Homeward Bound (Rotary Wing Model)

There’s a popular saying (here in the Geezer Hood) that if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there. Well I can and I was so I smile as we go through I’m not quite sure what to call it at this moment in commemorating the 45^th Anniversary of “An Aquarian Exposition”, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

Do I really need to warn you to stay away from the brown acid? Too late, I concede, for those in the House of Representatives, as near as I can determine, but worth a try for the rest of us. I wasn’t there but I was on the earth and enjoyed many of the people who made much of three-days of music that went on there, and who then left without getting any of Yasgur’s Farm on them.   

This is the most iconic moment of those three days of peace, love and death. But it’s not a part of my story about Woodstock, because my story isn’t about Woodstock but a prison in Munchen (West) Germany, called Stadelheim and two inmates, lovers I always assumed, Magnus and Marchy.

It was Marchy who used to write to me with requests either she or Magnus wished to hear when I worked very late at night for American Forces Radio. I had the impression they were incarcerated for serious (vice recreational) drugs, cocaine or heroin (more likely the latter) than hashish or cannabis.

Her command of English made Marchy the ambassador.

I worked hard, though not as hard I should or could have, to honor requests even if they were from what we called “the shadow audience” (not US troops, employees or their family members for whom we were a ‘Voice from Home’) but the natives of the countries we were stationed in and to whom we were  accidentally bringing American culture, even if it was spelled with a “K.”

I’d get a ridiculously large number of rock and roll song suggestions and developed a deep appreciation of Rik De Lisle, the host of Old Gold Retold (on before me) and his ability to manage a deluge of requests without drowning in somebody else’s favorite songs and still please his legion of fans.

I never had that many ear witnesses-I referred to the show in the office as “Diving for Dopers” since I had little illusion as to who was up at that hour and what they were doing. I’d play no more than three audience requests a show but still had a waiting list that stretched for weeks. Marchy and Magnus were repeat requesters and always had amazing taste.

When I got her card with a “Birthday Greetings Wish for Magnus” (I can still see the blue ink scrawled across the white prison postcard and the initials of whomever (I presume) allowed the card to be mailed to the Armee Sender in Frankfurt), for Ten Years After, “I’m Going Home By Helicopter” I was amused as how he had misheard the title, but when you listen to Alvin introduce the song, you ,too shall realize, Magnus nailed it.

If fast guitar playing had been an Olympic sport, Alvin Lee would be on the medals podium; he was fast and he was loud. And people who loved him, loved him; and people who didn’t, shrugged. I did a lot of shrugging when I saw the card, but I worked the Live at Woodstock version of the song into a set and wished Magnus a happy birthday (though privately I wondered how that would have been possible).

A couple of weeks later a card, signed only by Marchy, came thanking me for playing Alvin and TYA, assuring me  Magnus would have really loved it, except he’d committed suicide by overdose the night of his birthday.

Probably not quite the Woodstock story either of us had hoped for and certainly not the one I’d have told you had I a better one, but as I suggested earlier if you remembered Woodstock, you weren’t there. And I’ve spent a lot of time in the ensuing decades wishing I had been somewhere else instead. 

-bill kenny