Woodstock got all the press. It was credited with inspiring everything from the Age of Aquarius to cannibalism. Iconic, perhaps. Soggy, definitely. I’m not sure anyone enjoyed being there nearly as much as they later enjoyed telling people they were there. Still, Woodstock is probably responsible for the wealth of local and regional music festivals we have today. Locally, that’s Live Oak.
My own first festival was pre-Woodstock. (Yes, I’m that old. And yes, it was shortly after the invention of music.) My friend Tim and I arrived at the Newport Folk Festival just in time for a small afternoon workshop where Woody Guthrie’s 19-year-old son introduced something called “Alice’s Restaurant.” Clever, I thought, but if his showcase was a 30-minute, spoken-word song, he better learn a trade.
The evening lineup was sold out. But Tim had hustled up tickets from a scalper. Unfortunately, they weren’t actually tickets for the folk festival. Fortunately, we didn’t notice. And with the sublime confidence of the blissfully ignorant, we presented them at the gate and marched right in. We saw Dave Dudley, The Chambers Brothers, Maybelle and Sarah Carter, Bill Monroe, Joan Baez, and Muddy Waters. Two years after Dylan electrified the place, the smell of pot was in the air, and the festival was evolving from standard folk music — whatever that was — into something more. A year later, we watched Janis Joplin seal the deal.