Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, August 12, 1994 TAG: 9408120085
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MITCHELL LANDSBERG ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
There's this reporter, some network dweeb in his 30s, standing in front of him with a microphone asking the most insane questions.
``What is it that the musicians have that they can communicate so well to the kids?'' the newsman asks.
If a lamer question ever has been asked, Lang hasn't heard it. He looks dismissively at the reporter, the Generation Gap yawning like the Dead Sea between them. Then he answers.
``Music,'' he says.
Twenty-five years later, Michael Lang and his generation - the Woodstock Generation, the Woodstock Nation - are nearing 50, another Woodstock festival is dawning and that ludicrous exchange is replaying endlessly in the movie ``Woodstock,'' re-released this summer for the anniversary.
That, and so much more, echo like the soundtrack for a slightly off-kilter generation.
Arlo Guthrie telling the crowd: ``The New York State Thruway is closed, man! It's far out, man!'' A stage announcer exhorting the crowd to shout away the rain, leading 400,000 stoned and drenched people to begin chanting, ``No rain! No rain!''
As Frank Zappa was later to observe: ``It just goes to show you the flexibility of the human organism that people who would willingly sit in the mud and chant `no rain' periodically between badly amplified rock groups could suddenly turn out to be the ones to run the U.S. economy.''
To anyone who was, say, 15 or older in 1969, it is an astonishing, not to mention frightening, thought.
But back to the music. Music, as Lang said, is what Woodstock was supposed to be all about. The promoters promised ``Three Days of Peace and Music,'' and it turned out to be accurate enough - amazingly so, actually, considering that few people at the time believed the three days could pass peacefully.
This was 1969: Richard Nixon had just become president, the Vietnam War was at its height, the anti-war movement was cresting and the news was full of riots, bombings and a general sense that the fabric of society was not holding.
It had been two years since the ``Summer of Love,'' and the innocence of the Flower Children had given way to increasing bitterness, anger and a generational dividing line between those who were political radicals and those who weren't.
What brought them together was the music.
Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Who, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Band - in all, 31 groups or individuals performed at Woodstock. If they weren't famous before the festival, Woodstock - the concert, film and record - assured that most of them would be famous for a long time after.
Few, if any, gave the performance of their lives at Woodstock. The Grateful Dead's performance became legendary as one of the band's worst; afterward, the Dead grumbled about bad Czechoslovakian acid, as well as wet equipment that zapped them with electrical shocks - sparks crackling like lightning on the stage! - when they picked up their guitars.
The British blues rocker Alvin Lee and his band, Ten Years After, were catapulted into superstar status for their performance of ``I'm Going Home.'' But looking back on it now, Lee says: ``I didn't play at all well. ... I had played it better before and I've played it better since.''
It didn't matter. Half the people in the audience couldn't even hear the music. For those who could - and for the far larger number who later saw the movie or heard the record - the sheer magic of the moment overwhelmed any technical shortcomings.
But somewhere along the way, Woodstock stopped being mainly about music. As important as the music was, it took more than ``Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,'' more even than Hendrix deconstructing ``The Star-Spangled Banner,'' to tattoo an entire generation with the name of a rock concert.
How did it happen? As big as Woodstock was, it was, after all, only a concert. Somehow, though, it came to stand for not just an entire generation, but an entire era.
Thomas Segrue teaches the history of the 1960s at the University of Pennsylvania; his students were born in the mid-1970s. ``Their image of the 1960s IS Woodstock,'' Segrue says. ``My students think about Woodstock the way their parents might have thought about World War II. After all, the war was 25 years before Woodstock.''
These are different times. One of the poignant things about seeing the Woodstock movie now is seeing the faces of young people, knowing their youth is now well behind them.
So many are dead. And so many, it seems safe to say, have lost whatever hold they had on the common dream of the time.
``My only regret,'' says Alvin Lee, ``is that it seems the Peace Generation came together for Woodstock, and then they all dispersed and went home again.''
Lee now lives and works in Spain. These are happy days for him, he says, but he misses the idealism of the late '60s. He wasn't asked to play at the Woodstock anniversary concert being held in Saugerties, N.Y., this weekend. If he had been, he's not sure he would have accepted.
``Woodstock was an accident, and it was a great event, and I'm quite happy to leave it at that, actually.''
John Sebastian, the folksinger whose gentle, sweet performance helped give Woodstock its aura, says the festival was ``the beginning of the end.'' He was speaking of large outdoor concerts, but he may well have been speaking of the era as well.
Woodstock, more than one person has observed, marked the moment when corporate America discovered the Baby Boom generation in a big way. If 400,000 young people could turn out for a rock concert, who knew how many might buy blue jeans or record albums or hamburgers or beer?
There has been great debate over the anniversary concert. It is being produced by the same three men who put together the original Woodstock festival, Lang, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman. But with its corporate sponsors, $135 ticket price and slickly designed facilities, the anniversary concert strikes some '60s survivors as a sellout, out of tune with the sensibility of the original.
``I give you my word,'' says Michael Wadleigh, the film producer, ``back then, all of us would have had a roaring ... fit if someone had put a Coca-Cola sign up.''
All this strikes Roberts as so much silliness. The original Woodstock was very much a commercial venture - the promoters were, after all, attacked for charging the unheard-of price of $18 for a three-day ticket. Sure, most of the concert-goers got in for free, but that wasn't part of the plan.
``There was a major corporate thrust to it that was appropriate to the times, in the sense that whatever corporate or commercial outlets were available to us as the producers, we used,'' Roberts says.
This time the promoters want to get it right. If that means military-scale security, corporate logos, ATMs, pay-per-view television, T-shirt concessions and an appropriate fleet of portable toilets, well, maybe that's progress.
Is it Woodstock? Of course it is: The promoters own the trademark.
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