They embodied everything I wanted to be: revolutionary, uniquely beautiful, full of wonder and adventure, and utterly fearless. Woodstock intrigued me, if only because it was the music, the spirit, and the people that defined the hippie counterculture colliding in one completely perfect place. I would look through books and image archives in awe of the girls in the mud and the crowds and the grass listening to music people would still miss forty years later. Organizers had expected a turnout of 50,000, and they were still in debt after money poured in for the video footage of performances. Bumper-to-bumper traffic built up around the space.
#WAS JANIS JOPLIN NUDE AT WOODSTOCK FREE#
The Woodstock Music & Art Fair, or Woodstock Festival, took place on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York from August 15 to 18 in 1969. The 600-acre plot of land was not the first or ideal location for the festival, and as the day drew nearer and shit hit the fan, organizers announced it was free and watched as a million people began approaching in their cars. My mother had suffered from having watched flower children from afar with a longing heart as I became more interested in the history of the period I suffered from having never seen them at all.īut even worse, I was forced to live with the knowledge that I would never, ever, ever be able to go to the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. So instead, she marched around the schoolyard repeating their slogans.īy the time I’d reached ten, I was obsessed with the hippie counterculture: how it looked, what it did, and especially how it sounded. She wanted to march with them, but she couldn’t. (Don’t fret – she did indeed come of age later in the latter decade and become a self-labeled “Disco Queen.”) My mom was in middle school when Vietnam was being broadcast on television growing up, she would constantly recount a story of hippies marching past her school in protest of the illegal war. I was raised by a hippie-would-have-been mom born too late to protest in the streets during the late sixties and early seventies. Billed as “3 days of peace and love,” it was marked by rain, lots of naked people doing what was at the time a legal hallucinogenic known as LSD, mud wrassling, and some of the defining bands of the psychedelic hippie era coming together to rock out, make out, and shape history. This week marks the 44th anniversary of Woodstock, the music festival that changed the world. This week I’m learning to fly with Amelia Earhart. This is a no-holds-barred lovefest for my favorite celebrities, rebels and biker chicks women qualify for this column simply by changing my life and/or moving me deeply. Welcome to Idol Worship, a biweekly devotional to whoever the fuck I’m into. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.Though her groundbreaking rock career was short-lived, Joplin forged a path for other female performers like Madonna and Lady Gaga whose careers are defined by taking to the stage on their own terms. Joplin’s set list at Woodstock included two of her iconic hits, “Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)” and “Piece of My Heart.” Most of Joplin’s songs were covers, but the paradox of power and pain in her music captured a generation coming of age during the free love movement and the violent Vietnam War quagmire. By the time performed at Woodstock, alighting the stage at 2 am, Joplin was in the thrall of a heroin addiction that would ultimately kill her a year later, in 1970, at age 27.
Two years later, she embarked on a solo career. Joplin established her bonafides as a musical force at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 with her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. She ended up in the Haight Ashbury music scene in San Francisco, unable to escape the pull of her blues singing talent. With her peacock-like psychedelic style, assaulting blues vocals, and earth-shaking swagger, Joplin was already a symbol of women’s liberation by the time she catapulted to superstardom on that stage.īorn in 1943 in the Texas town of Port Arthur, Joplin was bullied in high school for the same unconventional looks that would eventually propel her to rock god status. Attended by over a half a million people, Woodstock was a defining moment in both music and counterculture history. On August 16, 1969, Janis Joplin sauntered onto the stage to play her delayed, but historic set at the three day Woodstock Music and Art Fair in Bethel, New York.
Article Details: August 16, 1969: Janis Joplin Played a Historic Set at WoodstockĪugust 16, 1969: Janis Joplin Played a Historic Set at Woodstock
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