Chapter 8 A generation goes there to say hello to each other Looking back at Woodstock Music Festival Yuan Yue

If you remember what happened in the sixties, then you didn't live in that era at all. —David Crosby If you rent a boat from the center of New York and sail 160 kilometers upstream along the Hudson River, you will come to a beautiful summer resort, which is Woodstock. This is a typical hilly area with mountains and water and lush vegetation.The small flat land in the mountains has been reclaimed into farmland, and most of the local residents make a living from farming. In 1902, a wealthy British businessman named Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead came here.His father was a successful textile factory owner, but he was very disgusted with the excessive industrialization of British society.Whitehead once studied under John Ruskin, a professor at Oxford University. Ruskin believed that large-scale machine production would flood the market with cheap and unartistic products, and the craftsmanship left over by the ancestors for thousands of years would be lost. Humanity will lose its most precious creative spirit, so he launched an anti-industrialization movement in Britain.Influenced by Ruskin, Whitehead immigrated to the United States with a large sum of money, hoping to find a piece of unpolluted pure land in this new continent and establish an artisan village mainly with handicraft workshops.After traveling around most of the United States, he finally discovered Woodstock.With beautiful mountains and clear waters and not too far from New York, it is an ideal place to build a utopia.

Having made up his mind, Whitehead immediately bought a large piece of land in Woodstock and built thirty wooden houses on it, attracting a group of craftsmen, artists and young students to come here to engage in primitive woodworking, weaving, Artistic creation and productive activities such as ironwork and pottery making.He wanted to exchange handmade products for money to maintain the prosperity of the place, but this plan met with merciless failure. The handmade products they produced were too expensive to compete with large-scale machine production, and the livelihood of this community still needed to be maintained. It depends on the money his father earned when he opened the textile factory.At the same time, Whitehead's authoritarian character and anti-Semitic attitude annoyed his companions, and the original founders established several similar communities nearby.

In the 1920s, as the scale of these communities continued to expand, they gradually merged into a whole.Woodstock slowly became a small town with shops, cafes and restaurants.At the same time, many artists, including writers, musicians, painters and dancers, began to migrate to the city, and Woodstock became an artist village. In the mid-1960s, Peter Yarrow of the "Pete, Paul and Mary" band first moved into Woodstock. In 1965, Bob Dylan also bought a house here and officially became a resident of Woodstock. But Woodstock was able to leave a strong mark in the history of world music not because of these musicians, but because of that music festival.

This music festival can be said to be the product of an accident. The organizers have been preparing for it for half a year, and they have encountered countless setbacks. Almost every difficulty is enough to make them change their minds. Historians have named an entire generation after the festival.