I remember the crowd of 400,000 people passing joints and proclaiming peace and love. I remember Santana’s lightning-speed riffs and the long-haired hippies skinny dipping in the lake. But to this day, I remember Jimi Hendrix with his (supposedly) acid-soaked bandana and fringe-shirt playing the Star Spangled Banner. I saw my dad’s attempt at musical education as some rare form of torture in which I was forced to sit still for almost four hours (225 minutes to be exact). As a 12-year-old girl at the time, I didn’t much care about Woodstock, the musicians or the counterculture. #Mesmerized wiz khalifa cover art tvSo, on a winter’s night in Colorado, my father sat me down, flipped on the tv and made me join him to live vicariously through the wild video footage of the festival he missed. I think my father always regretted choosing responsibility over his chance to throw caution to the wind and join his friends for a magical weekend - one Rolling Stone listed as one of the “50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll” - a pivotal moment in the development of the counterculture. My dad had been a manager of a shoe store in Massachusetts that famed summer of ‘69 and missed his golden opportunity to see a lineup of 32 of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s finest including Janis Joplin, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix and The Band. When I was a kid, my father (a passionate music lover with a vinyl collection that would make 60s and 70s aficionados drool) made me sit down to watch the director’s cut of the documentary Woodstock.
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