On Woodstock
99 weekend, a
look back at
Woodstock '69
and the yeshiva
kid who sang
at the greatest
rock show of
them all.

R

JONATHAN MARK

Special to the Jewish News

oute 17 had seen some
legendary traffic jams but
nothing like this.
Catskill-bound cars
were being parked along the highway
shoulders and then in the lanes of
the highway itself.
•
Drivers got out and started walk-
ing. It was a hot August, 30 years
ago this summer, and along with
weekend husbands" returning to
bungalow colonies and Jewish hotels,
a half-million longhairs were headed
to an Aquarian exposition" at Max
Yasgur's alfalfa farm.
A billboard for Brown's Hotel fea-
tured a caricature of Jerry Lewis. On
other billboards, men were shown golf-
ing in billowy slacks. A third billboard
advertised the "Woodstock Music and

CC

Jonathan Mark is associate editor of
the New York Jewish Week.

7/23
1999

84 Detroit Jewish News

ootistock's
`Child Of God'

Art Fair" in White Lake, N.Y. The ad
Sweetwater, Incredible String Band,
depicted a cartoony white dove
Tim Hardin, Bert Sommer — were
perched on a blue-green guitar neck.
forces with which to reckon.
Alan Cooper, 19, left his friend's
Then there were the heavyweight
car in a ditch and started walking.
champs: the Grateful Dead; Jimi
Unlike the millions around him,
Hendrix; Sly and the Family Stone;
Cooper was booked to sing at
Mountain; The Who; Blood, Sweat &
Woodstock with an unknown band,
Tears; Joe Cocker; The Band; Crosby,
called Sha-Na-Na.
Stills & Nash; Janis Joplin; Canned
The 12-man aggregation, com-
Heat; Ten Years After; Joan Baez; John
prised of college kids from Columbia,
Sebastian; and Arlo Guthrie.
signed a contract to sing for $750,
This was to be the company, that
which worked out to $62.50 for
for one weekend, Cooper kept.
Cooper. They had to arrange for their
But those bands were being heli-
own transportation.
coptered in from
Oh, by the way, that
Above: Sha-Na-Na: "The guys Grossinger's and from
same $62.50 gave
up front would wear gold other great hotels from
away all royalty rights
lame suits like the kind they the Catskills' golden age.
used in Bye-Bye Birdie." Cooper was just walking
from the Woodstock
movie and gold-
along Route 17.
record soundtrack.
It all began the autumn before, in
Woodstock, for those of you who
1968, when Cooper was a religion
are younger than springtime, was the
major at Columbia, a Jewish kid fresh
all-star musical summit of the rock
from a childhood in Long Island
era. Even the musicians, perhaps for-
where he graduated from HANC, the
gotten from that distant time —
Hebrew Academy of Nassau County,

before his family moved to New Jersey.
Columbia was the site, then, of
some of the nastiest college riots in a
decade of nasty college riots. But
Cooper preferred singing. He joined
a longstanding campus group, the
Kingsmen, which did close har-
monies and pop tunes. At a campus
concert, when they sang numbers
like, "Well I Think I'm Going Out
of My Head," the reaction was, shall
we say, lukewarm.
However, says Cooper, who sang
bass, "every time we sang an oldie,
like 'The Book of Love,' the crowd
went berserk."
These oldies weren't all that old.
Some were hits just six or seven
years before, but in the purple haze
of 1968, it could as well have been
antediluvian.
At the next concert, the Kingsmen
slicked back their hair, wore pointy
shoes, tight jeans and tighter T-shirts,
in one of the .first '50s parodies. "For
`CHILD OF GOD' on page 86