photoshopping history

A few more comments before getting too far into this:  To all my English teachers and others who tried to teach me to write well, I am sorry.  I will actively try not to use all the skills I've learned because I do not wish to spend an hour trying to wordsmith a couple of sentences because I've mixed metaphors or used overused expressions time and again, etc. etc.

Writing can force me look at things more attentively.  Part of why I started with my email to work was because there were some things I wrote that have stuck in my craw ever since I hit send.  The main one I want to explore right now is "at least that I remember." It was an honest statement, written fairly casually with the idea that I spent so much of early and mid 1970s wasted that I could have seen him but not remembered.  

Then I slowly started to entertain the possibility that I may have seen him with other artists and just hadn't regarded it as important enough to remember.  I found my scenario while perusing various websites, and it seems remarkably plausible.  But before that, I'm still not sure why it became so important to me to find something that would work like this. Perhaps the mention of him as a fixture... it is true that is how I saw him, but the word bothers me at the same time. I guess I took him for granted, and realize now the cost. I expect that observation alone will prove to be an abundant source of material.

So once I found my "I've seen him after all" scenario, I began to fill in details... I have no idea how true thay are or could be... but they have been showing up.  I don't know if hypnosis would work or whether the memory has already been contaminated or photoshopped too much already, to separate fact from fiction.  It is almost as if the old Soviet propagandists have been hard at work going through files and images in my mind that the history I enjoy now bears little resemblance to that which would have been recorded by a dispassionate observer.  

So here it is:  I saw him at the Joyous Lake in Woodstock at a Muddy Waters show in either 1975 or 1976.  This came to me after finding out about Muddy Waters' Woodstock album.  I think I still have the poster for that show somewhere (whichever one it was). i even spent an hour or so looking in old boxes to see if I could find it.  I think I'll try some more over the next few days.  In the meantime, for whatever reason, this has been given me some comfort -- though it is not without its own issues.