THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 7, 1994 TAG: 9408040530
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KEITH MONROE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 104 lines
For 25 years people have been talking twaddle about Woodstock. The 25th anniversary this summer, complete with another mega-concert, is sure to provoke a new deluge of nonsense.
For the so-called Woodstock generation, the event itself was supposedly a defining moment. But most didn't even know it had happened until long after it was over. It was only because Michael Wadleigh made a film of the three-day mud bath that Woodstock assumed mythic status.
The Joni Mitchell anthem recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young also helped. Soon everyone was pretending they'd been to Woodstock, much as people in later years pretended they hadn't voted for Nixon. In each case, the motive was the same - an attempt to get on the trendy side of history - if only retrospectively.
As a result of the song and film, the festival has been endlessly portrayed not as three days of music attended by too many people in bad weather. Rather it was a tribal turning point, a countercultural milestone, a youth happening.
It made good copy to say a whole generation was going to get back to the land and set their souls free, as a result of which the bombers would turn into butterflies above our nation. We are Stardust. We are Golden. Of course, that was poetry. But propaganda wasn't far behind.
In one of the more piquant details from the actual event, Abbie Hoffman allegedly tried to clamber onstage during The Who's performance to make a political statement. The band's surly leader, Pete Townshend, was outraged and booted Hoffman back offstage. Unfortunately, he didn't stay booted.
Hoffman expropriated the idea of Woodstock in his book ``Woodstock Nation.'' The next thing you knew, the event had become a symbol in the dreary '60s debate of us against them - the children of the '60s against their out-of-it parents, innocence against corruption, peace against war, love against repression, marijuana and other controlled substances against martinis, rock against Lawrence Welk, doves against hawks. Blah, blah, blah.
The media, unsurprisingly, ate up this simple theme of generational conflict. They concentrated on the most extreme manifestations of the Woodstock event and the young people entertained by it. One would have thought an entire generation overdosed on drugs, took off their clothes and jumped in a lake, gave birth or got pregnant at Woodstock and subsequently dropped out, turned on and tuned in.
In fact, after three days most attendees found Dad's Oldsmobile 88 where they'd left it, by the side of the New York Thruway, and drove home. Most who didn't attend saw the movie a year later at the local Bijou and thought it was ``far out, man.'' They got to see musical acts that would never play Dubuque or Greenville and got some fashion tips from more cosmopolitan countercultural dudes on hair, bells, beads and headbands. Groovy!
But that was about it. Within a few years, most of the Woodstockers were management trainees or house painters, and their younger brothers and sisters were getting into disco.
The Woodstock acts were largely forgotten or embarrassingly unfashionable. Quite a few of them were dead. That would have been that, except for extremists at the other end of the spectrum from Abbie.
Cultural conservatives, as we now say, also attended the movie of Woodstock or heard about it. And it freaked them out. Here was hedonism unleashed, dope smoking, fiscal irresponsibility, an assault on the culture, socialism, communalism, nudism, free love, the decline of the West. Mass hysteria.
And so it has gone for 25 years.
Woodstock as a symbol of a better world short-circuited, a lost Eden. Woodstock as a symbol of cultural decline and values subverted, a vision of a muddy, overpopulated, high-decibel hell. Clearly, both sides in this Kulturkampf are nuts. They long ago lost touch with reality.
And Woodstock has assumed a life of its own.
For 99 percent of the Woodstock generation, the concert or the idea of it was kind of cool. They wore bell-bottoms for a while and then they didn't. They talked about universal love and flashed the peace sign for a while and then they didn't. They rebelled against their parents and then they didn't. Many tried marijuana and thought it would be better to have a band than a day job. But a statistically negligible minority actually joined the Weather Underground or a commune or continued to try to blow the roof off the garage playing ``Purple Haze'' into their 30s.
This wasn't unprecedented. In an earlier generation, many wore suits with wide shoulders and lapels, swooned over Gene Krupa, got stoned on rum and Coca-Cola, and jitterbugged till the cows came home. They thought their parents were old fogies, but they didn't run off to become heroin-shooting bebopers or zoot suiters. They got jobs, spouses, kids and mortgages. In later years, they got nostalgic every time the old tunes came on the radio. Remarkably like the Woodstock generation.
Now in their 40s and losing the hair they once cared a lot about, their idea of getting back to the land is a second home. When they hear ``Teach Your Children,'' they worry about that loan for college tuition. When they think about getting themselves back to the garden, it's the one behind the suburban split level where they spend the weekend pulling weeds.
They think their kids are dressing weird and listening to tuneless music played too loud. They don't want them to attend the new Woodstock, but not because they might pick up some countercultural vibes. Because of the $125 ticket price. And when Katie and Bryant or Diane and Sam or Hugh and Barbara start gassing about Woodstock and what it all meant and how significant it was, if they've got any sense left they will change the channel. Or maybe slap a scratchy 33 on the stereo and get nostalgic.
Hey, we are Stardust. We are almost Golden Agers. by CNB