{"id":26930,"date":"2019-08-28T08:00:31","date_gmt":"2019-08-28T12:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=26930"},"modified":"2020-03-04T09:53:32","modified_gmt":"2020-03-04T14:53:32","slug":"screw-woodstock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/28\/screw-woodstock\/","title":{"rendered":"SCREW WOODSTOCK"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t<\/strong><\/span> go to Woodstock. Never even thought about going. Wasn\u2019t into Woodstock, period. I disdained anything popular. That was me. (My future wife, Alice, went to Woodstock for a fraction of a day. She saw Richie Havens and left because Woodstock was too crowded. By the way, Richie Havens was OK with me because he wasn’t super popular.)<\/p>\n

I saw most of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, which was two weeks before Woodstock. I should have seen the whole blues festival but my sister got married in Cleveland the same weekend. The chutzpah. I had to bounce back and forth from the wedding to the festival. I was the blues festival’s PR chairman, so I placed ads in major daily newspapers, Coda<\/em> (a Canadian jazz mag), underground newspapers and Rolling Ston<\/em>e. I got in touch with the Voice of America, which taped the event. (The tapes haven\u2019t resurfaced. Some other tapes have. There is a\u00a0 just-released live double album.)\u00a0 I worked with an ad agency in downtown Cleveland — a guy there did ads for the key company my dad worked at.<\/p>\n

\"ann

First A2 Blues Festival, 1969.<\/p><\/div>\n

The blues festival drew 20,000, and we spent about $60,000 from the University of Michigan and Canterbury House — an Episcopalian coffeehouse. That was a lot of money. ($419,000 in today’s terms.) I got a free trip out of it, to New York to talk to WNET. They weren\u2019t interested in filming the festival because they had just done the Memphis Blues Festival.<\/p>\n

Woodstock go<\/strong><\/span>t a lot of ink because of the big crowd and the movie (1970).<\/p>\n

Another national music festival in August 1969\u00a0 was the Atlantic City Pop Festival. That drew about 100,000. Atlantic City Pop — you don\u2019t hear much about that anymore. You don\u2019t hear much about the Ann Arbor Blues Festival either.<\/p>\n

The blues festival committee was U-M “blues freaks.” Most were Jews. University Activities Center — a student programming organization — ran an ad in the Daily<\/em> that said hey-you-want-to-put-on-a-blues-festival? The student who placed that ad was Cary Gordon. He had a thing for Clifton Chenier. Gotta bring in Chenier! We did. And we brought in everybody else, too: Fred McDowell, Son House, Big Mama Thornton, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, and more. These old black musicians had a certain presence. They knew more about music and life than we did. Screw Woodstock.<\/p>\n

*Speaking of old, B.B. King was 43. Son House was 67. Sleepy John Estes was the oldest at 70.
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I didn\u2019t go to Woodstock. Never even thought about going. Wasn\u2019t into Woodstock, period. I disdained anything popular. That was me. (My future wife, Alice, went to Woodstock for a fraction of a day. She saw Richie Havens and left because Woodstock was too crowded. By the way, Richie Havens was OK with me because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-of-age"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26930"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26950,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26930\/revisions\/26950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}