The first Woodstock happened when I was 8 years old. I remember the pictures in Time and Life, the newscasts, and the music on the radio. My parents were supporters of the arts [particularly pottery] and so I remember going to arts festivals and seeing "hippie artists" and wanting to be like them- completely different than the sick society that I saw all around me.
Many years later, I had the "remember Woodstock" ideal when I did a mural for the '94 festival- it was all about "peace love and music" for me, a Grateful Dead tshirt designer and starry-eyed dreamer, and I had an unveiling party for friends and family that featured lemonade and cookies and my best friend crying when the sheets came down. I had everybody who came to the unveiling sign the back with a message to the world, because I felt myself to be a product of all of the relationships I'd had in my life, and felt that the world's unity was something similar. Most wrote "peace and love" or similar. My brother wrote, "Nuke the pregnant gay whales for Jesus". Poignant- and the only one I remember now.
The title of the piece was "M.M.M.M.: Mountain Mama's Moonlit Music"- oils on 5/8" plywood, 8' wide by 10' tall, built onto a framework that my bro-in-law built [could have been a house!]- because my style of painting, in layers of color, is done over a textured ground that requires an inflexible base.
pieces, drawings, and paintings- because it took more than $300 worth
of paint and other supplies in addition to the plywood that was
supplied to me- iin a rented garage [there was noplace safe to keep it
at home]. Half of the town of New Paltz bought those little pieces in
order to help me along.
I worked on it in 90 degree heat in a parking lot [adjacent to the garage] 6-8 hours every day for weeks in June and July [beginning as soon as I'd received the plywood from the promoters]. I had to rent a truck to take it back to them in Saugerties when it was time to deliver, because it had to go as one piece.
I painted it with love in my heart, and prayers for peace and the evolution of the world on my lips. It was an abstract painting of a mountain stream rolling down a mountain, with a moonrise, but also a woman playing guitar with a halo. Had "peace and love" in 7 different languages, and "respect your Mother and love one another", all in invisible glow-in-the-dark paint, so that at night it could still be seen. I varnished the thing with marine varnish in back so that it could survive the weather.
When I delivered it to Saugerties, Michael Lang came out and shook my hand and told me I was "brave". I told him so was he.
I went to the 94 festival in hiking boots and a dress, carrying a sleeping bag. I was there for a photo op with all of the artists at the sunken alligator.
The first thing I saw, coming in the gate, was a fat kid with a crewcut, a 12-pack of Budweiser under his arm and the sign "show your t*ts", in the company of several others of similar ilk. I marched past them without making eye contact and got into the endless crush of people shuffling around with barely breathing room, anywhere. Claustrophobia is not my thing, but I felt some degree of it there.
We muralists found each other and the alligator, stood around for an hour or so chatting and exchanging contact info, and the photog never showed up- he couldn't find it! So we wandered off.
I crossed one of the streams on a log [because the bridge was too packed to move on]. A handsome young man who was stoned off his ass stood in the water up to his knees and was helping people across. He felt up my thigh and asked me to come back later. I just laughed and left.
I crossed the mud flats near the North Stage, and one of the mudmen scampered up to me to plaster me, as all previous victims had been, and when he looked into my face, he carefully streaked a line of mud down each cheek and gently kissed me on the lips while I giggled.
I went to the south stage to watch my folkies, got pissed off when the Green Day fans shouted Youssou n'Dour off the stage so that they could get theirs sooner, was told "you're ugly" by a big fat punker [to whom I responded: "coming from you, that's a compliment"] and left when the sh*t literally started flying because, well, it wasn't my scene. Whoever booked that act to that stage was a raving idiot. I've come to like Green Day in the intervening years, but the first impression totally sucked in my book.
