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innerspace #12 - You Say You Want A Revolution? - Woodstock, Nostalgia,
and the Words and Sounds of the Endtimes
by Carol A. Wade - caw39@columbia.edu"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good."
"God is light, light is good, yeah...God is good."
"Two wrongs don't make a right."
"If you build it, he will come."
"What goes up must come down."
*** "How can you write about it if you weren't there," asked my old friend Dave quickly, in his characteristically provocative, playfully challenging deadpan, on the phone at work the other day. He's the guy who, in college, rekindled in me the love of Steely Dan, which had germinated in childhood, the major dude who's climbing his way steadfastly and modestly towards a shimmering career as a movie editor, here in the Gritty City. He remains mostly lucid, sharp-witted and cheerful, despite some recent, pretty freakin' heavy personal meta-catastrophes.
"Well, I...uh..." He'd gotten me, pinched menacingly at my damn Achilles heel with, long, deft digits. The Truth. Yeah, I didn't go to Woodstock '99. I hadn't ever had a single intention of going, at all. Not for a single minute...okay, maybe a fleeting second, to dig the "vibe" (weird as I figured it would be), and also, of course, to check out moe., playing to eighty-skabillion people. But why didn't I end up going? What kind of music lover am I? What kind of social critic am? What kind of damn brick-brained loony would I be to be willing to pay $4 for a bottle of WATER...outside of Manhattan?!
"...SURE...I'm not gonna be writing about the music, as such." I sighed, a little too aware of my full-of-shiteness. Who was I kidding? It wasn't that I didn't want to go to Woodstock. I'm total game for any Bacchanalian Festi-vaal of elephantine proportions. I can get down anywhere. But at $150 per full-weekend ticket, I couldn't risk coming back to New York City a pauper.
I was barely surprised, but nonetheless depressed, when Jesse and I kicked down with some bagels, breakfast music provided by Trey Anastasio's weird solo disc. It was Sunday morning, the murmuring of Fire Islanders heading towards sand drifting out the window. We picked over a Sunday Times, laconically trading grim soundbites from the paper about the concert, and other news.
[Smearing cream cheese] "Six dollars for a slice of pizza at Woodstock."
[Regarding bagel as if it were wood, or covered in maggots] "Fourteen Serbian farmers murdered" (accompanied by a totally grainy and dismal picture, of course)..."
I couldn't afford to go to Woodstock. Instead, I spent a cheap-and-necessary weekend on Fire Island with my ever-present pal, pondering the finer points of the various multiverses, on the vast, moonlit beach, and in the cozy, ancestral Jarnow Family beach shack. The whole thing cost next to nothing, and rescued me utterly from a near urban-nervous-breakdown, the volcanic caliber of which might've been felt as far as Rome, NY, or perhaps, that other one.
"I'm gonna be writing about the phenomenon," I snorted at Dave, shoring up my firm-jawed, slacker-journalist attitude. I was a little irate with the softly and harmlessly snickering Dave, but with a little pushing and shoving, my vision fast began to solidify. "You always hurt the ones you love"? Well...maybe it's something like, "In darkness, there is light"...
This year's Woodstock '99 has turned out to be the (unfortunate, though not surprising) laughingstock of the summer's festival roster. Please know, first, that I'm not attempting to be nescient, or to snootily badmouth and denigrate the efforts of the intrepid promoters and organizers. It's hard to deny, by this point, and in retrospect, that the view is almost inevitable.
It seems that, in the larger picture, mostly stark, ugly, glassy images of unhinged melee and violence remain as testimony to Woodstock '99, all captured during the final evening of the three-day festival, which was mounted the last weekend of July in Upstate, NY. "Did you say...uhh...Woodstock, exactly?" Nonetheless, its fringe-covered-or-blissfully-nude, thirty year-old twin cousins are still frolicking in the same archives, logged on the same servers and on videotapes, tumbling, wailing and mystifying, from studio racks, museums, and throughout the unfathomable vastness of Internet space, crackling mutely inside mainframes everywhere.
They're abstract, puzzling and disheartening instant-replays of the idea of a weekend of Peace and Love and Music, slow-dancing before our eyes, as seen three decades later, thorough the unblinking, ironic lens of the fragmented, Late-Capitalist quasiculture. It all went down in the rapidly hardening shape of the Y2K-sassy, Dispenso-Millennial(TM), polymer-plastic hunk of history, relayed on cell phones up to comsats, bounced around the global living room. It's like the quintessential silly-looking, resinated glob-chair of the Late Sixties, the jauntily swaying bead curtains moving in tandem with the lazy, rhythmic tilt of unfestooned boobs, afros wavering in the heat, mud and dust and children whirling through space to the tremoring, electrified soundtrack of momentous, carnal chaotics.
