14 year old girl in my neighborhood snuck away one weekend to attend a Rock Festival that was held somewhere in the northwest - much to the chagrin of her parents.  It caused quite a bit of talk in our neighborhood and her parents were pretty worried.  After she’d been gone a few days, her dad expressed his disgust and said that he didn’t believe for a minute that Debbie was interested in rocks…  It was the term “rock festival” that he didn’t understand.  When he heard where she was, he assumed that a rock festival was a gathering of people who collected rocks.

After Woodstock, my friends and I were interested in the album and movie of the concert that followed.  I have to admit that I didn’t really like the music that I heard.  I’ve sort of suspected for a long time that the music really wasn’t that good there.  However, with all the documentaries that have been on TV this week, I’ve seen some of the original clips of the concert and some of the performances blew me away.  Santana’s Soul Sacrifice alone was worth it.  Watching them has made me wish even more that I was there.  But it wasn’t just the music that made Woodstock an icon of the 60s.  It was the moment.  For one weekend, young people were on their own sharing freedom for the first time.  Four hundred thousand kids many of whom had run away from home just to be there… and it worked.  The concert came off to everyone’s satisfaction, everybody had a good time, and nobody was killed.  Well, one person was accidentally run over and killed; but still...just an accident.  With no real security or supervision, 400,000 thousand kids spent the weekend peacefully.  The “summer of love” was just what was needed... peaceful protest of the Viet Nam war and everything else the adults were doing with the world.     

Woodstock wasn’t the first music festival.  The Monterey Pop festival was in 1967 and in fact inspired the producers of Woodstock.  But Woodstock was life changing.  It was colossal - like nothing else that had ever happened.  Sadly, nothing like it has or will ever happen again.

Published On: 07-30-2009 11:38 PM
Blog Category: No Category
Blog Tags: pop, humor, weirdness, mj, michael jackson, osmonds, eccentric

I was saddened and dismayed to read that Michael Jackson may have been a drug addict. This just goes to show that no matter how good and how normal you think a person is, there's always something. It's a only the sanitized image that the public gets to see. Of course as of now these stories of drug use are just innuendoes and rumors from the coroner’s office. We can choose not to believe them...like we choose not to believe that OJ is the real killer, but if it turns out that MJ was on drugs it’s only because Michael was a victim; a victim of mean people. His father was really really mean to him and so were the police, and his doctors and bill collectors, and especially his plastic surgeons. Mean people can make a person crazy. Just because MJ made and then squandered a billion dollars or so, doesn’t give mean people the right to take away Neverland and make him stop sleeping with 10 year old boys and stuff. Michael invented the Moon Walk for crying out loud - cut him some slack!

People were always so mean to MJ that he had to pay people to be nice to him; In fact that’s why he had to buy the Elephant Man. The E-man and Elizabeth Taylor were the only people he could turn to. Nearly everybody else was mean to him.

Many of Michael’s problems stem from the simple fact that it’s hard growing up in an inter-planetary family. Plus it’s a well known fact that most of his family was black. Not that there is anything wrong with having a black family, but it must have been tough to have been white and to have had black parents... things like that are hard to explain to the other kids when you’re growing up.

Growing up in show business is hard enough and seems to always take a toll on those that make it big.  It’s the price they have to pay.  Michael may have been the biggest so it no surprise that he turned out a little eccentric.  Considering all that he went through, the amazing thing about this story is not that MJ was a little goofy, the amazing story is how normal he and the other Jacksons turned out. You would never guess that Tito and Bubbles were even Jacksons.  Now the Osmonds on the other hand... there’s yer oddballs. In comparison, the Jacksons look just fine.

Published On: 06-21-2009 04:00 AM
Blog Category: No Category
Blog Tags: park city, june, lupine, flowers

June has been extremely wet this year and it seems like we've had a rain storm just about every day this month.  We haven't needed to use our sprinklers this year and mine are still turned off.  The mountains are greener than I've ever seen them and the mountain flowers are spectacular.

Right now the lupine are putting on a spectacular display like these in our neighborhood park.