Was happy to see My Boys, Aerosmith, play. I once had a playful conversation with Steven Tyler on-air down in Virginia- when my son was a baby, I would call in to the local radio station and goof off with the dj, Henry "the Bull" Del Toro, so when Aerosmith was on the come-back trail, I was ecstatic and did a Mae West impersonation and joked around with Tyler [my ex- was an elevator mechanic, and many of the jokes were about sex in elevators- one of which was "going DOWN?"] Tyler's recovery [and IMPROVEMENT] of his voice skills is one of my inspirations in life. If you're going to listen to screaming, testosterone-y rock n roll, Aerosmith is it, IMO. Seeing them there was Good Stuff.
Spent the night in the Todd Pod. There was a group of stone-drunk Irishmen wearing little old lady hats [some with veils], yelling and playing soccer while dozens tried to sleep. When the ball hit me in the head, I grabbed it and shoved it down into my sleeping bag. When the loudest and drunkest Irishman came over to retrieve it, I looked him in the eye and said, "NO". He stopped yelling, told me he loved me, and started trying to get into my sleeping bag with me.
A very large, very sweet Israeli kid who was near me reached over and hugged me and said, "She's with me". The Irishman snarled, took his ball, and left. After it stopped raining, we went over next to a generator and slept there until it started getting hot out, then said our goodbyes. Wish I could remember that sweet kid's name...
I left sometime in the middle of that day, exhausted. Went home and watched the rest on tv. Actually saw my arm in a few of the Green Day shots. Whoopie.
The murals were slated to be toured around the world and then auctioned off by Sotheby's for environmental charities- 80% to the charities, 20% to the artists. This never happened. Instead, people who knew Lang and me told me that the artwork was being stored in a rental unit warehouse in Poughkeepsie- not climate-controlled, just a garage, in essence. I asked mutual friends- more than three- to talk to Lang for me. I was ignored. After a couple of years, I got mad. A friend of my sister's was an intellectual property lawyer. I did some design work for him and he wrote a letter to Lang asking for the mural to be returned- that's all I wanted, was my artwork back if he wasn't going to care for it. Lang never responded. I spent five years trying to get the piece back. Nada.
When Woodstock III began to be murmured about, my dad sent me a clipping from the newspaper describing the layout of the new site, how it would be "surrounded by artwork". I knew that meant the Woodstock Wall, that had been absconded with, was now going to be used for crowd control. I tried to contact them, they ignored me.
I wrote to a newspaper "arts czar" in the area who vaguely knew who I was, describing the past five years' effort to retrieve my work, and how I'd been ignored. He had a reporter who was covering the festival contact me and a few other artists. She said, "Maybe they haven't gotten back to you because you're just not important." Then she added, "They've very graciously said that you can either have the piece returned to you now or wait and THIS TIME they're really going to do it." I knew right at that moment that the piece was going to be destroyed, but I asked the woman, "if you were me, what would you do?" She said that she'd go with it. I cried, and told her what I felt was going to happen. She laughed at me.
I did something I never do that day. Probably it was because of the nasty things the reporter had said, probably it was because Michael Lang had ripped me off with impunity and nobody cared. Largely it was because the dreams of Woodstock that I'd grown up with were completely and utterly shredded that day, and I was going to return the favor to the dream-thieves.
I took the photo-poster my father had sent me of the mural, put it on the floor, placed crystals and stones all around it, lit candles, and danced around it for hours, chanting to the angels and the ancestors, in the old languages, for justice. I asked that if Lang intended to rip me off again, that his efforts come to naught, that the murals be "burned by dragon fire" and sent to the Divine so that he could no longer benefit from them, and that the Woodstock festival be destroyed just as my dreams of Woodstock had.
I went to the Starwood festival that year. Starwood is put on by the same people who were involved in the original Woodstock festival. It's a peace-oriented, spiritual thing, with teaching, learning, music, and other wonderful stuff going on the entire time. I showed my artwork, met some lovely people, and sketched nude women ["Your Goddess Here" read my charcoal-drawing sign, and we'd go out behind my tent and I'd sketch them]. There I got some degree of the spiritual connection that had been lacking in the "Spring Break at Woodstock" event I'd been to years before. I hung out with some wonderful people of depth and knowledge and felt replenished and healed in many ways.
