Three days of peace, love and music.
An eternity of crap celebrating it.
I’m not really a rock concert goer. After about 20 minutes of most of the shows I’ve seen, I found myself wondering when the band is going to get to their encore. It’s usually a miserable affair where the venal club owner has filled the place well beyond fire capacity with chain smokers so that everybody is standing shoulder to shoulder like a rush-hour Japanese subway train to hell. I and my friends would try to position ourselves so that we could have a view of the band which was usually a terrible place to be. It was like being a piece in one of those sliding puzzles. Some guy up in the corner was going to have to shift over so that the rest of the crowd could slide around hopefully bringing you close to the bar or, God help you, the lavatory. Clean bathrooms are for squares, Potsie! Also, there’s really nothing to see with most bands. The singer earnestly wails out lyrics that sound like bad high school poetry while the guitarist and bass player lean back and smugly grin at one another as if sharing some private joke, and the drummer madly perseverates on a set of skins. I look at them and envy the personal space they have in that hellish sweatbox. Look! They can move around freely! Despite the lack of room in the audience, there’s always the shirtless, sweaty guy imbued with the spirit of Isadora Duncan and filled to the gills with pharmaceuticals not recognized by the FDA who can’t help but do bad interpretive dancing in the extremely limited space. This is usually while the warm-up act is still on. I couldn’t imagine a three day concert. It sounds like the musical equivalent of the Bataan Death March.
This ad from a 1971 issue of Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos is part of the hangover from 3 Days of Peace, Love and Stopped-Up Portable Johns. The documentary Woodstock had come out the year before and it was sold as the next best thing to being at the real event as if it was The Sermon on the Mound. Warner Bros probably realized that there was a lot of money in all of the folks who wished they could have been there and shilled an endless line of trinkets and trash.
Cuff links? How many people reading Sgt. Fury wore cuff links?
