Readers and writers blog

Oh, man, I’ve just had an experience that every acoustic guitarist dreams of — playing Woodstock.

Okay, it was just a little farm festival Wednesday night in a small park off the main street in town. And, okay, my wife, Bonnie, and I were just the backup music to a group of readers. And, okay, some of the crowd weren’t paying attention as they milled through the concession booths and chatted among themselves. And, yes, there was some confusion.

But it was Woodstock. And the hippies were there.

Oh yeah, one more irony or two: The famous 1969 ‘Woodstock’ concert wasn’t held in Woodstock but in Bethel more than 40 miles and another county away. And the 25th anniversary ‘Woodstock’ concert in 1994, although closer to Woodstock, was held in the next town, Saugerties.

But it was still Woodstock. Where the hippies live. Well, some of them do. And a lot of yuppies, too. Not to mention lots of musicians, really good ones, which makes playing in Woodstock for a couple of out-of-town amateurs like Bonnie and me a little daunting.

But we did it, and pretty well at that. The program, about 25 minutes long, was a reading based on interviews and reminiscences of elderly Woodstockers who were tied not to music and the arts but to the earth — principally, farmers and loggers. Doing the reading were its author, Jo Schwartz, who with husband Arthur runs a local publishing company, and poet Phillip Levine and storyteller Jill Olesker.

Bonnie and I were supposed to play quietly beneath their voices, but the solar battery running the microphone ran out of power just as we started, so the readers raised their voices to near-shouting, and we began hitting our guitars pretty hard.

Our musical selections were keyed into the readers’ script, but since the readers had moved closer to the audience to be heard, they and the script were nearly out of our earshot, so we winged it.

We played numbers like “This Land Is Your Land,” “Wildwood Flower” and a song by a local musician, Jay Ungar, called “Ashokan Farewell,” a theme you may remember from the Ken Burns Civil War series.

Bonnie did rhythm guitar and vocal harmonies, and I played lead guitar for the melodies. Now, playing a melody on a guitar can be simple: You can just do one note at a time. But to do it right, you really should play the melody notes at the top of the chords as they change through the song so that you can add appropriate harmony notes to fill in the melody line. Some guitarists do this without thinking. Me, I have to concentrate like hell.

I hardly noticed the people wandering back, forth and sometimes through the small performance area. I blew a few notes, but Bonnie, bless her, stayed right with me with her chords.

Despite the confusion, I wasn’t nervous. I don’t think Bonnie was, either. Playing at senior citizen residences for the past decade has taken most of the performance nerves out of us. We’ve been run into by wheelchairs, screamed at, thrown up on — one wonderful resident named Dorothy, no longer with us, liked to grab Bonnie’s cheek and tell her, “You’re a cutie.” All while we were singing and playing, and we hardly missed a note.

So while we weren’t opening for Jimi Hendrix in ‘69 or The Band in ‘94, it was my Woodstock experience. And although my own 60s are nearly over chronologically, the decade of the ’60s will always be with me — and with you as well, I hope.

To paraphrase Tom Joad in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the ’60s “will be all around . . . everywhere . . . wherever you can look.” Wherever people worry about the environment, grieve over racism, reject materialism, prefer flowers and peace to guns and war, the ’60s will still be around. And for me, Woodstock is their symbol.

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter 34: Colma of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Ginny and Elliot are now dead. Gerard, although now settled with Melanie, fantasizes about them in new bodies like Tinkerbells and imagines himself leaping off a cliff and gliding to them.

• Chapter 22 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. It’s October and Tess is putting away summer clothes and unpacking sweaters when she comes upon old pictures that bring reminiscences of how she and her ex-husband, Jason, fell in love.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is an outside window sticker on sale at the website purplemoon.com. The sticker, called ‘woodstock nation,’ is 5 inches in diameter and sells for $3.50.