We saw butterflies turning into bombers. And we weren't dreaming. At the time when the Woodstock festival became an instant media legend in mid-August 1969, melodic yearning for peace was up against the cold steel of American war machinery.
The music and other creative energies that drew 400,000 people to an upstate New York farm that weekend rejected the Vietnam War and the assumptions fueling it. Thirty-five years later, the Jimi Hendrix rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner could still serve as an apt soundtrack for U.S. foreign policy, with bombs bursting in air over urban neighborhoods across much of Iraq.
A Woodstock reunion, scheduled for Aug. 20-22 in the town of Bethel, N.Y., comes while the gap between the nation's commander in chief and huge numbers of its citizens is enormous.
Among those on the bill for the 35th anniversary event is the Country Joe Band. Its four musicians were original members of Country Joe and the Fish. No doubt the band's upcoming Woodstock performance will include "Cakewalk to Baghdad," a caustic tune based on boasts -- from such right-wing media darlings as Richard Perle and Ken Adelman -- that the U.S. military's quest for victory in Iraq would be a "cakewalk."
"Now moms and dads don't worry 'bout / Your soldier boys and girls," the song goes. "We're just sending them cakewalkin' / Around the world /When the coffins come home and the flag unfurls / Cheer for Bush, Cheney,Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle."
Of course this song has echoes from the excruciatingly grim humor of the Country Joe and the Fish classic "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die," which resonated not only with antiwar activists but also with many U.S. soldiers in Vietnam a third of a century ago...
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Also see Country Joe Band 2004.
