The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Lamont’s Labor Day of Love music festival
Gov. Ned Lamont — who can fly or ferry to his rightful place among the posh, Down East on North Haven Island in Maine whenever he needs to escape the pesky realities of winning the 2018 election — wants to turn back the clock.
It may be just what this divided, dour, bitter, angry, stressed state needs.
You moviegoers might remember the 1991 film “My Own Private Idaho,” which was vaguely based on Shakespeare’s plays about Henry IV and V, and took place mostly on the drugaddled streets and squats of Portland, Ore.
Lamont, in the unlikely trappings of a modern version of the rascally Sir John Falstaff — on boogiewoogie piano no less — wants our own public Woodstock.
Connecticut that is, a mere 98 miles from Bridgeport, up in the Northeast “Quiet Corner,” a town I have never visited, in the shadows of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
It might be Lamont’s best initiative, certainly his most imaginative, or at least the one must likely to be fulfilled, in his young administration.
And with family wealth that goes back to the United States’ own Henry V — John Pierpont Morgan — Lamont can do it, offering a top prize of $7,500 to bands commemorating the seminal 1969 weekend that was the public flexing of generational muscle, in front of a 4/4 beat.
Those kinds of boomer bucks are a drop in the bucket for the governor, who wants to commemorate a trademark and cultural touchstone a full half century after the ’60s peaked, all in the name of Connecticut tourism.
“Step out of yourselves,” lavender haired U.S. Soccer superstar Megan Rapinoe said the other day on the steps of New York’s City Hall, in a fresh battle cry from the era. “Listen more and talk less.”
I would hate to accuse the governor of nostalgia in trying to recycle the ’60s, which for my money were more about national social unrest and 58,000 dead Americans — along with hundreds of thousands Southeast Asians — than peace, love and understanding. Yeah, war is stupid, not that we learned anything from the carnage. Racial discrimination persists in the 21st century.
But music can be timeless, and sharing it is one of the great gifts we have as humans.
Since I am a mere couple months younger than the governor, I, who also missed the first Woodstock, can recall the outlines of the summer of 1969, aged 15.
I was in no position whatsoever to get up to Max Yasgur’s 600acre cow farm in Bethel, N.Y. In fact, I was playing semi adequate third base for my Babe Ruth League team in Stamford, batting a dismal .188, in a season that luckily put me on the path to a 50year soccer playing career that makes getting up out of chairs today, well, gravitationally challenging.
The way Lamont, a good piano player, remembers it, he tried to negotiate with his parents.
It was barely on my radar, although my folks didn’t have to point out the front page of that Sunday New York Times: the aerial shot of 300,000 people. A year later, when I started summer jobs and bought a record player, they pretty much heard the entire concert who knows how many times.
Anyway, Lamont and his staff, namely Rob Blanchard, the communications pro who kept Lamont from falling off numerous train platforms during the 2018 campaign, had been secretly working on the governor’s Labor Day of Love for months, springing it on reporters a few days ago.
Meanwhile, the bigtime Woodstock revival was collapsing of its own weight at various potential locations in upstate New York.
Its first location was going to be the sprawling auto racetrack in Watkins Glen, where, coincidentally, I found myself with 600,000 close friends in the summer of 1973 for The Grateful Dead, The Band, and The Allman Brothers, in one of the final gasps of the caring, sharing era of soggy sleeping bags, bell bottoms, blistering sun, and longhaired tribal rhythms.
With that many people packed tightly we had to get along with our neighbors, who in turn did the same in a popup cascade of caring.
I am kind of rooting for mud over the coming Labor Day weekend and the 159th annual Woodstock Fair, to make the “Ned fest” experience more authentic. Maybe a shortage of food, too. Certainly we don’t want any brown acid up there, and with the proximity to the marijuana dispensaries of Massachusetts ...
It might be Lamont’s best initiative, certainly his most imaginative, or at least the one must likely to be fulfilled, in his young administration.