> At 06:19 PM 2/24/2003 -0500, Deb Messling wrote about "Woodstock:" >> So many writers trot out the "voice of her generation" cliche and >> cite Woodstock as some sort of hippie anthem > > To me, the song always was and always will be a hippie anthem. :-) > If some want to label it "the voice of a generation" I think it's a > compliment to > the songwriter for capturing the emotion of an entire generation. > > >> She DREAMED she saw the bombers turning into butterflies, but dreams >> aren't reality. She says we've GOT to get ourselves back to the >> garden; >> she doesn't say we're already there. > > Isn't that the point? The reality in 1969 was bombers strafing > southeast Asia, the dream was and still is to take this flying > machine of destruction and turn it into something more peaceful and > beautiful, like a butterfly. She's *hoping* society will find the > garden, or some semblance of a garden. Few would have argued then > that we were "already there" in the garden...the > *dream* was for everyone to get there...and that is why the song is > an anthem.
I agree that the song is an anthem both in Joni's original version and in the Travelogue version. The Ladies of the Canyon version makes me think of a pagan priestess singing an invocation, the beginning of some sacred ritual. It is sung with reverence and a certain amount of awe. The voice soars into the stratosphere, reaching toward the heavens. It recalls a recent event, a gathering of the tribes. But in spite of the fact that it recalls a communal event, to me it has the sound of a single soul expressing the exaltation and hope brought on by that event, not the 'voice of a generation.' On Travelogue she doesn't have that instrument that can reach those heights anymore. So she takes a different route and gives the song a weight and profundity that it couldn't have had in the original. More than 30 years have passed since the song and the event that inspired it. Altamont, Kent State, Watergate, the Gulf War, Chernobyl, Exxon-Valdez, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9-11 - all of these things and more have come to pass in the intervening years and have perhaps changed the way we view what was for many, the defining moment of a generation. Woodstock, the event is now history and the stuff of legend. Joni's latest incarnation of the song, Woodstock achieves anthemic status in a different way. It is now hindsight, nostalgic and colored with the tint of myth. It has become a slow and stately march, more about the half a million than the solitary child of God who finally, but only for a fleeting few days, found that place of song, celebration and naive innocence. Annie Ross once said that Lady in Satin was her favorite Billie Holiday record "because there's a whole life in that voice." I think the same can be said for Joni's singing on Travelogue. Billie died when she was in her 40s. Although it could be argued that she had more life experience in that time than a lot of people have in 80 years, I don't think that lessens the fact that Joni has lived nearly 60 years and that there is perhaps even more of a life in Joni's voice. The voice gives new insight into Woodstock, a perhaps sadder, but wiser recollection of the event. This latest version is different from the original but no less anthemic. The more I listen to Travelogue, the more I hear in the voice that has a whole life in it. Some of the arrangements that didn't seem to work for me at first make more & more sense to me the more I listen. Although some of them are truly stunning and really do enhance the songs, I think some of them merely serve the purpose of providing an interesting but unobtrusive backdrop to that voice. And that voice with the whole life in it has new insights to bring to these songs, even though it was in better shape when it sang them the first time. Mark in Seattle