On my way back from the festival, I saw funnel-shaped clouds rising over the airbase off in the distance to my north- long thin streams of blacker black against the dark gray night sky .. They flattened out at the top, becoming the shape of tornados. I pulled into a rest-area and watched for a while. I got out of my rental truck [I was showing my work there at the festival], and watched as one of the clouds swooped towards me, full of lightning and glowing lights. As it came close, the head of a dragon appeared, so huge that I started shaking and had trouble breathing. I thanked the dragon, and it faded away, and then the rain began to pour down.
Later on when I awoke I continued the drive home. That early morning I watched on the news as they documented the riots. In one shot, the mobs were tossing an extra-heavy, extra-large chunk of wood onto the pyre.
I'm pretty sure it was my mural.
I worked on it in 90 degree heat in a parking lot [adjacent to the garage] 6-8 hours every day for weeks in June and July [beginning as soon as I'd received the plywood from the promoters]. I had to rent a truck to take it back to them in Saugerties when it was time to deliver, because it had to go as one piece.
I painted it with love in my heart, and prayers for peace and the evolution of the world on my lips. It was an abstract painting of a mountain stream rolling down a mountain, with a moonrise, but also a woman playing guitar with a halo. Had "peace and love" in 7 different languages, and "respect your Mother and love one another", all in invisible glow-in-the-dark paint, so that at night it could still be seen. I varnished the thing with marine varnish in back so that it could survive the weather.
When I delivered it to Saugerties, Michael Lang came out and shook my hand and told me I was "brave". I told him so was he.
I went to the 94 festival in hiking boots and a dress, carrying a sleeping bag. I was there for a photo op with all of the artists at the sunken alligator.
The first thing I saw, coming in the gate, was a fat kid with a crewcut, a 12-pack of Budweiser under his arm and the sign "show your t*ts", in the company of several others of similar ilk. I marched past them without making eye contact and got into the endless crush of people shuffling around with barely breathing room, anywhere. Claustrophobia is not my thing, but I felt some degree of it there.
We muralists found each other and the alligator, stood around for an hour or so chatting and exchanging contact info, and the photog never showed up- he couldn't find it! So we wandered off.
I crossed one of the streams on a log [because the bridge was too packed to move on]. A handsome young man who was stoned off his ass stood in the water up to his knees and was helping people across. He felt up my thigh and asked me to come back later. I just laughed and left.
I crossed the mud flats near the North Stage, and one of the mudmen scampered up to me to plaster me, as all previous victims had been, and when he looked into my face, he carefully streaked a line of mud down each cheek and gently kissed me on the lips while I giggled.
I went to the south stage to watch my folkies, got pissed off when the Green Day fans shouted Youssou n'Dour off the stage so that they could get theirs sooner, was told "you're ugly" by a big fat punker [to whom I responded: "coming from you, that's a compliment"] and left when the sh*t literally started flying because, well, it wasn't my scene. Whoever booked that act to that stage was a raving idiot. I've come to like Green Day in the intervening years, but the first impression totally sucked in my book.
Was happy to see My Boys, Aerosmith, play. I once had a playful conversation with Steven Tyler on-air down in Virginia- when my son was a baby, I would call in to the local radio station and goof off with the dj, Henry "the Bull" Del Toro, so when Aerosmith was on the come-back trail, I was ecstatic and did a Mae West impersonation and joked around with Tyler [my ex- was an elevator mechanic, and many of the jokes were about sex in elevators- one of which was "going DOWN?"] Tyler's recovery [and IMPROVEMENT] of his voice skills is one of my inspirations in life. If you're going to listen to screaming, testosterone-y rock n roll, Aerosmith is it, IMO. Seeing them there was Good Stuff.
Spent the night in the Todd Pod. There was a group of stone-drunk Irishmen wearing little old lady hats [some with veils], yelling and playing soccer while dozens tried to sleep. When the ball hit me in the head, I grabbed it and shoved it down into my sleeping bag. When the loudest and drunkest Irishman came over to retrieve it, I looked him in the eye and said, "NO". He stopped yelling, told me he loved me, and started trying to get into my sleeping bag with me.
