The Great Music Show by McGrath of Harlow

McGrath's Comments:  (In re Woodstock)  Lots of good memories.  I got there more or less by chance - I was over there for a pacifist conference due the next week, and someone offered me a lift to some kind of festival that was going on.   I remember waking up smashed in the morning and wandering over to the Hog Farm free kitchen, where I found myself working stirring up peculiar messes of food and serving it to lines of survivors, holding the tent down when the rainstorm broke upon us and nearly blew us away, and joining in a jug band when night came around.  Better than any of the music on stage. And some of that was pretty good.  The someone comes round with boxes of chocky bars and that that was supposed to be thrown out to people wedged up the front, and I got in for that, up on stage while Jefferson Airplane were playing, before we got to do our throwing act.  So I wasn't just at Woodstock, I was on stage there!  Come the 25th anniversary someone on our local paper thought they'd find a local angle on it, and came and interviewed me about it.  (Well there aren't many Woodstock survivors in West Essex, I think, and my son had told him about me).  Thinking about it afterwards I wrote a song:


When I got there, all around 
you could feel it start to grow. 
There were thousands upon thousands,
people moving to and fro,
and the roads were blocked behind us - 
there was no way you could go. 
We were cast away, so far away 
in that Great Music Show. 

Chorus:
And I stood in the rain, 
and I wondered through the show, 
and I saw what I saw, 
and I know now what I know, 
and it's all been so long 
and so very long ago - 
but I'm glad I was part 
of that Great Music Show.

Well the smoke and the sunshine 
nearly felled me like a blow, 
but I rose like a salmon 
as my mind began to glow, 
And I was heaving like a sailor 
when the tent began to go, 
and the wind and the rain 
they were walking to and fro.

Chorus:
And I stood in the rain, 
and I wondered through the show, 
and I saw what I saw, 
and I know now what I know, 
and it's all been so long 
and so very long ago - 
but I'm glad I was part 
of that Great Music Show.

And the music on the mountain 
in the morning when we rose 
seemed to open up a window 
that could never quite be closed. 
And the brightest and the best 
they may have died so long ago, 
but I saw them there all shining 
at the Great Music Show.

Chorus:
And I stood in the rain, 
and I wondered through the show, 
and I saw what I saw, 
and I know now what I know, 
and it's all been so long 
and so very long ago - 
but I'm glad I was part 
of that Great Music Show.

And you can ask me for the reasons 
why we ever chose to go 
to those hills so far and foreign 
to a place we did not know. 
But the reasons they are hidden 
in the days of long ago, 
when the world stood amazed 
at that Great Music Show.

Chorus:
And I stood in the rain, 
and I wondered through the show, 
and I saw what I saw, 
and I know now what I know, 
and it's all been so long 
and so very long ago - 
but I'm glad I was part 
of that Great Music Show.

c. Kevin McGrath 1994