A Half Century Since the Summer of Chappaquidick, the Moon, Woodstock, and Manson

The summer of 1969 did not only see Chappaquiddick and the Moon landing....

"Woodstock is located in New York State amid the pastoral idyll of the Catskill mountains. Its setting means it's only a few hours' drive from New York City yet remote enough to provide a retreat from the traffic-splashed streets of the metropolis.....

"[When Bob Dylan moved there in 1966] Woodstock was an antidote to the dark, negative energy of New York [City] where fans relentlessly hounded him at diners and bus stops....Woodstock was the perfect environment – until it wasn’t.

"Inevitably, following Dylan’s move, other artists, burnt out and embracing the back-to-nature ethos of the late 1960s, relocated to Woodstock. But it was the eponymous festival in 1969 that put the town on the map (despite being held some 60 miles away). Ever since, 'Woodstock' has served as a metonym for everything right and everything wrong about the counter-culture.

"Following the festival, fans streamed into town hunting Dylan, Hendrix, Van Morrison and Janis Joplin. Dylan eventually had to retreat to a house further away, but even that wasn’t enough. In his autobiography, Chronicles, he complains of 'people living in trees outside my house, trying to batter down my door'.....The Manson Family’s baroquely depraved murder spree in Los Angeles spooked Dylan badly and he moved back to New York [City]. As he recalls in Chronicles: 'Woodstock had turned into a nightmare, a place of chaos'....

"Time and again, we read sad, awful stories of musicians, barely out of their teens, overwhelmed by fame and seduced by drugs, but finding only death. The dream of returning to Eden is always going to be an unrealised one and yet human beings have never stopped searching for this idyllic (but imagined) past, and the story of Woodstock is no different" (Catholic Herald, Why Woodstock Became a Nightmare, 3/11/16)