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People who grew up in the ’60s like to talk about Woodstock. A lot. They like to talk about Jimi Hendrix, and The Who, and why Crosby, Stills and Nash were so much better with Neil Young in the lineup. They like to reminisce about “the times” and how, obviously, they were “a–changin.”

And they really like to proclaim that people of our generation just have no idea what it was like to attend such a mass-scale rock and folk concert at a time when our country was being torn apart by a divisive war. Well, OK, maybe it’s a little tougher to buy into that one these days. But you catch my drift.

And I’ll be the first to admit there was a time when I agreed with some of these former hippies about the state of festival concerts. Despite the fact most of the people who talk about their time at Woodstock as if it were a religious experience now drive SUVs and swear by the revolution that is TiVo, they had a point. Back in the 1990s, big rock ’n’ roll festivals just weren’t what they used to be.

Take Lollapalooza, for example.

Perry Farrell’s idea to resurrect the music festival was a big deal and hugely influential, bringing the likes of Smashing Pumpkins and Alice in Chains, along with a score of other hip alternative bands, to a city near you.

But before too long, the festival ran out of steam. So many other festivals had cropped up around it that Lollapalooza felt like yesterday’s news. There was Lilith Fair, Ozzfest, the Vans Warped Tour, the Family Values Tour and H.O.R.D.E., just to name a few. Unable to continue to drum up an interesting enough lineup to go on, Farrell’s tour drew what seemed like its inevitable last breath in 1997, just six years after it began. The other festivals of the time had similar fates.

But suddenly, it seems, Lollapalooza might be back. Last summer, it quietly resurrected itself with, albeit, a group of largely mainstream artists like A Perfect Circle, Incubus and Jurassic 5, and completed a modest tour. And this summer, the just-announced lineup actually looks pretty hot: Sonic Youth, Modest Mouse, Gomez, Le Tigre, The Flaming Lips and Morrissey, among others. They’re even promising to stay at each venue for two days, increasing the likelihood that whoever wants to attend will.

And Lollapalooza is by no means the hottest concert festival around these days. There’s the amazing, Tennessee-based Bonnaroo Music Festival, which over three days this June will manage to bring together artists as astonishingly diverse as Willie Nelson, Yo La Tengo, Primus and Cut Chemist. There’s also All Tomorrow’s Parties, which, despite its rather disorganized and dismal showing here in Los Angeles last year, is currently still a force to be reckoned with in the U.K. And then there’s this weekend’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which since its inception has evolved into what, this year, promises to one of the best concert festivals in recent history.

Not only is this year’s lineup arguably the best Coachella has ever put together (The idea of being able to see Radiohead, Stereolab and the friggin’ Pixies in a single day has been giving me chills for months, not to mention who’s playing on Day 2.), but it looks like organizers may have finally solved some of the problems that plagued past festivals. For example, they’re now offering limited on-site camping, which should cut down on the number of desperate people fleeing the crammed parking lot at days’ end to take refuge in a motel.

So just why, exactly, are big concert festivals making such a resurgence this year?

After so many recent years of excruciating bubble gum pop (the first U.S. release of a Backstreet Boys album was in 1997, the same as the last year of Lollapalooza – hardly a coincidence), it feels like good music might actually be back, and those who love it are coming together to celebrate in a big way. Whether or not this has anything to do with the current political climate is a little hard to judge, but artists have always been able to draw from turmoil in order to create.

So maybe the Woodstock generation was right, and the answer really is just blowin’ in the wind.

E-mail Mathis at smathis@media.ucla.edu