Oh, dear.
Woodstock III was apparently not the roaring success its avaricious
organizers had hoped it would be.
They seem unhappy
about that unpleasantness toward the end — arson, violence, looting, the
local fire brigades and constabulary called out, people arrested — and the
whole mess wrapped up on kind of a bum note.
Did anybody expect
this event to be anything other than a grim exercise in degradation? Have
bloated outdoor “rock festivals” ever been anything more than a chance for
feckless youth to get in touch with their animal selves in a sylvan setting
(or, in the case of Woodstock III, on the broiling concrete of a
decommissioned Air Force base), while paying for a ticket in order to live
like their Neanderthal ancestors?
Afterwards, plenty
of prattle appeared in the public prints about what it all meant. In the
Globe and Mail, the world’s last living Marxist, Rick Salutin, issued
forth some confused mumbling about missing Che Guevara. (I checked the liner
notes from the original’s soundtrack, and the only Latino performer I could
find was Carlos Santana. Was Guevara part of his backup unit?) At the
opposite end of the political spectrum, in the Wall Street Journal,
crypto-fascist scold Midge Decter blamed the Woodstock-generation parents of
the Woodstock III rioter-revelers for their kids’ lawless freak-out.
I think everybody
knew this year’s Woodstock would be just a little bit more wretched than its
predecessors — we just didn’t know exactly how it would suck. Sequels are
always worse than the originals. We’ve already had “Woodstock Original
Flavor” in 1969 and “Woodstock II: Electric Boogaloo” five years ago.
Anybody who didn’t know in advance that “Woodstock III: The Quickening”
would be little more than a predictable, late-mannerist, decadent mockery of
the first one is dumber than the rock-pigs who ponied up $150 a ticket to
get inside a big cyclone-fence pen and vie to be crowned “Lord of the
Flies.”
Woodstock ‘99
illustrates which lessons were learned in the 30 years that passed between
Woodstocks I and III. First, there’s the durability of the term “Woodstock”
as a brand for a too-big, badly organized homeless rock festival. It doesn’t
intrinsically mean anything, any more than “Unisys” or “Xerox” or “TRW” mean
anything. “Woodstock” is not a geographical term in these cases; none of the
three events happened anywhere near Woodstock, N.Y.
The first Woodstock Music & Art Fair was known for its “music” (40-minute
drum solos, extended bass jams, endless three-note “weedla-weedla-weedla”
guitar solos and roadies going “check...check-TWO, check”), mud,
overcrowding, brown acid, food shortages and “peace and love” — terms used
by young people of the late ‘60s to mean “narcotized catatonia and sloppy,
bad sex with total strangers.”
The Woodstock of
‘94 is best remembered for mud and the fact it was 25 years after the first
Woodstock. This time around, the bosses knew shortages didn’t mean sharing,
caring, no profit margin and “breakfast in bed for 300,000”; they meant
supply and demand. A pint of water outside the venue costs a buck; quintuple
that on site. With precision-tooled boomer hypocrisy, drugs — probably the
main reason Woodstock Classic was relatively trouble free — were not an
option at Woodstock III. Too bad. Doping the audience would’ve been cheaper
than the inevitable lawsuits, damage payouts and other costs associated with
the festival-finishing melee.
Other aspects make
less sense. Why is anybody still throwing unsustainably vast rockfests, for
one thing? The whole model is designed to charge people a ridiculous amount
of money, and in return give them bad sightlines, lousy acoustics, no way of
eating and adventurous refugee-style accommodations.
That’s why really
savvy marketers are doubtless already huddling to lay the foundations for
“Altamont 2000,” reprising another big rockfest from ‘69: the one at
California’s Altamont Speedway where at least one person was stabbed to
death and numerous others were beaten senseless with chains and pool cues.
“Altamont 2000” is a natural marketing opportunity for Marilyn Manson to
really cement that satanic badass brand identity permanently.
Woodstock III
didn’t have enough drugs, and as a result there was all that freakish
frustration. Surely we can rectify that at Altamont 2000. Make drugs just
one more product that attendees can buy along with the $8 nacho platters and
$5 pints of tap-water; limit choice to downers and other depressants — stuff
to keep folks mellow.
Violence at the
original Altamont marred the event. This time, it’s one more aspect of the
attraction. MTV could run a contest for suicidal adolescents. Don’t open
fire on your classmates, get yourself ritually sacrificed by Marilyn himself
in front of thousands of your peers — and live on pay-per-view in front of
millions more. Underwriting opportunities are going fast. Get those bids in
now. And reserve your brown acid to avoid disappointment. |