With a lot of what many children of today might call "Brady hair". Strictly "As Seen on TV".
Now, though, it's all been replaced, re-chorded, restrung...packed, heady, boiling hot and nervous, the thousands-strong crowds recalled Woodstock '94, the 25th Anniversary of the original landmark function, which went down at the hot end of the decade during American wartime, 1969. From the same living rooms, many moons and suns and and crazy crash-landings later, we gasp to ourselves as we gape at the television, the web-page, the monitor screen, the speedily grinning, 24-hour surveillance scope. It looms large, always convincing us that we're somehow in an aquarium, just inches, yet miles, safe outside of it all, even though it tells us what to do, no matter how we try to run and hide.
"That's terrible!" we think. We kind of forget we're gasping at ourselves, not just to ourselves. Then we click, flip the page. Another channel, somewhere else. What else is there to do...?
"This weekend, seventeen youths killed in gang homicides," says Ice-T blandly, in a five-second interlude from his 1992 thrash-rap album, "Body Count," with the band of the same name. "Now, Sports." Those final spoken words linger, watching as rock and hip-hop merge menacingly and gloriously, in the orgiastic eruption of noise that is the disc's title track.
The first Woodstock was about trying to mount a glowing, otherworldly effort of sheer creative, outlaw force, against an advancing blockade of goat-faced, sociopolitical insanity. It was, undoubtedly and to a large extent, an Us-Against-Them thing. A whole bunch of young and not-so-young upstarts at heart staged this totally impossible rock show, to show the Powers-That-Be that music was something that could split the heavens apart, becoming the mirror that might expose the greedy and unjust agony of America, and the world, at the time. But everyone was indeed invited, and eventually, it split open like an overripe fruit, thick with fragrance, and full of the exquisite feedback of Hendrixian bathos, the dancing embers of Vietnam-war bonfires, and years of teeming flies of nostalgia to come.
Suits walked with hippies, and I'm sure many less-publicized feats of cultural incongruence made themselves evident that long-ago weekend, myself nary a glimmer in my mother's dark ocule. My dear brother (also called Dave), born in July 1970, was probably just beginning to come into view, as were hoardes of other Gen-Xers, their parents "putting up the shelves" of the hopeful New World Order in tents and mud puddles all up and down Max Yasgur's Farm just outside Woodstock, NY.
Twenty-five years later, the mid-1990s found those same microbits of then-coalescing embryonic tissue, caked with mud and raunchy, vigorously hurtling hand-over-hand through teeming crowds of half-nude youth culture, to the strains of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Give it Away". The war was long since over, and the end of the Millennium was beginning, the slick, fast-paced information society lapping up every pixel of it, with then-novel remote Internet huts not too far off.
This year, the Cyber-Yurts seemed super-commonplace. The Times article chronicled laconic teens e-mailing friends their whereabouts and when-returnings, quarreling with those left out of the proceedings due to (is it possible?) lack of communication. I was about a half-hour away from going to Woodstock '94. Attending college in Oswego, NY, Saugerties was a totally do-able four hours' drive away, and my roommates and I had decided to go to Toronto (five hours' drive) a few months earlier, at one-thirty in the morning.
Convinced we were daredevils, we were almost out the door when reality hit...it was early Saturday afternoon, the concert was already almost a third over, and the traffic would be a complete bitch. The second summer session, too, was just around the corner. So, we did what any thwarted-but-in-the-know kinds of Nineties kids would do...we watched it on TV.
By evening, we'd become bored of the proceedings, which had become turgid with the hope for a redux of nonexistent, Summer Of Love poignancy. So, we went to my friend Steve's house and watched a video of the 1945 Billy Wilder film, "The Lost Weekend". It stars Ray Milland as an ostensibly stand-up guy who's really an unraveling drunkard, who is stranded alone in his apartment for a few hellish days, left struggling to avoid the liquid soma that he desperately craves, in order to survive the harsh realities of life in the Modern Age.
"Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction..."