A very large, very sweet Israeli kid who was near me reached over and hugged me and said, "She's with me". The Irishman snarled, took his ball, and left. After it stopped raining, we went over next to a generator and slept there until it started getting hot out, then said our goodbyes. Wish I could remember that sweet kid's name...
I left sometime in the middle of that day, exhausted. Went home and watched the rest on tv. Actually saw my arm in a few of the Green Day shots. Whoopie.
The murals were slated to be toured around the world and then auctioned off by Sotheby's for environmental charities- 80% to the charities, 20% to the artists. This never happened. Instead, people who knew Lang and me told me that the artwork was being stored in a rental unit warehouse in Poughkeepsie- not climate-controlled, just a garage, in essence. I asked mutual friends- more than three- to talk to Lang for me. I was ignored. After a couple of years, I got mad. A friend of my sister's was an intellectual property lawyer. I did some design work for him and he wrote a letter to Lang asking for the mural to be returned- that's all I wanted, was my artwork back if he wasn't going to care for it. Lang never responded. I spent five years trying to get the piece back. Nada.
When Woodstock III began to be murmured about, my dad sent me a clipping from the newspaper describing the layout of the new site, how it would be "surrounded by artwork". I knew that meant the Woodstock Wall, that had been absconded with, was now going to be used for crowd control. I tried to contact them, they ignored me.
I wrote to a newspaper "arts czar" in the area who vaguely knew who I was, describing the past five years' effort to retrieve my work, and how I'd been ignored. He had a reporter who was covering the festival contact me and a few other artists. She said, "Maybe they haven't gotten back to you because you're just not important." Then she added, "They've very graciously said that you can either have the piece returned to you now or wait and THIS TIME they're really going to do it." I knew right at that moment that the piece was going to be destroyed, but I asked the woman, "if you were me, what would you do?" She said that she'd go with it. I cried, and told her what I felt was going to happen. She laughed at me.
I did something I never do that day. Probably it was because of the nasty things the reporter had said, probably it was because Michael Lang had ripped me off with impunity and nobody cared. Largely it was because the dreams of Woodstock that I'd grown up with were completely and utterly shredded that day, and I was going to return the favor to the dream-thieves.
I took the photo-poster my father had sent me of the mural, put it on the floor, placed crystals and stones all around it, lit candles, and danced around it for hours, chanting to the angels and the ancestors, in the old languages, for justice. I asked that if Lang intended to rip me off again, that his efforts come to naught, that the murals be "burned by dragon fire" and sent to the Divine so that he could no longer benefit from them, and that the Woodstock festival be destroyed just as my dreams of Woodstock had.
I went to the Starwood festival that year. Starwood is put on by the same people who were involved in the original Woodstock festival. It's a peace-oriented, spiritual thing, with teaching, learning, music, and other wonderful stuff going on the entire time. I showed my artwork, met some lovely people, and sketched nude women ["Your Goddess Here" read my charcoal-drawing sign, and we'd go out behind my tent and I'd sketch them]. There I got some degree of the spiritual connection that had been lacking in the "Spring Break at Woodstock" event I'd been to years before. I hung out with some wonderful people of depth and knowledge and felt replenished and healed in many ways.
On my way back from the festival, I saw funnel-shaped clouds rising over the airbase off in the distance to my north- long thin streams of blacker black against the dark gray night sky .. They flattened out at the top, becoming the shape of tornados. I pulled into a rest-area and watched for a while. I got out of my rental truck [I was showing my work there at the festival], and watched as one of the clouds swooped towards me, full of lightning and glowing lights. As it came close, the head of a dragon appeared, so huge that I started shaking and had trouble breathing. I thanked the dragon, and it faded away, and then the rain began to pour down.
Later on when I awoke I continued the drive home. That early morning I watched on the news as they documented the riots. In one shot, the mobs were tossing an extra-heavy, extra-large chunk of wood onto the pyre.
I'm pretty sure it was my mural.
