Chapter 15 epilogue of an era

But in any case, Woodstock Music Festival is still the most famous music festival in the history of world music.Since then, the entire generation has gained a common title: "Woodstock Generation".Although it was later said that the young people who participated in the Woodstock Music Festival are now company bosses and Wall Street stockbrokers, in any case, Woodstock and the subsequent documentary have truly recorded this generation. The dreams people once had, and their fiery youth. At 8:30 am on August 18, 1969, Jimi Hendrix finally got to play.Because the organizing committee feared that ending the festival on Sunday night would cause chaos, the performance continued until Monday morning, and only about 50,000 fans were lucky enough to stay to hear Jimmy's performance.From the documentary, we can see the most representative scene in the history of rock music: the rising sun reflects on a messy farm, and the lawn full of spectators is replaced by countless garbage.Facing the sun, Jimmy played the American national anthem for everyone with his magical hands.But the sound coming from the speaker is exactly like the explosion of a bomb or the roar of an airplane.The familiar national anthem was transformed into the best soundtrack of a turbulent era with Hendrix's improvisation.

In the second year, a major event happened in the United States. During the campaign, US President Nixon, who had vowed to end the Vietnam War, suddenly announced on April 1 that he would send troops to Cambodia. This order once again triggered a wave of protests by American college students.Students at Kent State University in Ohio were no exception. They held a peaceful anti-war rally on campus to protest the government's invasion of Cambodia.The governor of Ohio, who has always been far-right, asked the federal government to send the National Guard to the campus to maintain order. On May 4th, guard soldiers were ordered to charge the students in an attempt to drive them out of the campus.The action met with strong resistance from the students, who threw stones at the soldiers, who responded with tear gas.However, for unknown reasons, a dozen soldiers suddenly knelt down on one leg without any warning, and pointed their M-1 submachine guns at the students.At first it was thought that the soldiers were trying to warn, but suddenly they started shooting at the unarmed students.The whole process lasted thirteen seconds, and the soldiers fired a total of sixty-seven rounds, killing four students on the spot and wounding ten others.The four people who were killed were all at least 300 meters away from the scene at the time, and it can be said that they were all hit by stray bullets.

Once this incident was disclosed by the media, the entire United States immediately exploded. Protests broke out in almost all universities, and many schools were forced to close down.However, in the subsequent polls conducted by the media, most residents, especially the parents of the students, chose to side with the government.They accused the students of provoking the incident first, and the soldiers fired to maintain order and national dignity, which was a last resort.Especially when the U.S. military was fighting on the front lines in Vietnam, it was against the spirit of patriotism for the students to riot in the backyard.At that time, the TV station also broadcast an interview in which a middle-aged woman said: More students should be killed because they knowingly committed crimes and did not abide by the law.

Afterwards, none of the soldiers were sentenced. When Neil Young heard about it, he wrote "Ohio" angrily, in his loudest protest against the American government: The tin soldier and nixon have come after us We've finally reached the point where we're all alone I heard the drums this summer Four students die in Ohio The single hit American radio in the summer of 1970.But despite the protests of the artists, the event dealt a fatal blow to radical students and anti-war activists.If they can push the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedy brothers to a few extreme right lunatics; Blame it on a handful of misguided hippies; blame the Hells Angels for the Altamont incident (where the Rolling Stones staged a free concert in Altamont, California, that ended in violence and killed one person) The incident exposed the direct and irreconcilable contradictions between the government and the mostly conservative citizens and young people.The four students who died were unarmed and not bludgeoned, murdered or drug overdoses, but shot by U.S. troops.What good are all the antiwar protests if the government and the military start using real guns?The students were frightened, and after they had been arguing for a while, they all died down in unison.

So far, what is often called the "turbulent 1960s" ended after the Kent State University incident.All those smiling faces full of hope, and the flowers on young people's heads; all those spirits advocating freedom, and exciting rock music, seemed to be sitting on a rotating slide, sank to the bottom of the water, and disappeared without a trace . The 1960s can be said to be the most important decade in American history. During this decade, the United States held several Washington Marches from protesting racial discrimination to opposing the Vietnam War; countless assassinations and violence occurred; Flower-wearing hippies and trouble-making heterodoxys; everything from marijuana to LSD to heroin was popular, and out of it came robed psychedelic gurus and misguided murderers.It all happened so quickly that the folk singer Crosby once described the era in this seemingly wrong way:

If you remember what happened in the sixties Then you never lived in that era at all This is called by many "veterans" from the 1960s as the most appropriate sentence to describe that era.The Woodstock Music Festival is the last climax of the most prosperous 60s in American music history.