Burk Uzzle, Couple, 1969
(Photo courtesy Lawrence Miller Gallery)
This summer will mark the 40th anniversary of the famous music festival near Woodstock, New York that took on the name of the town. One of the more famous pictures of the event was taken by Burk Uzzle, a former contract photographer for LIFE magazine and now a past president of Magnum. One reason it became so famous was that it was the cover of the first (of two) Woodstock albums. (Strange as this may sound, I don't recall ever seeing the album cover before, although I think I must have at some point. At the time, I was 12, listening to things like Donovan's "Mellow Yellow" and Motown on the radio, and my father's Al Hirt records—I played second trumpet in the school band.)
The couple in the photo are Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, both 20 then, local kids. They had known each other only three months at the time, but they married two years later—and are still together today. (So it was love.) They're both 60 now, and have been profiled so often that they sometimes get recognized out in public. There's a nice article about them in the New York Daily News that shows a picture of what they look like today.
They still live in the area, too, all these years later.
The album cover photo limped on with reduced size on CD but where is it on music downloads? Someone needs to come up with a music format with an embedded picture so we can look at something other than the swirly "Trip without drugs" served up by Windows Media player
Posted by: Tony Collins | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 03:11 AM
Ah, man, haven't seen that album in a looooooong time. Now you've made me nostalgic...
Posted by: erlik | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 03:19 AM
"Someone needs to come up with a music format with an embedded picture"
It exists, and it is used: ID3v2
Posted by: Carsten S | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 04:10 AM
Personally I think Motown has held up better than some of the music on that album. Not all of it, but some of it.
Posted by: Paul McEvoy | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 04:49 AM
Wow I don't know. I've never seen this picture before. I certainly am too young to even remember Woodstock. But this picture moved me a little some what :)
Posted by: Popcorn | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 07:09 AM
Groovy man.
Posted by: charlie d | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 07:31 AM
That summer I was living on State Street a couple of blocks off campus in Madison. The atmosphere of the place was charged with protest and literally explosive. I remember seeing a full page ad on the back of the local underground newspaper for tickets to the Woodstock Festival. It was a time when young people felt empowered even as they (we) succumbed to excess. No Brokaw documentary could ever capture the mood of that summer.
Posted by: Ken White | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 08:03 AM
I also made it as high as second-chair trumpet. Man, I hated playing the trumpet.
Posted by: emptyspaces | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 09:26 AM
Quite an evocative photo for anyone who was around in the '60s, but I can no longer look at it without thinking of Mankoff's "Woodstock 10th Annual Reunion" cartoon from the New Yorker. Anyone else remember that one?
Posted by: JK @ Studio Hatyai | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 09:35 AM
Thanks Mike. I needed that.
Posted by: Paul De Zan | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 10:09 AM
Ah, yes. As a young teen I was pretty tuned into the music scene...or at least I thought I was. And then I saw "Monterey Pop". Wow. The next, and biggest, revelation was seeing Woodstock. Bigger wow. From that point I knew that as a Chicago kid I was so not cool in the bigger world.
Posted by: Ken Tanaka | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 11:41 AM
Well, *I* certainly remember the cover. Not because I'm older than you, Mike, I'm actually a couple years younger. But my oldest brother is 10 years older than me and this album was definitely in the house. I remember me & my next-oldest brother listening to it for hours (and staring at the cover), much to my fathers' considerable consternation. He could handle the Beatles but this Woodstock business, it was beyond the pale for him.
Cheers,
Phil.
Posted by: Phil Hall | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 02:29 PM
Mike
I was 16 when we heard of Woodstock. The impression at that time was it had an anti-war theme to it and the flower power, drugs and sexual freedom culture was a protest against the establishment.
I remember seeing the picture plus many others taken there. These images were shot on analogue, not manipulated and hence would possess great photojournalistic credibility.
Today, it is possible to digitally manipulate and show her hugging a grizzly bear.
Dan K.
Posted by: Dan K | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 05:13 PM
Greatest disappointment of my young life. I didn't have a ticket so I went up on Wednesday to take photos before the Aquarian Exposition became WOODSTOCK! Armed with my Canon TL, I wandered around the grounds and shot some Tri-X. I spent the weekend in DC watching TV and lamenting that I wasn't there. I'll have to do a search and see if I can find the negs or a few prints. I used to dazzle my kid clients with genuine Woodstock photos.
BTW: I understand that Ang Lee's new Movie about Woodstock is a renter.
Posted by: John MacKechnie | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 06:33 PM
The article in the Daily News says that they still get "recognized" because of the the photograph. How in the world can that be true? His face is turned away from the camera and all you see of her is the very top of her head and her sunglasses. Not to mention the fact that he has just a wee bit less hair now! =)
Posted by: Steve Rosenblum | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 09:43 PM
Steve,
I assume it has to be because of profiles like the one in the NY Daily News, which shows their faces.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Johnston | Thursday, 09 July 2009 at 09:48 PM
Terribly uninspired "today photo" of them in the New York Daily News. It's the most obvious of poses ("how about this: get a duvet from your bedroom and stand there like you did all these years ago!"). Perhaps it is the art editor's fault, not the photographer's.
Posted by: Dirk | Friday, 10 July 2009 at 12:02 AM
That shot brings back some memories. I was 22 at the time and returning from a trip to the Adirondacks (about 3.5 hrs north of Woodstock) with my now ex-wife. We planned on attending the "festivities" and then heading home.
Try as we might, we couldn't get within 5 miles of the actual venue. Traffic along the NYS Thruway and adjoining roads seemed backed up to Albany to the north and New York City to the south.
To this day I've never seen the like. We had 4 people sitting on the hood of our '62 Impala and 3 more in the back seat. No danger of anyone falling off the hood as we couldn't move at more than 3mph.
I forget where we dropped them off but we finally gave up and headed back home to New York City without ever hearing any music other than what was on the radio.
Lots of great images came out of that weekend but I never even got off a single exposure.
Posted by: Rich B | Friday, 10 July 2009 at 08:17 AM
That is a very good shot, in my opinion.
Posted by: Iñaki | Sunday, 12 July 2009 at 11:17 AM