There was more to Woodstock than the hippies smoking their dope.(Our apologies to the New York Times.) There was, if you remember, rock music also.
By Salahuddin I. Imam
Speeding Through the no man’s land that is Connecticut on the way down to New York I got to thinking about rock (the music), as distinct from rock (the social phenomenon) or rock (the star-machine) — which is not to say though that the three heads of rock do not spring from the same trunk.
Anyway rock music is a matter of innumerable little connections, all being made at lightning speed. That is, a rock song contains many different and sharply defined melodic and rhythmic parts that are constantly bumping into one another lightly, only to bounce off in the arcs of a water fountain.
And in rock music these points of contact are deliberately left rough and unpolished;it is the energy of friction between these brittle interconnections that produce the furious drive that is the essence of rock and roll in all its forms.
That is why modern jazz is not rock, and so lifeless by comparison – its interconnections are too well-oiled, smooth and polished. And that’s why AM radio rock is so insipid – much of the potential dynamism of the interconnections is damped to nil.
Easy- listening music is so called because it does not jar; every little musical unit falls neatly into place, no ill-mannered rough edges showing. Rock is not easy-listening. This would seem to be an elementary enough lesson for would-be rock musicians to learn, but many of the most highly-rated American groups, and West Coast groups in particular, stubbornly refuse to acknowledge this requirement. All this I thought as I crossed no man’s land.
Saturday Night
Thus on Saturday night at Woodstock, when the Grateful Dead appeared on stage, hours and hours of lifeless, insipid California inspired music (Santana Blues Band – sounds just like Sweetwater – sounds just too damn much like Canned Heat) had lulled Wood-stock crowds into dangerous ennui.
This was a crucial juncture in the Festival, a highly volatile opportunity that the Grateful Dead proceeded methodically to blow.
Consider. On the one hand were the tired numberless masses, gathered decisively after all the rain on Friday night and Saturday morning, after all the overcrowding, traffic jams, mild paranoids, and expenditure of joyful nervous tension of the last two and a half days, primed and ready for the big Big Rise, and growing steadily panicky as it steadily failed to develop.
And on the other hand there was the Grateful Dead who fundamentally misjudged the tone and mood of the moment.
As their set drew on, through some off-key off-balance sugar-coated country music into a faltering, packaged, without tempo jam, there just were no explicit internal musical interconnections of the kind that one expects spangling and bristling and sprouting in rock music.
Consequently there were no external interconnections between performers and audience, and the hillsides grew quieter and quieter. There was a hushed desperation in the air as the Dead split the stage, a soggy sobriety that clearly was setting in much too early since there had been no intervening period of unrestrained madness.
I remain convinced that if the Dead had been followed by yet another of these California shlock bands. Woodstock today would have been a memory to forget, not cherish. All the underlying weight of the weekend’s distress would have emerged to blot out all the pleasantness.
This despite, and perhaps because of, all the feelings of brotherly love that had genuinely swept the assembly from the force field. All the good vibes had been built up in expectation of good rock-music, and more importantly, had been produced as a carry-over from previous encounters with the experience that is rock.
Rock (the music) in its pure (i.e. Rolling Stones, Beatles etc.) form with its minute inter vibrations loosely strung together to a resonant resultant macro-vibration is a direct feeder into rock (the social phenomenon). Rock in that sense is a lucid and comprehensive composite of the style (flashy, kinetic) and ideology (call it Peace, a better single term than most) and much of everything in between, of this generation of young Americans.
Woodstock was above all a rock-music festival set in its appropriate setting for once and that’s why people turned up in the hundreds of thousands. It follows that bad music masquerading as rock could have destroyed and undone it.
As it turned out, as everybody knows by now, Saturday night and the whole festival along with it was redeemed, step by careful step- there’s still some heavy artillery left in rock.
Creedence Clearwater Revival followed the Grateful Dead’s gap, doing their string of bit singles in quick succession and the monster-crowd gradually began to stir. It’s so appropriate that Creedence’s songs deal so heavily with Water ( the Mississippi, swamps, the moon) because their music is just that, cool, refreshing as a mountain stream, in short a menthol cigarette (so much goddamn interference these days).
And then Sly and the Family Stone with Sly chanting “We got to get high-er’ and the 400,000 roar back, “Hi-igh-er”. You know what it sounds like to have so many people roaring from an open hillside? It’s not like 100,000 screaming in Shea Stadium because that’s sharp and it shoots straight up; this was a deep rumble, steady and ascending with different pockets of sound catching up, mingling and diffusing into another one another before the next wave rolls in. Such an uncanny power-trip.
