A few weeks back I was contemplating the tragedy that music journalists of days gone by lacked the modern sensibility we take for granted. Those poor souls didn’t realize the best way to document  and evaluate music is with a snarky and condescending tone, narcissism and shoe-horned cultural references that serve more to demonstrate the author’s breadth of knowledge than offer any useful context. Realizing this wrong needed righting, I invented a time machine and have made it my quest to travel space and time to report on significant musical events in the parlance of our times.

For my first excursion, I traveled to August 15th, 1969. In Bethel, New York a festival called Woodstock was about to take place. It was a milestone cultural event, representing the passions and ideals of a generation that decided to abandon the tedious and antiquated conventions of social normality. Instead, they embraced peace, love and harmony, or so I was lead to believe.

Day 1, 8/15/1969

I arrived in the early afternoon at the outskirts of the festival site. Swarms of foul-smelling hippies were marching towards the entrance. They paid me no mind as I joined them, attempting to mimic their enthusiastic gait. Once I arrived, a gentleman asked me for my ticket. I muttered a brief prayer and enacted my plan to gain admittance.

“I can offer you something better than a ticket, friend, ” my silver tongue promised. Fishing a matchbook out of my pocket, I held it in front of his bewildered face. “Behold! I have here a magic device that will create fire as easy as you please. No longer will you laboriously rub to sticks together every time your village cooks the day’s hunt.”

“You started a little early, didn’t you? What are you on?” he asked me, his mind clearly incapable of grasping the miracle I’d shown him.

“Yes. I did start early, thanks to the time I saved with my device. I call them Herb-sticks, use them sparingly,” I said as I clasped them into his limp hand. I continued to make my way.

“Hey! Do you have a ticket or not?” he called after me.

“No need to thank me,” I assured him as I disappeared in the crowd. “Just remember. With great power, comes great responsibility.”

It was difficult to blend in. I looked so god damn great. Clearly, I was from another time and beyond the filthy masses of this era. (Granted, they were all probably so high they wouldn’t notice if I was riding a unicorn.)

At about five o’clock, Richie Havens took the stage. I’m not the biggest fan of folk music, and I can’t say Havens converted me. After a handful of piddling numbers I didn’t recognize or care for, Havens started a series of Beatles covers, each worse than the previous. “Strawberry Fields” as a folk song? For shame!

“They should at least do something off Let it Be“, I complained. “Those are Beatles songs they could play.”

“What are you talking about, man?” A cretin to my left asked.

Right. 1969. Let it Be was a year away. I’d only been there for a few hours and I was already slipping up.

I resolved to keep it together.

“Shut up, asshole,” I said to the asshole as I made my way closer to the stage.

After Havens finished, some west Asian dude said a bunch of crap I wasn’t paying attention to because I was drinking some whiskey from a flask watching in amazement as some “flower children” were dancing to literally no music. I enjoyed the burn of my drink and continued to mosey about, waiting for some more music.

The next band to take the stage was Sweetwater, who I’d never heard of. It was criz-zappy, as they say.

“I liked these guys better the first time I heard them and they were called Jefferson Airplane,” I said to a hippie that bore an uncanny resemblance to Mariska Hagerty.

“I beg your pardon?” she replied.

They just did not appreciate sophisticated humor in the 60′s.

I found an abandoned blanket on the ground and realized how tired I was. There was a bit of vomit on the corner, but it was a pretty big blanket, so decided to have a lie down. Sweetwater’s mediocrity washed over me as I tried to sleep. It must have worked, because later I woke up with a sharp pain in my arm.

“Sorry man. I didn’t see you,” said a voice. While I was asleep, a huge crowd had gathered in my general area, and they were all dancing.

For a moment, I had no access to my contempt for this culture and was startled to hear myself say, “That’s okay. It’s not your fault. Could you please tell me who’s playing now?”

“Ravi Shankar, man. You’re missing it!” said the man who presumably had stepped on my arm a few moments before.

Panicking, I grabbed my setlist from my pocket and cursed myself. I’d missed three acts during my nap. What kind of a journalist was I? Here I was, forty years in the past, attempting to document a significant historical curio, more culturally significant than any music event my generation would experience, and I’d slept through a third of it.

“Shit,” I thought. I have a time machine. I’ll just come back tomorrow, or tomorrow I’ll come back to today, rather. Giddily skipping away, relieved I was done for the day, I wondered, “How many of these people are dead now?”