I always say that even though my dad was alive during Woodstock, he was just not invited. He just seemed like he was from a different generation.
Woodstock is the only thing we have going for us in this part of the state in terms of national recognition. The idea is to extract what was good about Woodstock, repackage it, and present it to Middle America.
We can't recreate Woodstock, nor do we want to. We want to turn its notoriety into a place where we can shape controlled, scaled-down musical events of all sorts.
Woodstock didn't define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.
Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.
I like to head upstate to the Catskills, to Woodstock.
The 'rock world' is a lot smaller than it used to be. It's doing a lot less things than it used to be. From Woodstock back in the day and Rage Against the Machine, no one sells millions of records anymore.
Chicago '68 was a relatively small demonstration for its time, but I've talked to millions of people who claim they were there because it felt like we were all there. Everyone from our generation was there and was at Woodstock.
In the Woodstock movie, you see Justin, my son, who is now a filmmaker, being carried off by my wife at the time to the helicopter. He's just this little bundle of joy in her arms. And it's 1969.
Chaplin was my idol. I remember watching those movies at this little theater in Woodstock, N.Y., when I was probably 6 and laughing so hard at the surprises, like Keaton suddenly being dragged by a streetcar.
