Ravi Shankar and his Hate for Hippies
Words by Ahsun Zafar
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Ravi Shankar and his Hate for Hippies by Ahsun Zafar
In 1969, Ravi Shankar with his custom-made sitar performed in front of his largest ever audience - at Woodstock, the most famous of the 1960s rock festivals, held on a farm property in Bethel, New York. The three-day music festival attracted over 400,000 people, along with rain and mud. All roads to the concert grounds were so jammed that a helicopter was used to fly in Ravi, his frequent accompanist tabla player Alla Rakha, tanpura player Maya Kulkarni who was a twenty-two-year-old master’s student at NYU, and his tour manager Frank Wicks. While waiting to be picked up from a farmhouse, the four watched a man manically chase chickens. Later that same man accompanied them in the chopper to Woodstock. “Then we got into the helicopter, and he was sitting right in front of me, and this guy started pulling hairs out of his chest!” remembers Kulkarni, “I didn’t know where to look. Raviji started teasing me, and Alla Rakha was laughing. Later I was told it was Jimi Hendrix.”
At 10 pm, the trio took the stage. It was dark, rainy, and heralded by dazzling claps of thunder and lightning. Loomed over their heads was the constant threat of their canopy overfilling with water and crashing down. Ravi worried his sitar was getting wet. They performed their best for the next 40 forty minutes but Ravi was fed up with the crowd. “It was drizzling and very cold, but they were so happy in the mud; they were all stoned, of course, but they were enjoying it,” Ravi describes, “It reminded me of the water buffaloes you see in India, submerged in the mud. Woodstock was like a big picnic party, and the music was incidental.” Ravi could feel a disconnect between him and the audience, not just at this particular moment but one that has been growing monstrously for the past few years.
Ravi Shankar’s distaste, to put it politely, for the 1960s hippy culture could be traced back to his performance at the iconic Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 held in California. It was the first and considered to be the greatest of the counterculture’s mass gatherings. Not only would it mark the onset of the “summer of love” but it would also mark Ravi Shankar’s first American appearance, along with Jimi Hendrix - then still a relative unknown - and the Who.