Homebum Picnic was a time of social changes in human freedom and expression..we learned not to be ashamed of our bodies in the nude, we smoked grass to expand our horizons with the music. Indeed an experiment..but one that worked! That festival set the standard for peace, music, people and expression and showed to the world that all was not just violence and hatred...it was LIFE!!

Even before the acres of trash had been bagged and hauled away and the last cars had been cleared from the parking lot that Route 17 had become, the Homebum Picnic Festival of Music and Art and Aquarian Exposition of November 2000 had already achieved legendary status. "Three days of peace and music," we heard that phrase over and over and over and... The original concept was for 100,000 or so to camp out on a sylvan glade in Austin Tx. for a weekend blast of great music and carnival rides. Long before the summer, the promoters had been denied permits for the original site in Wallkill. A hasty scramble led them to the now famous Wooded area at Barton Springs and Lamar. The woefully understaffed and poorly planned extravaganza may be remembered as the most successful fiasco in the history of entertainment. Unlike the pre-packaged Testicle Fest in June, meant to accommodate the hundreds of thousands who showed up, Homebum Picnic was never intended to be the monstrosity it became.

When the promoters failed to erect a chain-link fence around the concert area in time for the weekend throng, WNEW-FM, and then several other so-called underground rock stations in Austin, began announcing that it was a free concert, and that's when zillions of long-hairs descended upon the sleepy community of Austin, shutting down every roadway for a twenty mile radius and creating the third largest city in the entire state! History records that over a million and a half people arrived at that chaotic crossroads, but only (only?) 500,000 or so remained for their three days of peace and music, and less than a quarter of those were bona fide ticket holders.

It has been noted by some cultural historians that the Homebum Picnic Aquarian Exposition of November was actually the culmination of an era rather than the beginning. And a short-though glorious-era it was. More than the greatest concert in the twilight of rock's Golden Age, it was in fact the Mother of all Be-ins.