| 47 It was a few years ago that I was sitting in a restaurant in Belgrade’s Skadarlija Bohemian Quarter as part of a selected welcome group for the legendary Joan Baez ahead of her concert to be held in the city the next day. I was supposed to teach her to sing a song in our language. Nevertheless, I spent most of that evening speaking with her son, Gabriel Harris, percussionist of her accompanying composition. At one point, completely out of the blue, Gabe said tome,“You know... I was alsoatWoodstock... inher stomach”.Theconversationbetweentwomusic lovershadto, at some point, stumble across the magical name of the festival named after a city in which it wasn’t held and which is “best remembered by those who weren’t there”. THE CONQUEST OF FREEDOM, ESSENTIAL DRIVING FORCE Woodstock Festival (or, o cially, “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music”) signi ed the climax of the swinging‘60s, but alsoannounced the inevitable endof that amazing, unrepeatabledecade in thedevelopment ofmodern civilisation. Intheshadowofdangerousglobaldivisions, under the threat of nuclear con ict, a completely new culture had emerged that had musicpulsingat itscore.Therock’n’roll phenomenonof the1950s,bornthroughthefusionofpreviouslyincompatiblein uencesof “black”and“white”musictraditions inAmerica, hadspreadto infectmuchof theplanet, thanks to the expansionof the technological capacities of lm, radio and television. Amongthevictimsofthisinfectionwere fourblokesfromtheEnglishcityofLiverpool, who found their names in thecomposition known as The Beatles, along with a skinny bookworm from Minnesota, the o spring of a familyof Russian Jewish refugees, who moved toNewYork andchangedhis name fromRobert Zimmerman to themore suitable pseudonym of Bob Dylan. A meeting between Dylan and The Beatles at a New York hotel in 1964 practically represented the spark of rock’n’roll’s development into the“rockculture”.Thisnewmodel didn’tonly encompass music, but rather expanded to include a general state of mind which erased the boundaries between“folk”and “elite” culture. Artists like Andy Warhol or Salvador Dali became pop stars in a world where the Rolling Stones’ song Sympathy For The Devil recommended a ection not for the Devil, but for Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. The essential driving force was “the conquest of freedom”, and the main protagonists led the way by example. Thanks to their incredible talent and the authority of their commercial success, The Beatles had their hands untethered in their inimitable and unrepeatable musical expression, from the song She Loves You to the layered Strawberry Fields Forever and beyond,whileDylanrejectedthecomfortable roleof a troubadour belovedbyNewYork’s intellectual circles, electri ed himself and became a genuine rock star. Nevertheless, every struggle for freedomcreates victims. The Beatles stopped performing because they were bored of not even being able to hear their own thoughts over the screaming fans at their concerts, whileDylan’s role as a leader and “messiah”was determined by the family with which he ed from the crowds to a small town in northern New YorkStatenamedWoodstock.Thatwas1966. Technological advancements would soon o er solutions to the kinds of problems that had tormented Liverpool’s Fab Four,withpowerful speaker systemsdevelopingforopen-airconcerts (TheBeatleshad performed in front of tens of thousands of people using standard stadium speakers). This created the conditions for the staging of mass musical events, and the great successof theMonterey International PopMusic Festival, held in North California during 1967’s Summer of Love, inspired a series of similar events in the followingyears. Anew type of hippie was emerging – entrepreneurs, managers able to align their organisational skillswith theprinciples of“ ower power”.Two such individualswereMichael Lang and Artie Kornfeld. It was among the Negde pri dnu finansijske liste bila je grupa Santana Somewhere near the bottom of the financial list was the group Santana SANTANA
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