Richie Havens Quotes

Woodstock had a tremendous impact on American artistic life.

I was invited for the first Woodstock. Actually, I started the programme.

Woodstock was both a peaceful protest and a global celebration.

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

Describing Woodstock as the 'big bang,' I think that's a great way to describe it, because the important thing about it wasn't how many people were there or that it was a lot of truly wonderful music that got played.

Woodstock didn't define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.

I came upon a child of god, He was walking along the road And I asked him, where are you going And this he told me: "I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band I'm going to camp out on the land, I'm going to try an' get my soul free.

There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.

Woodstock happened in August 1969, long before the Internet and mobile phones made it possible to communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere. It was a time when we weren't able to witness world events or the horrors of war live on 24-hour news channels.

At the time of Woodstock, I was just 13, but I used to see these exotic hippy creatures and I did look on with envy. How could you not? In an ideal world, I would have loved to have been a hippy - but I might have been a bit strait-laced. It was my fantasy.

Those Laurel Canyon days were great. I have a real fondness for that era, 'til about '68. Musically, it was wonderful, and there was this great innocence, an idyllic view of the world. After that, everything got a little... edgy.

When people talk about the '60s I never think that was me there. It was me and I was in it, but I was never enamoured with all that. It's supposed to be sex and drugs and rock and roll and I'm not really like that. I've never really seen the Rolling Stones as anything.

I grew up in the 1970s, and my friends and I felt very keenly that we had missed the '60s. We were bummed out about it.

I hitched up to Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love, you know? And I was very much politically aligned with that whole mentality, the whole ideology of that generation, the music, the culture, the behavior.

The hippie era was a wonderful time because we still believed we could make the world a better place.

L.A.'s hippies are actually quite scary - more like Hell's Angels than the Haight-Ashbury hippies of San Francisco.

You went to Woodstock and all that trash, your generation is fading fast.

How can I be a part of the 1960s generation when I don't even remember any of it?

There is a lot of sixties-bashing going on these days that I don't agree with at all. I feel that extremely important ideals were brought to the forefront of the collective consciousness at that time. Granted, drug use was so pervasive that our generation did not as a group have the capacity to manifest our ideals to any great extent. But many of the people who were young in the sixties and who were most touched by that collective ethos are still touched.

To get the hippie out of certain characters is probably the most difficult thing for me. I was not a hippie by choice but by birth.

The '60s weren't my cup of tea. I never bought that philosophy that, you know, we're all brothers and that'll solve everything. And I never believed that music dictated the times. I always thought it reflected them.

I thought the '60s was the most exciting time and the most vital music, and we were really together as one mind then. Then afterwards, the songs and the bad drugs, that took its toll.

Never trust a hippie. That's definitely my motto.

The '60s aren't over; they won't be over until the Fat Lady gets high.

The '60s was one of the first times the power of music was used by a generation to bind them together.