Woodstock, the 1969 festival Joni Mitchell thought of as “a modern miracle”
Woodstock was definitely the most important festival of all time. In fact, it may well have been the most important moment in music history.
The Who didn’t think so; they thought that hippies were annoying and that the idea that the world would be different after a load of artists played music together was silly. They went so far as to write the song ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ in retaliation for their time at Woodstock. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” It essentially means it doesn’t matter how much you supposedly change, everything stays the same.
“All those hippies wandering about thinking the world was going to be different from that day,” said Townshend, “As a cynical English arsehole I walked through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them, and shaking them and trying to make them realize that nothing had changed and nothing was going to change.”
It’s easy for Pete Townshend to say that, after all, he was actually at the festival. When you strip back all of the peace and love, you can probably see the event for what it is, which is a poorly organised and muddy music festival. However, very few people were stripping back that peace and love; it came as a package deal, and it was hard for those in attendance not to get swept up in the euphoric feeling that came with the weekend.
Janis Joplin was blowing audiences’ minds, Jimi Hendrix was improvising stellar solos, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were delivering the angelic harmonies they became known for.
And it wasn’t just those at the festival who were swept up in the beauty of the festival, but people watching on from their homes on TV were also pretty blown away. Seeing that many people, strangers from different walks of life, united in a love for music and a general affinity for peace is enough to get the coldest of hearts beating profusely. One of those watching from home was Joni Mitchell, and she couldn’t believe the magnitude of the whole thing.
Mitchell had already made a pretty good name for herself by the time Woodstock came around, and she was invited to play; however, her manager talked her out of it and persuaded her to accept a TV spot on the Dick Cavett Show instead. In her manager’s mind, it was a better career move to go and play the TV spot rather than head to Woodstock, and Mitchell agreed, but it didn’t stop her from feeling as though she was missing out when a lot of her musical contemporaries were heading out to the iconic weekend.
There are very few people who can capture a moment in time through music quite as effectively as Joni Mitchell, and so she channelled this feeling of FOMO in a song. You guessed it, her track ‘Woodstock’ is specifically about missing out on playing Woodstock. When she was writing it, it was her aim to try and capture what appeared to be some kind of religious gathering, where God is the music and punters are the congregation.
“I was a little ‘God mad’ at the time,” she said in an interview in 1995 when discussing what it was like watching the festival from afar, “… Woodstock, for some reason, impressed me as being a modern miracle, like a modern-day fishes-and-loaves story.”
