atomly wrote: > Woodstock marked the time when the hippies established themselves as a > force. Nobody cared about Country Joe or Jimi Hendrix before that.
Yes, but did anybody in the music establishment really care about techno before last year? They might've cared about the usual suspects that we all love to hate on this list, but not about the artists that were on last year's DEMF lineup. > Woodstock was amazing because it wasn't planned to be huge while they > were anticipating huge crowds at DEMF. They were not anticipating huge crowds at DEMF. 100,000 was the maximum figure I heard in the weeks before DEMF. Don't forget that until 1-2 months beforehand, there was still quite a bit of uncertainty as to whether or not it would go ahead at all and with what lineup. Serious promotion was pretty much nonexistent until a few weeks before the event. Weather was expected to be crap too (one highlight of the festival: the sun breaking through the clouds just seconds after Mike Grant dropped Blaze's "Wishing You Were Here". I love synchronicity). When we told people that we flew in from the Netherlands, the standard reaction was that we must be crazy to fly halfway across the world for a festival that the majority of locals didn't even know about, let alone care about. So when the first day it became the success that it was, it was so completely unexpected that that feeling/atmosphere made the next days an even bigger success. Woodstock of course had much larger social and cultural implications than DEMF, but in terms of what it meant for the music itself and its (broad) acceptance, they're both defining moments in American musical history. Otto
