Ed in 1994 (on the occasion of the 25th anniversary):
“You can’t kill the spirit of a generation for at least fifty years, and there was a time when millions believed in the entity known as Woodstock Nation, a nation of free food, free medical care and free music, a generation that paid very careful attention to the implications of Allen Ginsberg’s great line of poetry, “When will I be able to go into a supermarket and get what I want with my own good looks?“. So tonight, we celebrate the Woodstock Nation, a place of clean air, clean water, free food and lots of art, love and music..”
(from the Fugs concert at the August, 1994 “Real” Woodstock Festival)– (Ironically, unlike any of the other events bearing the Woodstock albatross, this Festival was actually held in the town of Woodstock, upstate New York, where Ed Sanders and his wife Miriam have maintained a permanent residency since the early ’70s)
Happy Birthday, Ed! – For previous Ed Sanders birthday postings – see here, here and here
Here’s Ed performing Blake on the occasion of his 75th birthday
& for another salute to a great Socialist Beat legend – see Scott Bradfield on Ferlinghetti in (the American edition of) the New Statesman – here
Bob Rosenthal went to visit Naomi Ginsberg’s grave the other day (Beth Moses Cemetery, West Babylon, Long Island (book open to the last page of Kaddish, brother Eugene‘s words on the stone, jazz legend, John Coltrane buried nearby) – and. the crows caw-ed
Ah ritual!