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Scene from the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, White Lake, Bethel, NY.
Dear Friend and Reader:
Tonight’s Planet Waves FM looks at the current astrology: Jupiter stationing direct, with Jupiter square Neptune, and Thursday’s Aquarius New Moon.
I briefly discuss the deeper implications of the Jeffrey Epstein situation. Then I move on to a reading of the Woodstock Festival chart (included below), and Tantra Studio, wherein I discuss the “anti-environment” created by conscious sexuality.
Tonight’s music is mostly by Vision Quest (I open with a Mickey Hart piece from Planet Drum).
Planet Waves FM is part of the Pacifica Radio Network. We’re a nonprofit project supported by your donations, memberships and contributions. Please do what you can. Planet Waves FM and its publisher, Chiron Return, are seeking a major donor to help us get our more ambitious projects off of the ground. If that might be you, please get in touch.
Thank you for your listenership and your ongoing support and friendship.
With love,
PS — I’ve revived the Vision Quest programming on our main Mixlr stream. Vision Quest is the in-house Planet Waves ambient rock ensemble, which emerged as part of the 2016 annual edition. The queue now has 80 hours of recordings, writing sessions, rehearsals and live performances. Tune in here, free, any time.
In the summer of 1994, I wrote the cover story for As We Are magazine, looking at the first Woodstock revival — the 25th anniversary. I dug it out and scanned it; here is the PDF.
Part One of Eric’s Solar Winds reading, Astrology Studio for Leo Sun, Moon and rising, is now available for instant access. Leo has just been through an extraordinary experience of eclipses (including the Great American Eclipse), and you are still reorienting from those experiences. We will move from there into the influence of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn, which talks about the profound changes you’re going through in “everyday life,” including matters related to work and wellbeing. And of course, Chiron in Aries will feature prominently, in this extended reading for Leo. Take a break from the mental stress and frustration of society, and enter a world where you are at the center, where your potential is real, and where your problems yield to your spiritual gifts.
You may order here. This reading is included with the Backstage Pass and Galaxy Pass.
It is difficult to feel good these days; it’s challenging to focus on your growth and self-care, or even to relax. We are pulled out of ourselves constantly, and often distracted from our core purposes. IN THESE TIMES, the Planet Waves autumn reading, will help.
Not many black musicians played at Woodstock but one iconic figure who did and who is somewhat overlooked today was the late, lamented Ritchie Havens. Not only black, he was an Aquarian who sang a song called Freedom in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Musically, it doesn’t get much more astrological than that. Many happy returns on your 50th anniversary, Woodstock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rynxqdNMry4
Thank you for the Ritchie Havens link, Geoff! He definitely gets less mention than Hendrix, but for sure deserves attention.
Many thanks for the appreciation, Amanda. Apologies for my slip-up over the spelling of his name, by the way – it’s Richie, a more accurate abbreviation for Richard. Other black musicians did perform at Woodstock but it seemed to me at the time as conceptually a white music festival.
Given its extensive coverage of white youth’s musical tribute to their “alternative” revolution, it did seem odd to me at the time that the main man missing from this great gathering was the master-songsmith himself, Mr Robert Zimmerman. Turns out he was only too happy to enrapture his friends in the deep south of the UK while America’s hippies cavorted on his beloved patch of sacred home turf. We couldn’t believe our luck, Bob!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/entertainment-arts-49353170/when-bob-dylan-played-the-isle-of-wight-festival-in-1969
Sadly coincidental, the death of Peter Fonda on the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock festival of arts and music. The movie Easy Rider, released just two months after Woodstock, in which he starred, co-wrote and co-produced, was the break-out movie for the love and peace counter-culture generation in search of acceptance for their concepts of what it should mean to live in the land of the free.
In a statement, his family said: “While we mourn the loss of this sweet and gracious man, we also wish for all to celebrate his indomitable spirit and love of life.
“In honour of Peter, please raise a glass to freedom.”
A great pity that Richie Havens is not here to do just that.
Geoff — somehow I completely missed the news of Fonda’s passing last week! Thank you for mentioning it here. I need to bump “Easy Rider” up to the top of my long-neglected list of classics I should watch.
I’ve long been peripherally familiar with Fonda and that film. But for anyone else my generation or younger, this short article offers a great tribute (spoiler alert, though):
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/remembering-peter-fonda-indie-revolutionary-143044475.html
I haven’t seen Easy Rider in a long time, Amanda, but I was at film school when it came out and at the time the film was considered a revolutionary breakthrough akin to The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s LP.
Within a very capitalistic Hollywood framework, the film had been produced for around $400,000 and had gone on to gross $60 million at the box office worldwide – the kind of profit usually reserved for illegal products such as drugs!
You can see why us poor film students were impressed by this possible breakthrough in legitimate film financing. Until then, the somewhat exploitative social commentary flicks by Roger Corman were the only movies dramatising the lives of young outsiders which had managed to achieve international distribution.
Apart from the storyline, acting, real smoking of pot on camera (truth in honour of the incoming Age of Aquarius) and financial success, what dignified this original movie and set it apart at the time was the soundtrack. Not a pop music score, as your article suggests, but a sublime selection of the best underground music to accompany this radical departure in movie entertainment for a psychedelically self-aware generation. Check out the soundtrack listing here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_Rider_(soundtrack)
If you watch it now, it may not stand up to your expectations, but I believe it’s fair to say that this movie is to film what Woodstock was to music concerts – undeniably alternative and appropriate to the zeitgeist of the times, which were, of course, a-changin’.
Freedom from the way things had always been; freedom to honour the freedom of all individuals; freedom as in the meaning of Aquarius. Freedom!
Geoff, thank you for the additional context! I can see why the person writing the article might have mis-categorized the soundtrack, given that some of the names on it are now iconic household names — even if they (or those tracks) were not at the time. And I’ll do my best to view the film with awareness that times have changed, both in filmmaking and in general. I happen to enjoy watching classic films (all the way back to the silent gems), and appreciate that the social and technical contexts have changed significantly in the ensuing decades, but can *usually* still glean a sense of why the groundbreaking ones were considered to be so.