That’s who we are

50 years of Peace and Music

August 17, 1969, the last of Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music. Mud creeps up the long, pink and white blanket swaddling a young couple surrounded by the debris of revelry. The image taken by Burk Uzzle would go on to become the cover of the festival’s three-LP album. The couple, in turn, would become unofficial spokespeople for those three days of peace and music on a dairy farm in upstate New York.

Almost 50 years later, the now-iconic pair are still hanging on tight. They are Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, now married and the pair never left one another’s arms. They married two summers after the fabled weekend, and they still live less than an hour’s drive from the original concert site of Bethel, N.Y.

“I try to explain that photo as a couple of 20-year-olds who were in love with each other. It’s us. That’s who we are. Still,” said Nick. His advice for an enduring relationship is “A lot of communication. Don’t go to bed mad at each other. It’s a give-and-take. Choose your battles”.

Nick and Bobbi weren’t hippies, “we were just normal, hard-working kids from small towns”. When the festival album came out, they gathered in Corky’s apartment — one of their friends — to listen to it. Bobbi remembers how suddenly Corky recognised the yellow butterfly staff on the left, which belonged to this guy Herbie they’d been looking after, as he was tripping pretty heavily and had lost his friends. But then he said: “Whoa! That’s you and Nick”.

“Corky is lying on the ground to the right of us. He’d just returned from Vietnam. To me there’s something particularly symbolic about that: a festival dedicated to peace with a Vietnam marine on the cover of its album. We remain good friends“.