I heard a lot about Woodstock turning 40 this past week.  Three things in particular stand out:

1. It is very likely that if you are under 30 you have no idea what the big deal is.
2. Those who attended the festival and can still remember it, are generally proud they were there, but would never do it again.
3. The Rock and Roll legends performed on Yasgur’s farm, which is in Bethel, NY  some 1 hour from Woodstock, NY.

I bring all this up, not so much to revisit my hippie days (I was actually about to enter my Junior year in High School and trying to earn some money for college)
but to point out something that seems to be the primary constant in our generation.  Music!

We had no cable or satellite TV,  no video recorders, and no Cell Phones.  We had 4 broadcast TV stations, (3 national, 1 local) and two primary storage media for our music,
LPs and 45s.   AM Radio broadcast our sounds on the monaural “Motor Roller” radio in our dashboard.  If we couldn’t understand the words we would make up our own just so we could sing along.  Then we would argue about what they were really singing, AND what it really meant.  But regardless, a good time was had by all.

As I have written here before, my entire music collection is digitized and loaded into my digital juke box.  If I want to hear Santana, Joe Cocker, The Who, Mountain, or Ten Years After some 40 years after, I just build my playlist and let it rip.  I can hear it perfectly.  I don’t have to smell whatever is emanating from the 1000’s around me.  If I get hungry, I can walk to my refrigerator and still feel the rhythms from my kitchen speakers.  And when nature calls, I have ample sanitary conditions to properly take care of business.

This is not to say that there is no value in the live performance venues and the sense of accomplishment that goes along with having been there and done that!  To the contrary, there is a very special place in my soul for these memories.  It’s just that, in my life, music at just the right volume and just the right moment can trigger a flow of harmony that can only be described as the theme song of my life.

To augment Carlos, “music is everybody’s everything “.  A constant that does not ,necessarily, unify the generations, but it certainly seems to bring us together…even if all we do is stand for Jimi’s rocket’s red glare  or sway and wave to Sha Na Na singing “Goodnight Sweetheart.”