
WOODSTOCK NATION
Is It Real Or Is It Memorex
by Gary Site

Having survived last summer's mind-numbing hype of Woodstock '94,
it's time to prepare for the fall onslaught, as retail capitalism gears
up for a holiday marketing frenzy with a "radical" new twist: For
with Woodstock '94, Inc.--and the not coincidental November 8th
release date of the CD and who knows what other official
memorabilia, timed. precisely for the Christmas rush --
"alternative" capitalism has finally come into its own as a
full-fledged partner with its presumably "mainstream" brother. And
with that not quite startling development, the remains of the
sixties' counter-culture can be said to have met its final degradation
and humiliation.

Stripped of political content or a social context like that of the
sixties which might lend a potentially radical thrust to its
subcultural forms of "rebellion"; immersed in childish notions of
tribalism and poisoned by the myriad forms of New Age spirituality
and superstition -- the detritus of the counterculture that has
managed to survive into middle age and even reproduce itself in a
younger generation, is not a pretty sight. It is nothing more, now,
than another marketing niche: a matter of lifestyle, fashion and
personal taste, to be serviced by "alternative" capitalists and
retailers in much the same way L. L. Bean services its own would-be
"rustic" customers, for the same reasons and by the same means.

Indeed, to the very arguable extent that the counterculture ever
confronted the dominant society with a radical political challenge,
after the summer of 1994 it can be declared politically dead. And
it's time to let the dead bury the dead.

But first, a view of the boneyard. For if the counterculture is dead,
Woodstock '94 was its cemetery. In this "event," we find hype
squared. The spectacle unabashedly presented as spectacle. A mirror
reflecting a mirror. Far from recreating the dubious "magic"
mythically attributed to its legendary progenitor, in this
made-for-tv "Woodstock theme-park" we find something worse than
nothing: We find a vast spiritual emptiness and cultural vacuity
more profound even than the void that exists where meaning should
in the inner life of a generation so immersed in capitalism that huge
numbers of people apparently can no longer recognize the difference
between life and marketing strategy -- and hence, in a pathetic
attempt to fill an emptiness that really is "null and void" (as a
popular t-shirt slogan puts it), seeks to find "authentic" experience
in a grotesquely hypertrophic replay of its parent generation's
weekend in the mud and shit.

And not just that. One of the more striking aspects of the whole
affair is that for many of the pilgrims, Woodstock '94 was a chance
to "experience" not the original festival as such but rather the
original festival as it was filmed and edited for mass consumption.
As pop-critic Jon Pareles of the New York Times put it, "They had
seen the movie =D2Woodstock=D3; now they were determined to
experience it." In  short, they were seeking to relive an experience
that no one ever had because literally no one "experienced" the highly
edited commodity millions have consumed as a movie.

Even some of the musical performances in the movie are probably an
illusion, since it is known that at least one of the more famous
musical moments -- Crosby, Stills and Nash's debut at the festival --
was rerecorded in the studio prior to release because their live
vocals were terribly off key. And needless to say, nowhere in the
movie are we shown footage of the rock-and-roll royalty being
pampered and feted with extravagant food and drink flown into the
"disaster area" by helicopter -- while their fans went without in the
rain and mud.

Perhaps we should just be grateful that it was not "Apocalypse Now"
that so many wished to "experience," but this style of "searching,"
while doubtless sincere on the parts of many, mostly young people,
represents something new: something perilously close to hype
experienced as life and life experienced as hype.

Ironically -- and this is the nature of hype -- what it does not
represent is the thing that is sought. Whatever else may have been
experienced at Saugerties last summer, what was not experienced
was even the potential for an authentically alternative culture in
any meaningful sense of the term, much less of any form of
alternative politics, unless we are to use the terms alternative and
popular culture as interchangeable synonyms, in which case under
capitalism all is decisively lost.

Woodstock '94 gives us alternative culture in the way Arm and
Hammer gives us an alternative to Pepsodent, Volvo to Chrysler, and
"alternative" rock to mainstream rock. Capitalism will create,
market and sell as many "alternative" products or "experiences" as
there are people to buy them. It will service as many "lifestyles" as
there are people t "live" them. It will even sell us "anarchy" -- so
long as that supposed "anarchy" remains a "lifestyle" or "personal
philosophy," that is, a strictly cultural "statement" or "protest" that
one registers with a spraycan or slogan on a jacket, but which poses
little if any political threat to the established social order.

But it has become banal to point to the "commercialism" of
Woodstock '94 or the cultural vacuity it so magnificently displays.
This was done for months in every mouthpiece of liberalism from
the Village Voice to the New York Times, which featured article
after article until one wanted to scream, contrasting Woodstock '69
with its crassly megaprofit-oriented offspring.

Yet, while this nostalgic contrast may have provided a ready
organizing scheme for more articles than anyone ever cared to read
about either Woodstock, it, too, is a lie. The truth is that Woodstock
'69 was no less commercial in its intent than Woodstock '94. Both
events were organized and promoted by more or less the same
well-heeled yuppies with easy access to major banks and
multinational corporate sponsors. Both events promised and returned
hefty profits to their investors, as intended. (The original Woodstock
may have become a "free" concert -- by default, because its
promoters couldn't find a way to effectively ticket that many people
-- but only a fool would believe that investors lost money on it,
what with multimillion record, movie and video sales that have been
ongoing now for twenty-five years.

