When my mother was raising me, she moved us upstate to the Woodstock area. Our closest neighbor was a mile away. She planted all her own vegetables.
I lived in Red Hook, Brooklyn, for about 10 years, and then we moved out to Jersey City after my wife and I bought a house up in the Catskills. I miss Brooklyn, but the commute to the Catskills is about 45 minutes shorter.
Live Aid was a baby Woodstock, a child of Woodstock, which I call Globalstock.
I grew up with the Woodstock generation. I went to Woodstock, and like everybody in my school, I wanted to be in a rock-and-roll band, and most of us were. But I also grew up with a lot of piano lessons and a lot of classical music training.
Woodstock is the only thing we have going for us in this part of the state in terms of national recognition. The idea is to extract what was good about Woodstock, repackage it, and present it to Middle America.
This isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock--I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.
I've always felt that there's a Catskills comic who lives in my head and is constantly trying to get out. There's all these jokes that have been passed down from Jewish generation to Jewish generation, which I love but which I've always made fun of.
I'm here in the mountains, in the foothills of the Catskills.
I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.
To come out here and play on Woodstock grounds, first year ever headlining on the main stage there's nothing more iconic. [Mysteryland] is one of those festivals that holds down the legacy of dance music it's been around for so many years. It's been part of what we do for so long. It kinda makes sense to bring the tradition over here to America. The festival grounds of Woodstock, that's pretty epic.
My mom lives on a mountain in the Catskills.
I don't care what you do, I just don't want to be a mud hippie like you. [From 1994 woodstock]
If every vampire who said he was at the crucifixion was actually there, it would've been like Woodstock.
Our band doesn't like pressure or timelines. We like to be in a casual environment where everyone is happy with their surroundings. It's not like being in Brooklyn - if you're somewhere beautiful like upstate, you can walk outside to take a moment. It's a big part of our functioning.
Woodstock was about the closest thing to anarchy I've ever seen in my whole life, and I didn't like it.
I have held Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock guitar and imagined what it would be like to play it, but that's the extent of it.