Negde pri dnu finansijske liste bila je grupa Santana Somewhere near the bottom of the financial list was the group Santana
SANTANA
I t was a few years ago that I was sitting in a restaurant in Belgrade’s Skadarlija Bohemian Quarter as part of a select- ed 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, per- cussionist of her accompanying composi- tion. At one point, completely out of the blue, Gabe said to me,“You know... I was al- so at Woodstock... in her stomach”. The con- versation between two music lovers had to, 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 re- membered by those who weren’t there”.
THE CONQUEST OF FREEDOM, ESSENTIAL DRIVING FORCE
every struggle for freedom creates victims. The Beatles stopped performing because they were bored of not even being able to hear their own thoughts over the scream- ing fans at their concerts, while Dylan’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 prob- lems that had tormented Liverpool’s Fab Four, with powerful speaker systems devel- oping for open-air concerts (The Beatles had 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 suc- cess of the Monterey International Pop Mu- sic Festival, held in North California during 1967’s Summer of Love, inspired a series of similar events in the following years. A new type of hippie was emerging – entrepre- neurs, managers able to align their organ- isational skills with the principles of“ ower power”. Two such individuals were Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld. It was among the
able 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“rock culture”.This new model didn’t on- ly 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 pro- tagonists led the way by example. Thanks to their incredible talent and the authori- ty of their commercial success, The Beatles had their hands untethered in their inim- itable and unrepeatable musical expres- sion, from the song She Loves You to the layered Strawberry Fields Forever and be- yond, while Dylan rejected the comfortable role of a troubadour beloved by New York’s intellectual circles, electri ed himself and became a genuine rock star. Nevertheless,
Woodstock Festival (or, o cially, “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music”) signi ed the climax of the swing- ing‘60s, but also announced the inevitable end of that amazing, unrepeatable decade in the development of modern civilisation. In the shadow of dangerous global divisions, under the threat of nuclear con ict, a com- pletely new culture had emerged that had music pulsing at its core. The rock’n’roll phe- nomenon of the 1950s, born through the fu- sion of previously incompatible in uences of “black”and“white”music traditions in Amer- ica, had spread to infect much of the planet, thanks to the expansion of the technologi- cal capacities of lm, radio and television. Amongthevictimsofthisinfectionwere four blokes from the English city of Liverpool, who found their names in the composition known as The Beatles, along with a skinny bookworm from Minnesota, the o spring of a family of Russian Jewish refugees, who moved to New York and changed his name from Robert Zimmerman to the more suit-
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