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The Woodstock Generation T-Shirt
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About the Product
It’s remarkable that a rock festival became so culturally defining that it is used as a way to label a whole generation and even just those who were culturally sympathetic. Who are they? I suppose it’s that baby boomer generation when youth culture reaches an apogee not previously seen.
However, that’s not the whole story. It doesn’t apply to anyone of a post-war age group. It doesn’t include people to whom a rock gig, let alone a festival, was cultural kryptonite. It’s easy to forget that a lot, probably most people were not putting flowers in guns or grooving to Dark Star by the Grateful Dead. The ‘normal’ people were on those bus tours of Haight Ashbury, gawping at hippies. In Britain, outside of a hip elite, the 60’s didn’t really happen until the 70s. Long hair on men was a major statement. Even in 1979, I was the first person in our family to ever go to college. Brown rice was only sold in wholefood stores which also sold such things with lentils, organic flour, pinto beans, TVP mince and soya milk. All things now commonly available in a supermarket bought initially by the Woodstock Generation.
While at the actual festival, the good folk of Wallkill rather nobly made sandwiches to feed the festival attendees and were often sympathetic to them, they were not the Woodstock Generation either. I loved that they weren’t hostile to them. At Isle Of Wight however, the British Woodstock Generation was already suspiciously seen by an Isle of Wight islander, who claimed with all the self-assured authority of a deranged talk radio caller that "behind the hippies are black power, and behind black power is communism". Yeah, pal, freaking out to Taste and The Moody Blues is all part of a Communist plot. The Woodstock, or indeed Isle Of Wight Generation was already being put down, albeit by old paranoid fascist men. And to be fair organiser Ricky Farr said “This festival business is becoming a psychedelic concentration camp. What is all this peace and love shit when you've got police dogs out there?” which reflected problems ahead for The Woodstock Generation.
As time went on, the definition spread out and pulled more into its orbit. Soon, if you had a copy of Tapestry and a pair of jeans, you were in. No longer did you have to be in a commune or work with Wavy Gravy at the Hog Farm, a Jefferson Airplane album qualified you.
So by 1978, when on the Back To The Bars live album, Todd Rundgren refers to ‘the Woodstock generation’ he is using the term broadly to describe people who go to rock gigs, which is pretty wide. I also feel it applies to younger people like me who broadly align with the culture from brown rice and lentils to Butterfield Blues Band albums and ecology.
Yet the term still has weight, being synonymous with people concerned with a certain set of values and as such is often regarded as a bete noire by those who don’t share them. And there are those who started out part of the freaky world but over the years transitioned to the other side and sometimes became a vocal opponent of everything the term represented. But to those that still feel they are keeping the flame alive, in whatever way they can, being part of the Woodstock Generation is a matter of pride and still represents the best hope for humanity.
The Woodstock Generation T-Shirt DJTees Originals
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