Janis next; her band sounds firm and polished and she herself struts and preens as delightfully as ever between numbers. It all seems a little less innocent though. A year ago she was delightedly, tentatively discovering her power to send 1000 males into pumping ecstasy with a simple flick of her hips, a young girl’s revelling in her new-found raw sexuality. The act these days is a little more calculated, a whiff of hardened brazen exploitation?
She was welcome though. Followed by the Who, who played all through the night, Daltry’s syllables ringing out sharp and clear through the arena, Townsend in a white gleaming jumpsuit, the group running frantically through “Tommy” as if afraid time would run out, and just after sunrise when they were so high they couldn’t come down except, by crashing. Townsend and Moon obliged by smashing their instruments for the first time since they started doing “Tommy” on stage.
Sunday Morning
The sun by then had, after some initial wobbling, settled serenely in its groove for the day, and Grace Slick, breathtakingly unattainable, announced “You’ve heard all those hippie groups; here’s something for morning maniacs”. So flat and crisp her speaking voice, just like all of Jefferson Airplane’s music, come to think of it, like they make something perversely palatable out of neutral matter. Everyone lay in sleeping bags on the mud facing the morning warmth of the sun, the Airplane rang out for an hour, a pagan and ritualistic force, and it ended quietly.
After Saturday/ Sunday’s concert, the mood changed to one of certainty. Till then there had been a distinct lingering hesitation but sometime during the night the Woodstock Festival had been realized. We had all confirmed the necessity of our presence. The stars and their bands were now a distinct entity and so was the audience one; firm and logical bridges had been established between the two camps. The structure had been tested and found strong.
From now on it was clear that we would go through with it all tastefully and gracefully. We in all our numbers could be lumped under one personal pronoun because we had shared something unique. Such numbers! It is difficult to relate to numbers like half a million. During Friday night’s concert the M.C had asked everyone to light a match. In minutes the hillside was nothing but pinpoints of light.
The dimensions of the stage-site were staggering. Imagine a natural amphitheater 500 yards deep and a mile around the edge and every inch of space covered with bodies. The slope down was steady and strong, so much so that every row had a clear view over the one ahead of it. The sound system was so powerful that notes were audible for miles around. The stage towers were a hundred feet tall and the playing area was proportionately spacious. Five hundred thousand people. More people than had ever gathered in the history of the world in any one enclosed area. Nearly as many people as there are American soldiers in Vietnam, What if everyone had carried a gun?
And among all these people there was not a single fist-fight. I know because there was never any in my cross-section of the crowd and everyone know that every other cross-section was exactly the same as every other. You felt this homogeneity of beliefs and sentiments as a palpable reality. Fist-fights occur at baseball games because the fact of their occurrence does not in any way reflect on the institution of baseball games. But at such a rock concert as this one a fist-fight would have negated the whole purpose of the gathering. Such a violation would have been unpardonable and everyone knew it.
I’ve been to other rock festivals before, but it was never like it was at Woodstock. Never such a total absence of submerged currents linking different subcultures to each other. After Saturday’s concert at Woodstock there was only one current and it was in the open. Impossible too to avoid sounding a little breathless when describing Woodstock…
Sunday Afternoon
Sunday’s concert began in broad sunshine. Ripples of euphoria swirled around shamelessly. After two hours of Joe Cocker, a short chunky man who sings with his hands flipping like fins, the sun left with him, and dark clouds broke into the most vicious and bitter thunderstorm of the weekend. It rained for two hours strongly, drenching everyone. If the crowd’s spirit had not been consolidated earlier it would have broken under this onslaught. As it was the bond visibly strengthened – and it was no mere reflex to a natural disaster. At the height of the storm an army helicopter dropped tiny spinning yellow pallets that turned out to be flowers.
Visions of a better world? Why not? Soup was prepared in the mud after the rain stopped and it was given out. There was no organization any more because it was not needed: everyone had been organized and people tended fires as if they had been assigned. A boy, four or five years younger than I, sought me out to give me nearly all of his soup because he said he thought I needed it more than he. He wasn’t posing either because after careful thought I came to the conclusion that he was right. To each ……from each….I drank the soup.
The music began again. It was cold but with fires one endured. Memory of the night: Robbie Robertson of the Band, tall and lean in all white, deftly chopping into his guitar. Three new songs. Should be a great new album. Memory of the morning: at 7-Hendrix came out to us, grim and loving like a father with his children, and played and played like a demon for hour after hour (after hour after hour after half, to be exact). Hendrix played his version of the Star-Spangled Banner and it all ended with him.
In the nineteenth century the nations of Europe used to hold Expositions every so often as vigorous affirmation of national identity, displaying their finest and most representative products to their own people and to the world outside. The Aquarian Exposition was a well chosen name except that in this case both the people and their finest products were on display.