Well I travel at the speed of a reborn man...
Last month I finally managed to track down a replacement for a long-lost late Seventies copy of The Rolling Stone Record Guide. There were several editions published of this extraordinarily comprehensive and well-written overview which never pulled its punches by way of qualitative shortfalls it perceived in major musical careers - up to and including John Lennon and Bob Dylan. Other famous performers - anchored in both the commercial and the underground markets alike - could be savagely dismissed from Billy Joel to the Grateful Dead. Conversely no artist was held in higher regard within this definitive reference source as Van Morrison.
Some posts ago I mentioned Morrison's Seventies back catalogue which followed upon 1969's Astral Weeks. Any random investigation of the nine albums from Moondance through to Into the Music will reveal such an extraordinary sweep of lesser-known tracks of outstanding and timeless quality - Redwood Tree from Saint Dominic's Preview, Linden Arden Stole the Highlights off Veedon Fleece and the Hard Nose the Highway opener Snow in San Anselmo are just three.
Another wonderful track in this remit is Old Old Woodstock from Tupelo Honey which one must assume is a rumination on the utter bliss of married life in upstate New York as opposed to recollections of one of East Belfast's major arterial routes close to Morrison's own childhood home off the Beersbridge Road.
Over the course of this summer there has been a large raft of retrospective media analyses of both the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival and that of the outbreak of major civil disorder in Derry and Belfast in 1969 which constitute for many historical observers the de facto commencement of the Ulster Troubles. This beyond the three loyalist paramilitary murders of 1966 and the heavy October 1968 Royal Ulster Constabulary response to a civil rights march in Derry.
Although the presence of Grease Band guitarist Henry McCullough from Portstewart at Woodstock has been flagged up several times as the sole Irish connection with the most famous rock festival in history - and an interesting Belfast Telegraph article recalled Marmalade at Pop for Peace at Minnowburn Beeches in South Belfast on August 2nd - the exact linear overlap of these events on both sides of the Atlantic that summer are worth further consideration.
The violent mayhem in Belfast which left seven dead played out over four days and nights - Wednesday 13th, Thursday 14th, Friday 15th and Saturday 16th August. The long weekend of the Woodstock Festival took place through Friday 15th, Saturday 16th, Sunday 17th and Monday 18th.
The civil disorder in Belfast in August 1969 was triggered by the aftermath of the Apprentice Boys' march on Derry's city walls on Tuesday 12th which resulted in rioting in the Bogside between nationalist youths and the RUC. The geographical transference of trouble to Northern Ireland's capital however would see bloody conflict erupt directly between the two religious communities across three urban interfaces in working class Belfast - Clonard, Ardoyne and Divis Street.
On Wednesday 13th August Belfast republicans organised demonstrations in the west of the city to draw police attention from Derry - over 500 attending a rally at Springfield Road RUC station. The police station at Hastings Street was later attacked by a crowd and serious trouble ensued in the Falls district with stones and petrol bombs being directed at RUC vehicles. Barricades were thrown up at residential interfaces and many civilians living in these areas fled their homes - the IRA were involved in the disturbances of the evening but no direct fighting took place between republicans and loyalists.
The course of Thursday and Friday morning however would see circumstances spiral out of all public control and civil restraint. In this period Hastings Street police station was attacked again and groups of loyalists faced off against nationalist crowds at Dover Street and Percy Street before burning Catholic properties there, in Divis Street in the Lower Falls and at Conway Street near Clonard Monastery. Meanwhile petrol bombs rained down on police from the Divis Flats complex.
An IRA unit at Divis Street shot dead a Protestant civilian while rounds from RUC Shorland armoured cars killed a nine-year-old Catholic youth and a British soldier home on leave in Divis Flats. With rioting between loyalists and republicans spreading to the Crumlin Road/Ardoyne in North Belfast over the course of the evening, the IRA and the RUC exchanged fire - two Catholic civilians were shot dead by police. On this day too a Catholic civilian was killed in Armagh by auxilary policemen and units of the British Army deployed in Derry.
Thus Friday 15th August - the opening day of the Woodstock Festival one million miles away in Ulster County, New York state - dawned in Belfast. For older residents of the city - who could recall the troubled times of the Twenties during the Irish Revolution or indeed the savage riots of 1935 as times of unprecedented and surely unrepeatable terror - mortifying waves of violence would return to shadow all the rest of their days. Similarly the lives of all adults and children in Northern Ireland would thereafter be fogged by anger, suspicion and the lottery of three decades of murder.
On yet another extraordinary day in Belfast's history, families in interface areas continued to flee to safer locales while British troops arrived at the Falls/Shankill shatterzones that evening at 2135 following a 0430 request from the police commissioner for military aid and a Northern Ireland cabinet appeal to the London Home Office at 1225. Prior to the military intervention violence had continued in West Belfast with loyalist incursions down Cupar Street leading to the burning of Catholic properties here and in Kashmir Road and Bombay Street. A loyalist sniper shot dead a volunteer from the IRA youth wing at the latter flashpoint. The British soldiers from the Royal Regiment of Wales had initially arrived in the Falls area at 1830. Violence also raged at Ardoyne over the course of Friday with another Protestant civilian fatality caused by IRA gunfire.
Day one of the Woodstock "Aquarian Exposition" meanwhile commenced at 1707 with Ritchie Havens and then other folk performers taking the stage including Ravi Shankar, Tim Hardin, Melanie and Arlo Guthrie. It ended at 0200 Saturday morning with Joan Baez singing We Shall Overcome - a song heard frequently at Northern Ireland civil rights demonstrations and marches.
Assuming a standard five hour time difference between the east coast of America and the old soil of Ireland as then directly applying, the opening sets at Woodstock would have overlapped with the real Ulster passion play in terms of a 2200 to 0700 framework on the British Isles - hence the Army "peacekeeping force" set foot on Belfast's mean streets around 30 minutes before Ritchie Havens' From the Prison acoustic opener.
Over Saturday 16th August unrest died down across Belfast city with British Army coverage extending onto the troubled Crumlin Road in turn. At 1820 that night and as a devastated Belfast came to terms with the eruption of sectarian hatreds long considered as organically diffused into history, the second day of the Woodstock Festival commenced with Quill, Country Joe McDonald and Santana.
Performances would continue on through until 1110 on Monday 18th August - including Creedance Clearwater Revival, Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin, The Who and Jefferson Airplane. It finished with a two-hour Jimi Hendrix set which began with his mesmeric and driving Message to Love.
The August violence in Ulster beyond Belfast and Derry incorporated disturbances in Dungannon, Dungiven, Coalisland, Strabane and Newry. Aside from the eight fatalities outlined above, there were 750 injuries , over 150 Catholic domestic residences and 275 businesses destroyed while 1800 civilians fled their homes. The political, constitutional and security repercussions would be immense and the ramifications for civil society in Ulster would be devastating.
Fifty years on from Ulster's alternative Endless Summer and the millenium peace appears to be radically deconstructing as catalysed by both the political stasis at Stormont and Westminster's Brexit implosion. The latter's extraordinary complexity now fuelled by a parliamentary prorogation atop the explosive trigger of a democratic mandate - this being not dissimilar to the March 1972 and February 1974 milestones in Northern Ireland's earlier descent from blanket chaos to complete anarchy to eventually the very living room lights going off.