Back to the Garden 1969
Echoes from the past in the current moment
Friday evening we took a break from the stress of the last 6 weeks and went to see one of the best tribute bands I’ve seen in a while, Back to the Garden, hosted by Milford Performance Center.
They performed songs as they were played at Woodstock back in 1969, by Richie Havens, Melanie (who I mainly knew from Brand New Key) Janis Joplin, The Who, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Joe Cocker, Sly and the Family Stone, Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. So many different musical styles, and they nailed them all. Highly recommend seeing them if they’ve got a gig near you.
As might be expected, it was an older audience. H and I were some of the younger ones in the crowd. I was six when Woodstock happened, but as a teenager I listened all these these artists on vinyl. I probably wore extra groves in Santana’s double album, Moonflower because of songs like Soul Sacrifice - after I saved up to buy sound system for my bedroom from working after school jobs,
Same with CSNY. A few months ago, I made myself a Protest Songs playlist and both Ohio and Find the Cost of Freedom were on it.
Here’s Back to the Garden with Find the Cost of Freedom:
That’s the only video I took, because I was so absorbed in the music, which transported me back to teen years in Stamford, CT.
I wasn’t the only one so transported in this crowd of aging Boomers and Jonesers. There was a gentleman in the front row who was clearly in the early stages of dementia, brought by a companion. He was enraptured, constantly standing up and waving his arms to the music. It irritated my husband because it blocked his view, but for me it evoked the bittersweet moments of visiting my dad during the last year of his life at Waveney. I always tried to visit when they had a sing-a-long with songs from the patients’ era, mainly show tunes and songs from the 40’s and 50’s. I wrote about how powerful music was as a way to reach people, even when they seem to have no affect, even when Alzheimer’s has stolen so much of who they were before.
As you can see from the video above, the band projected images and video from the era. The lyrics and images of 1969-70 brought home the old adage:
Or as my son remarked when I was talking to him the next morning: “History doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes, and right now history is a masterful poet, rhyming on a dime.”
Because those images from over half a century ago showed war and devastation. They showed young people challenging the stultified worldview of the old, protesting against the war, against injustice, against racism, and being attacked by law enforcement. They showed college campuses in a state of turmoil. They showed the National Guard being sent in to quell dissent, with deathly results.
And then the rhyme:
The band also showed photos of Apollo 11, of the excitement and optimism of Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for a man, one giant leap for Mankind.”
The rhyme here has become a dark, twisted nightmare, where the current president and his Christo-fascist cohorts want to return to their concept of “the good old days” incorporating the very worst parts of previous century (racism, sexism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, bigotry, homophobia, etc). Meanwhile, they’re dismantling the education system and our scientific infrastructure in an attempt to destroy curiosity, inquiry, logic and free expression.
In other words, a full-on assault on the things that actually made America great.
Maybe we can learn a little from the campus protests fifty years ago.
In his memoir, “God, Country, Notre Dame,” Father Theodore Hesburgh, who presided over the university during this time, recalled the protests born of disillusioned idealism and the Vietnam War:
The high idealism, vigor, and youthful hopes that marked the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961 ended in disillusion, anger, and finally violence when the 1960s came to an end. College students, our traditional hope for the future, questioned the established values upon which they were raised, and then at least some of them revolted against everything that represented adult authority. Proclaiming their distrust of everyone over thirty, they fled parental authority, wore ragged clothing, used foul language, turned to mind-altering drugs, disdained the work ethic, family and marriage, and more-all to find a new meaning and a new way to live their lives. ... When they wanted to voice their protests, they struck out, of course, at what was nearest to them: the colleges and universities from Berkeley in San Francisco to Columbia in New York City.
Unlike the quisling law firms, politicians, and SCOTUS judges that have given in to to threats from the wannabe dictator in the Oval Office today, Hesburgh was up to the moment. His February 1969 letter to the university community became known as the Hesburgh Declaration and was subsequently printed in the New York Times.
Understanding and analysis of social ills cannot be conducted in a boiler factory. Compassion has a quiet way of service. Complicated social mechanisms, out of joint, are not adjusted with a sledge hammer.
The university cannot cure all our ills today, but it can make a valiant beginning by bringing all its intellectual and moral powers to bear upon them: all the idealism and generosity of its young people, all the wisdom and intelligence of its oldsters, all the expertise and competence of those who are in their middle years. But it must do all this as a university does, within its proper style and capability, no longer an ivory tower, but not the Red Cross either.
He rightfully noted that setting generations against each other is not the way to solve societies problems. That to make our lives better we need idealism, wisdom, expertise, and competence. Allowing our country to be run by an egocentric gerontocracy in Washington fails our youth - the olds need to be galvanized to change by the ideals and ideas of the young. But equally, the “youts” ignore the experience, wisdom, and expertise of previous generations at their peril. Look at the chaos caused by letting young idiot nepo-baby shitposters like “Big Balls” loose in the ranks of our nation’s critical institutions.
We can have a thousand resolutions as to what kind of a society we want, but when lawlessness is afoot, and all authority is flouted — faculty, administration and student — then we invoke the normal societal forces of law or we allow the university to die beneath our hapless and hopeless gaze...
I never want to see any student expelled from this community because, in many ways, this is always an educative failure. Even so, I must likewise be committed to the survival of the University community as one of man’s best hopes in these troubled times. I know of no other way of insuring both ends than to say of every member of this community — faculty and students — that we are all ready and prepared and anxious to respond to every intellectual and moral concern in the world today, in every way proper to the University. At the same time, we cannot allow a small minority to impose their will on the majority who have spoken regarding the University’s style of life.
I truly believe that we are about to witness a revulsion on the part of legislatures, state and national, benefactors, parents, alumni, and the general public for much that is happening in higher education today. If I read the signs of the times correctly, this may well lead to a suppression of the liberty and autonomy that are the lifeblood of a university community. It may well lead to a rebirth of fascism, unless we ourselves are ready to take a stand for what is right for us. History is not consoling in this regard. We rule ourselves or others rule us, in a way that destroys the university as we have known and loved it.
So much of the dialogue in our current discourse is in black and white, shouting past each other in slogans and memes. As a Jewish progressive, I’m sickened by the current president weaponizing antisemitism as an excuse for authoritarian behavior while appointing white Christian nationalists to his government.
I’m planning to protest on June 14th while the First Narcissist is wasting taxpayer money on his Kremlin parade, just to satisfy his militaristic fantasies and his ego.
But I notice that the protest closest to me is the only one in Connecticut that has decided to make it about Gaza.
While I deplore the actions of the Israeli government, want a ceasefire and this war to end, I also have family and friends in Israel and can’t stand side-by-side with people chanting “from the River to the Sea”, and “globalize the Intifada”, any more than I can stand with those who think flattening Gaza, building more settlements and condoning settler violence in the West Bank is justified.
I’ve spent several years immersed in the antisemitic rhetoric coming from the right, which only makes the rhymes coming from people I thought were friends and allies on the left even more disheartening.
I’ll leave you with some lyrics from CSNY’s Wooden Ships that resonate in this moment:
If you smile at me
I will understand
'Cause that is something
Everybody everywhere does in the same language
I can see by your coat, my friend
You're from the other side
There's just one thing I've got to know
Can you tell me please, who won? …
Horror grips us as we watch you die
All we can do is echo your anguished cries
Stare as all human feelings die
We are leaving, you don't need us