In his classic Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album" book of 50 years ago, 1960's U.S. antiwar movement organizer/activist and Chicago 8 Trial defendant Abbie Hoffman indicated how the U.S. hip capitalist rock music industry entrepreneurs and rock capitalist musicians who put together the Woodstock Music Festival in August 1969 apparently failed to reflect the egalitarian values of the 1960s antiwar and anti-capitalist Movement's counter-cultural hippie youth culture:
"...The za-za world of rock is almost entirely an uptown plastic dome. Up at Woodstock it meant living at the Concord hotel or the Holiday Inn in Liberty and buzzing in stoned out of your head in a helicopter. It meant being hustled under guard to a secluded pavilion to join the other aristocrats who run the ROCK EMPIRE...
"I emerged exhausted, broke and bleeding from the WOODSTOCK NATION. It was an awesome experience but one that made me have a clearer picture of myself as a cultural revolutionary--not a cultural nationalist, for that would embrace a concept of hip capitalism which I reject...Cultural revolution requires people to change the way they live...
"The four promoters of Woodstock Ventures are Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, Joel Rosenman and John Roberts...Lang owned a head shop in Coral Gables until he got the idea for Woodstock Ventures. Kornfeld was a rock promoter for ...bubble rock groups...Rosenman and Roberts had the bread. Roberts' old man owned a multi-million dollar pharmaceutical firm...
"...Brothers and Sisters, we have a duty to each other to work out the problem of the vultures that prey on our culture and indeed on the rest of the world culture as well...The Big Boys are going to get together and sort of figure out how they can make some bread on the Woodstock Nation or, if not directly, how they can suck its energy. All that has to be fit in along with Columbia Records pulling ads out of the underground press in an effort to cripple them. A to P research firm had suggested two ways to prevent another Chicago from happening.
"1. Cancel the policy of youth fare on airplanes.
"2. Urge Columbia Records to pull out of the underground press...
"...These guys were prepared to do anything to stay in business, even grow their hair a little longer and put on some beads.
"Fit all that in with Love Food, Inc. selling sawdust burgers for outrageous prices on the highest hill in WOODSTOCK NATION and shoveling real money with real shovels into Wells Fargo Trucks, all the time guarded by cops who weren't holding flowers in their hands, no sir. These are things that weren't announced from the stage in that syrupy smooth groovy voice, nor talked about in the psychedelic hand-outs and press releases of Woodstock Ventures...
"What are you gonna do with your bread, brother rock stars? Are you gonna help build and defend the WOODSTOCK NATION NOW, or are you just gonna piss it all away?...
"...Revolution was becoming a saleable commodity and the only way to deal with that was to try and rip off the bread and spread it around like the manure it was...No real hip activist could just sit by and watch skilled promoters create events that gathered huge numbers of young people and made exorbitant profits without eventually taking an interest..."
