The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts with Live Nation Concerts and INVNT announced a 50th anniversary Woodstock for August 2019. But who among the original 1969 music acts can still perform — or should?
Soon it will be 50 years since Woodstock.
Not sure what surprises more: the fact that seminal cultural event is coming up on a half-century or that some of its featured acts are still touring. Wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll a youth movement? Didn’t The Who’s Pete Townshend write the immortal line “Hope I die before I get old?” and sing it at Woodstock?
Answers: Yes but not anymore. And yes Pete did, indeed, sing that line from “My Generation” on the third and last day of Woodstock on Aug. 17,1969.
This week, The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts with Live Nation Concerts and INVNT announced a 50th anniversary edition of Woodstock for August 2019.
The new “3 Days of Peace & Music” at Bethel Woods, a concert venue built on the original dairy farm grounds that hosted Woodstock in New York on Aug. 15-17,1969, will run on almost similar dates: Aug. 16-18.
According to Bethel Woods, the “performers will include prominent and emerging artists spanning multiple genres and decades” and TED-style talks and other events.
Original Woodstock promoter Michael Lang, whose Miami Pop Festival in 1968 was a warmup, won’t be involved with this Bethel Woods anniversary festival. But he told the Poughkeepsie Journal earlier this month that he planned to host his own anniversary concert at another unspecified site.
So, with Woodstock ready for a reboot, will prominent acts from the past play a part?
This got us thinking who, from the original Woodstock, could conceivably still play this golden anniversary version? Not festival opener Richie Havens as he died in 2013. Ravi Shankar, Tim Hardin, Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin and the event’s closing act, Jimi Hendrix, have also passed on.
And who, among the living, would you pay to still see at Woodstock 50?
Here are some of the artists who played the first Woodstock and what condition they are in now:
▪ Melanie. Distinctive-voiced flower child Melanie Safka was a relative newcomer when she sang a seven-song set on Woodstock’s first day. She went on because another act, The Incredible Sting Band, refused to perform Friday because of the rain. (The group went on the second day, Saturday, instead.) Melanie was so inspired by the fact concertgoers lit candles during her performance she wrote “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)“ and in 1970 the song became her first of two Top 10 singles on the Billboard Hot 100. “Brand New Key” in 1971 was the other. Melanie is now 71 and still performs.
▪ Arlo Guthrie. Also 71, Guthrie still performs. Every Thanksgiving, his 1967 talking blues classic, “Alice’s Restaurant,” and its parent album, pops back onto the iTunes sales chart.
▪ Joan Baez, 77, released her latest album, “Whistle Down the Wind,” in March 2018 and promoted it on her Fare Thee Well Tour. How symbolic would it be for her to make Woodstock 50 her true final concert performance?
▪ Country Joe McDonald sang the Vietnam-era “The Fish Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” at Woodstock. In 2017, McDonald, 76, released an album called “50.” How could he not figure in Woodstock 50?
▪ Santana. Carlos Santana’s fledgling band brought Latin rock to the Woodstock stage before many people knew who they were. The set included songs from the group’s eponymous debut LP released soon after on Aug. 30,1969, including “Evil Ways,” “Jingo” and “Soul Sacrifice.” The classic lineup splintered but guitarist Carlos Santana, 71, tours and records as Santana to this day.
▪ Canned Heat. Two members from the hippie-era lineup that played “Going Up the Country” at Woodstock — Larry Taylor and Adolfo de la Parra — still tour the oldies circuit with new members as Canned Heat.
▪ The Grateful Dead ended with leader Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995 but various members of the ever-shifting lineup formed splinter groups like The Other Ones, RatDog and Dead & Company. In 2015, four core members went on the Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead tour.