More important -- no matter how many lies are told to the contrary
-- the truth is that the "original" Woodstock was not a political
event either. It was no more political than its mutant offspring,
despite the times. Indeed, it is amazing to see how many liberal
commentators, who had little if any actual involvement in the social
movements of the sixties and seventies, managed to raise this
canard in article after article. Take Pareles again: =D2After the
overflowing 1969 festival, scattered longhairs, underground music
fans and antiwar sympathizers realized they weren't loners anymore:
Woodstock certified the extent of Woodstock Nation. In 1994, the
younger generation doesn't have an issue as starkly divisive as the
Vietnam War, and it already knows it and dress code from MTV .... But
people in their teens and 20's flocked to Woodstock '94 anyway,
convinced that they had missed something.=D3 This breathtaking
mouthful is a near-perfect example of the mythicisms that have
grown up around Woodstock, mainly thanks to commentary like this,
which amazingly ignores almost everything that happened in the
sixties in order to create a memory that fits the desired myth and
legend. First, it ignores the rather obvious fact that 1969 was the
last year of "the sixties," not the first. Hence, to the arguable extent
that there was a "Woodstock Nation" in fact as well as fancy, it had
already seen itself in many events nearly as large and much more
political than Woodstock.

Where in this mythology are half a decade worth of antiwar
demonstrations, for instance, many of which were quite large? What
has happened to 1968's demonstrations and police riots at the
infamous Chicago convention of the Democratic Party -- a much
more seminal event for the political members of the sixties
generation in America than Woodstock would ever be? Indeed, how,
in this mythology, do we account for the huge "funeral of the hippy"
in San Francisco, where thousands of the more politically conscious
"freaks" symbolically buried their own counterculture, even as the
media and other capitalist sharks were discovering and exploiting
its huge financial rewards -- indeed, because these rewards were
already known to such an extent that long before Woodstock the
counterculture had become nea

Where the hypemakers gave us the "Summer of Love," the more
conscious members of the counterculture itself were giving us the
"Funeral of the Hippy." Go figure. In any case, by 1969 many more
"scattered longhairs" had probably met while hitchhiking on an 
ramp than ever would meet at Woodstock. Indeed, by 1969 the
counterculture was well into its fade into mere fashion and
lifestyleism.

"Underground music fans?" Pareles will have to go a long way to
show precisely how many of the most wildly successful, popular and
wealthy performers in history somehow make the grade as
"underground music." Woodstock's lineup in 1969 was about as
"underground" as Madonna was in the eighties.

But what irks most of all is the dragging in of Vietnam, the antiwar
movement, and the political overtones these subjects generate, to
all of these Woodstock reminiscences. Woodstock had nothing to do
with Vietnam, or with the political activity of the time, apart from
some inevitable overlap in the crowd, since most of the opposition
to the war was conducted by young people and, needless to say, most
of those young people enjoyed the rock music of the time.

But Woodstock was hardly an expression of antiwar fervor. To the
contrary, every attempt to politicize the gathering and turn its
attention to the war and other political issues of the time was met
with boredom at best and outright hostility at worst.

For a great example of the boredom, listen to Country Joe McDonald's
"Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" on the original soundtrack:
McDonald, one of the very few movement activists, perhaps the only
leftist, and definitely the only Vietnam veteran to perform at
Woodstock, has to chide and cajole the audience into singing along on
his most famous antiwar anthem. And, of course, the best example of
antipolitical hostility doesn't appear in the film, although it became
an apocryphal aspect of Woodstock for movement people: Peter
Townshend of the Who whacking Abbie Hoffman in the head with his
guitar, to put an end to Hoffman's attempt to speak to the crowd
about the war. (I've never known quite what to say about poor Joan
Baez's plodding version of "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night."
Perhaps some memories are best suppressed.) And, yes, Jimi Hendrix
played a magnificent "Star Spangled Banner" which perfectly
captured the intense, nerve-jangled feel of the time.

So what. Let's face it: Woodstock '69 was hyped as three days of love
and peace, whatever that was supposed to mean. But what Woodstock
was, was a "good time." It was a chance to do one's thing and enjoy a
huge party in the mud with lots of drugs, sex and the best rock and
roll money could buy.

What it was not, was a demonstration. No one went to Woodstock
because they opposed the war in Vietnam. Indeed, probably many
people went to Woodstock who did not oppose the war, and many
more went to the festival without giving the war or the radical
movements of the time a single sustained thought.

Perhaps the most accurate measure of the type of "political" mind at
work at Woodstock '69 -- and in much of the counterculture, too, it
must be said -- is revealed by a quote from Woodstock Vision, a
recent book of photographs by Elliot Landy. Landy, who was asked by
Woodstock promoter, Mike Lang, to photograph the original festival,
opens his book with photos of some streetfighting between police
and demonstrators. "You could be the policeman or the  
demonstrator," Landy says, "but either way, you were still part of
the fighting."

In short, whether you were a resister or a repressor of resistance,
you were somehow equally culpable for the violence of the time --
an attitude, the logic of which inevitably leads to the apolitical
passive-receptiveness that has come to characterize the remains of
the counterculture, and which also necessarily translates into
passive support of the dominant social order. So much for
Woodstock's politics, as articulated by one of its "official"
participants.

Even as a party, in retrospect Woodstock can be seen less as a
beginning of anything than as something of a last hurrah. Soon the
counterculture would have a more concrete suicide at Altamont, to
answer the earlier symbolic funeral of the hippies.

Soon, too, the New Left and the antiwar movement wo
have its last days in the sun: SDS exploded into various Maoist
fragments and other sectarian absurdities that summer, at its last
convention. The following year, 1970, saw the antiwar movement
take to the streets for its last major demonstrations, which met
with gunfire and military force at Kent State, Jackson State,
Buffalo, Albuquerque and other cities around the country. The war
would continue for another five years, virtually without opposition
apart from the May Day demonstrations of 1972.

It all seems so long ago. And, while "Woodstock '94: The Video" will
be available any moment -- the perfect stocking-stuffer for all the
hypesters on your list -- the challenge of creating a new left for our
time still hangs in the historical air like a great question mark.



