Band in a box files the night they drove old dixie down
As Michael Lang wrote in his memoir, The Road To Woodstock: “The Band was to be a part of the festival from the beginning. Only a month before the beginning of the festival, they made a deal with Max Yasgur, who owned a dairy farm in Bethel, in the Catskills. Meanwhile, Michael Lang and his partners had been trying for months to find a place to hold their Woodstock Music and Art Fair. This silence had generated curiosity from the public, and with their inaugural show at Winterland in San Francisco, they stopped being an enigma, at last. Why this interval? Because Rick Danko had suffered severe injuries after a car accident, and he was in traction for months, which stopped The Band from touring. In the spring of 1969, almost a year after the release of their influential album, they finally gave their first concert. When the idea of a music festival popped into Michael Lang’s mind, The Band was a myth. It’s hard to reconcile these words with the Woodstock Music and Art Fair set in a pastoral landscape a week after the murders. “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true.” Joan Didion resumed this anxiety in her book The White Album. The summer of 1969 was magical on the East Coast, but it was different in Los Angeles, where the Manson Family created a climate of fear. The moon landing and the Woodstock Festival are inseparable from each other these events happened three weeks apart and changed the United States forever. Back to the garden, as Joni Mitchell would write in the song Woodstock.ġ969 was rich in history. The album Music From Big Pink, released by The Band, in July 1968, had led to a musical movement aspiring toward simplicity. Yet, until the summer of 1969, before being associated with the most famous festival in history, Woodstock, in the Catskills, was known as the adopted hometown of Bob Dylan and The Band. The name evokes half a million hippies gathered in a field, cars abandoned on the road under the heat of August, and naked people sliding cheerfully in the mud.