23 August, 2011

A Wish Called Woodstock

I'm not really sure why, but I've been thinking a lot about music over the last few weeks. I've tried to make a mental list of every concert I have ever attended, I've replayed in my mind some of the sets I used to perform in my coffee house/folk singing days, and I've had dreams about my three guitars that have slept unplayed in their cases for years because of disability. In spite of that, these are mostly happy memories.

Invariably at some point in these reveries I end up in the 60s. There were so many talented performers offering us genuine melodic wonder - measure after measure, song after song! The quality of their accomplishment is obvious when we see how much of it has remained popular many decades later. Even my daughters like it.

And it's difficult not to think about Woodstock. I wasn't there although I do have a colleague who attended; he decided to leave well before the end. I don't watch it from start to finish, but whenever the film runs on television, I sit transfixed by whatever song, whatever performer I happen to catch. I sometimes wish I could have been there, but I doubt I would have enjoyed the mud. Instead, I spent most of the summer of 1969 with the US Navy in Guantanamo Bay. No mud there. I don't want to go back to that era, but I do love the music. It moves me, wild thing.

My kind of opera.
TGB   

See Me
Feel Me
Touch Me
Heal Me

See Me
Feel Me
Touch Me
Heal Me

       Listening to you, I get the music
       Gazing at you, I get the heat
       Following you, I climb the mountain
       I get excitement at your feet

       Right behind you, I see the millions
       On you, I see the glory
       From you, I get opinion
       From you, I get the story