You had to be there, man. Hurd Road, in the sleepy, blameless town of Bethel in upstate New York, hadn't seen traffic like this for 37 years. Actually it had never seen traffic like this. In 1969 it had funnelled the ragged masses of the long-haired, the tie-dyed, the flowered, the drugged and the defiantly young before they debouched blissfully from their multicoloured VWs into the natural amphitheatre of the greatest happening in the history of the counterculture.

In 2006, by way of contrast, it was a long, sleek armada of Mercedes SUVs and BMW convertibles that, chivvied and channelled by the state traffic police, bore their moneyed, groomed, overwhelmingly middle-aged occupants to the smooth gravel rows of Parking Area South.