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Radio personality Pete Fornatale has ruled the New York City airwaves for four decades, where he still reigns with his WFUV show, "Mixed Bag." Knowledgeable, incisive and with an uncanny ear, Fornatale started his career in 1969, about two weeks before the decade's seminal music event, Woodstock. "Back to the Garden" is his 2009 book chronicling the festival that oldsters and even youngsters (and it seems, everyone in between) view as the emblematic event of the Sixties. "Without initially intending to, Woodstock made a statement," Fornatale writes. "It became a symbol for all the changes that bubbled up during the first half of the American '60s and boiled over during the second half."
Fornatale interviewed scores of Woodstock attendees, from its musical stars (Roger Daltrey, Joan Baez, David Crosby, Richie Havens, Joe Cocker and more) to its organizers and fans. In trying to get the clearest possible picture of it, he was surprised to find how frequently things were fuzzy. Not because people's memories had faded but because everybody seemed to come away with different ones. After many interviews, Fornatale realized that the "confounding dilemma about the festival," is that people's accounts of the very same events are so at odds. "I'm not talking about mere mild differences of opinion," Fornatale writes. "I'm talking about wildly divergent, red-in-the-face rants and polemics about everything that happened during those very same sixty-five hours on Yasgur's farm in Bethel, New York, in August of 1969."
Fornatale relays these conflicting accounts, colorful anecdotes and insights on November 7 at 3:30 p.m., when he gives a talk at Greenwich Library. The event is free. For more information, visit the Library's website. If you couldn't make it to Woodstock, this might be a great runner-up.
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