Member-only story
Getting Ourselves Back to the Garden
even if we missed it the first time
I’d love to tell you I was at Yasgur’s Farm in August 1969, but I was 10, surrounded by soybeans and corn in downstate Illinois. Ten years later, my future husband would introduce me to Woodstock’s creative tillers: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Hendrix, Joplin, Mountain, Cocker, Country Joe & The Fish.
Among the famous festival’s absentees were The Beatles, Zeppelin, The Doors, and Dylan. But the most notable of all was Joni Mitchell. Precisely because she wasn’t there, Mitchell composed Woodstock.
Mitchell’s manager thought it more prudent she keep her booking on The Dick Cavett Show. So Mitchell wrote Woodstock in a hotel room, based on what she’d heard from her boyfriend Graham Nash and what she could glean from televised reports. Decades later David Crosby said that Mitchell captured the feeling and importance of the festival better than anyone who had actually been there.
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden
