Sunday, December 1, 2019

Meet the Couple on the Iconic Woodstock Album Cover

Nick and Bobbi Ercoline say event is 'part of who we are'

by Edna Gundersen, AARP, August 1, 2019
BURK UZZLE

You've seen the photo. A young couple wrapped in a blanket stands in a muddy field amid a mass of hippies. Both identities are obscured. She's wearing large sunglasses. He's turned away from the camera. But the fortuitous snapshot swept the pair into Woodstock mythology.
As lovestruck Nick Ercoline and Bobbi Kelly snuggled against the Sunday morning chill on day 3 of the 1969 music festival, they were unaware that Life photographer Burk Uzzle had captured the moment. And they didn't see that defining image until everyone else did, when it appeared on the cover of the 1970 three-album Woodstock soundtrack.
In May 1970, Nick and Bobbi went to the apartment of Jim “Corky” Corcoran, a friend who had joined them nine months earlier on their trek to Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, New York.
Photo by Stefan Radtke
"Corky was a two-legged music bible,” Nick says. “He had to be one of the first to buy the album when it came out, and we all got together, six or eight of us, to hear it. We were passing the jacket around when someone pointed out the staff with the orange and yellow butterfly. That belonged to Herbie, a guy from Huntington Beach, California. He was lost and having a bad trip, and we hooked arms with him until he was clear-headed. Then we saw the blanket. Oh my lord, that's us!"
At that moment, Bobbi says, “I realized I should tell my mother I had gone to Woodstock."
Nick and Bobbi were 20 and had been dating for three months when they went to the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. As boomers are toasting the festival's golden anniversary, the couple is also celebrating its 50th year of peace and love.
They were wed in 1971 and live in Pine Bush, N.Y., less than an hour from the festival site, where roughly half a million young people swarmed to see Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Santana and dozens more Aug. 15-18, 1969. It's now home to the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which is staging an anniversary blowout with headliners Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band, Arlo Guthrie, Carlos Santana and John Fogerty. The Ercolines will attend as the event's Woodstock ambassadors.
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