I don't watch TV anymore. Actually, it was right around Woodstock 94' when I began to notice my viewership dropping into the near-nil-zone, as I developed headaches and unbearable confused nausea when watching the most ordinary-seeming blocks of prime-time broadcasting. I stopped actively reading newspapers and magazines, too, about the same time, as a misguided (yet appreciable) phase of somewhat naive, self-enforced spirituality hovered into my life. The spirit has remained, and the self-denial has receded somewhat, but bookstores, newsstands, appliance shops, cyber-cafes...they all still retain the capacity, at some moments, to chill my body to its core, leaving me inconstruably paralyzed. I still watch movies...they, to me, are like orchestras for the eyes, but at nine bucks a pop, and all mass culture lie some great pedigreed dinosaur, sheltering some and devouring others, I sometimes don't know why I'm still trying to figure out just why. It suddenly seems obvious.
Music stores also freak me out. However, it's there that the Truth starts to creep out, in drop-D's and flecktones. The nature of our society today, being largely market-driven (and moreso than probably ever before), is such that one must make whatever they produce able to be consumed. Like eerie plants grown in Industry's soil, we are fertilized with the bullshit (excuse me...manure) of mass market's fallacies. We are pruned and tended by the shady wet-nurses of the media, advertising, and big corporations, which all go through the days with one hand offering salvation, and the other counting the bills behind the back, and a third mechanical arm strangling the essence out of existence by obliterating the possible permutations of the phrase, "real life".
I'm not saying that it was a bad thing for Woodstock '99 to have happened. And I'm not saying that it's the harbinger of the Endtimes, the vaunted, as-yet-untelevised, thrilling Apocalyptic Event/Spectacle, presented in Phantasmagoricolor(TM). Underneath it all, as usual, is the good idea, to me, the best idea...the idea of rallying creative people in positions of influence, bringing ordinary people together, to celebrate the idea of making the world a different (possibly better) place. Who knows what started the chaos rolling? For thinking it sad, anarchists would still call me a wussy and cover me with roughly-whitewashed letters "A," proceeding to tilt over the no-longer kitsch-protected PortoSans, and releasing the stink of ages all over the fields of Shangri-La.
What is "real anarchy"? Is the media "evil"? Are all big rock 'n' roll festival shows destined to fall into the realm of waste, greed and disorganized consumption, rather than embracing our most lofty ideals? I can't say I know. But watching reading about it then flipping the clicker, I reckon, is not going to get me any closer to finding out. I play in my band, and I watch us get more shows, as we (somewhat formulaically) drum up more shameless self-promotion and support. I have hushed inner dialogues along the lines of, "What if we get signed!?" and, "Do I really want to be a rock star?".
I wonder what the guys in moe. were thinking, having played their short set, debuting a few new tunes, then probably getting to hobnob with some crazy-type luminaries in the Hospitality tent backstage. I wonder what they thought, a bunch of regular dudes from similar Upstate environs, as hip-hopper, DMX, hollered something like, "Is there anyone out there who doesn't give a F*CK?!" at the roiling crowd of thousands (to a rousing and quixotic tandem hoot of affirmation).
I think that maybe nothing is pure anymore, but music comes pretty close, even if, in this, the day of the Multinational World, it all seems like so much pose, and so little sentiment. I'm sure, on some level, DMX's rallying cry was something *like* the cries of folk rockers from days of old, asking us all to look at the injustice which surrounds us. But failures and shortfalls are part of humanity's ever-evolution, and with greed and fear silently smearing the lens, I'm not alarmed that at the Dawn of the New Age, we're still a lot like like goats or monkeys or worms, with, sadly, quite a lot less dignity.
And although I give it to the Woodstock '99 folks for trying, I quote Steely Dan's "Barrytown": "I'm not one to look behind, I know that times must change."
It seems we're always young, with dreams just one inch smaller than our fears. But until we outrun the dark side, keeping in mind the beautiful and efflorescent "NOW", the rich, ozone-smelling possibility of the parade of moments which, in their lucidity, can guide and steer us more than any one-minute advert could. If we took our eyes off the "artist's rendering", and looked at the "real thing" for just a second, the shaded spectacle, rife with disappointments and appalling missteps might disappear. Left behind would simply be some weird, nasty snapshots, like some unbearable junior high family vacation, at which one laughs heartily and sighs, after they've all grown up, and are living and playing out the personal symphony, that scary, gorgeous script, with a mind all one's own.
Carol A. Wade is an aspiring Rock 'n' Roll Librarian, freelance writer, musician, and ersatz multimedia guerrilla. If you know what she's on about (she's often not sure), drop a line to caw39@columbia.edu.
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