The California Collection/TheCaliforniaCollection.cdr/his094/wood.arj/WOOD.TXT

Text File | 1991-03-11 | 7.1 KB | 143 lines

Bad Acid

Wall Street Journal
August 18, 1989

We stand in awe of the Woodstock generation's ability to
be unceasingly fascinated by the subject of itself. One
would have thought that the saturation coverage at the time
would have been enough. But every five years, Woodstock-goers,
so many of whom have become writers for elite media organs,
wheel out their gilded memories and pet observations.

It's even more remarkable that other generations are willing
to give the boomers all this attention. The elder generations
helped create the excesses of the '60s by indulging the teenagers
of that era. Somehow, grown-ups believed wisdom adhered to
youth, and that it was necessary to "get in touch with the young."

Life and Look magazines opened their pages. The New York Times
was somber and celebratory, calling Woodstock a "Phenomenon of
Innocence". This obeisance encouraged all that talk about revolution,
the Age of Aquarius and yuppiedom.

Today, the younger generation seems also to have become
vicarious flower children. Woodstock nostalgia seems strongest
among those who are 14. MTV, which caters to early adolescents,
has been going bananas with "Woodstock Minutes" and the like.
An audience of teenage boys naturally likes the idea of running
around with naked women and doing LSD while listening to Jimi
Hendrix and The Who. Woodstock also offers a forum for vague
rebelliousness. That's perfect for today's teens, many of whom
would like to be radical, though they do not have any definite politics.

Today's renegades should remember that Woodstock was about drugs,
and without drugs, it wasn't much fun. They should also know that
all the talk about freedom and individuality at Woodstock was
a lie.

There a rigid dress code(jeans, no short hair). There was
a rigid vocabulary code. There was a rigid thought code.
There was considerable peer pressure to be part of the drug scene.
Those who didn't do drugs often were afraid to admit it(As the
world's only anti-drug hippie, I can say amen -- :GM:)

There was intense peer pressure, especially on women, to
be promiscuous. A remark in a recent Woodstock column by the
New York Post's Pete Hamill captures the attitude toward women.
He is describing what a wonderful time his male buddies had :
"They joined together and bathed nude in Mr. Filippini's pond.

They shared food and joints and girlfriends."(Hamill is quite a
guy. Here's another of his quotes:

"[TV preachers] are respected
citizens; presidents take their calls; lesser politicians and network
executives fear them; the tax laws make them rich. But they
specialize in one thing -- the peddling of fear. Fear of 'secular
humanism', communism, big government, labor unions, liberalism,
other Americans, all mixed up with fear of the Lord and Satan.
We know their true enemies: reason, intelligence, pluralism"
 :GM:)

This year's cliche about Woodstock is that the kids came to
Woodstock as renegades and left as a market. Rock is now commercial.
Rebellion is an advertising gimmick. The heroes of Woodstock now
ride the nostalgia circuit. As Wavy Gravy put it, "Woodstock was
created for wallets". Mainstream commercial culture has assimilated
the counterculture. But mainstream culture had to meet it halfway.

What mainstream culture absorbed, at least during the '70s, was
a whiff of Woodstock's utopianism, the idea that you could have
drugs as well as wisdom, promiscuity as well as relationships,
organization without structure, prosperity without economic competition.
There a spiritual greed in the desire to have all these things;
the older name for it is hedonism.

The Woodstock radical couldn't have been expected to realize
that hedonism can damage the social fabric. Their elders should
have told them. Those whom they would have listened to did not,
and the social fabric WAS damaged. It is impossible to link
definitively the counterculture to today's social pathologies. But
the late '60s and early '70s brought a number of terrible trends that
now haunt us. Drug abuse rose dramatically. The divorce rate went
up. Promiscuity rose. Men felt less compelled to take responsibility
for the children they helped create. Schools became more disorderly.
The universities became refuges for frustrated radicals. The
poverty rate, which had been dropping, went up.

Today, most Woodstock veterans acknowledge the hedonism was
excessive. But today's nostalgic treatments are still largely
self-aggrandizing. Many celebrate Woodstock as the Last Good
Time. It would be more appropriate if there were a hint of
shame, if not over the damage done to the idea of individual
responsibility, at least over the deaths that resulted in part
from the countercultural lifestyle.

Twenty-seven acts played at Woodstock. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix,
Tim Hardin, Kieth Moon and Paul Butterfield subsequently died
from drug overdoses. Bob Hite from Canned Heat later died of
a drug-related heart attack and Ron McKernan of the Grateful Dead
died of a liver ailment. Richard Manuel of The Band and Abbie Hoffman
were suicides. Felix Pappalardi of Mountain was shot by his wife.

It wasn't only the famous who died. We were stuck by a message
in the current issue of Life by Pat Ruel Malone, a secretary in
Monroe, NY : "I am writing this in memory of my dear brother,
James M. Berra, who went to Woodstock with three friends. James
died at the age of 26, on February 11, 1978, from a drug overdose.
Two others also died of drug overdoses. Only one person of the
four survives."

Not everyone was thrilled. Perhaps what we think about Woodstock
is a mirage. A letter to the editor reads as follows:

Curiously, Martha Bayles seems to have developed her impressions
of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival and the people who attended
from the very media whose romantic reminiscences she deplores in
her article, "Unliberating Memories". As one who attended the
three-day event, I was offended by her cynical characterizations
of the festival-goers as into romanticism, socialism and transcendence
and find that her analysis only serves to further distort the already
distorted collective memories of Woodstock.

Along with most of those in attendence, I went for the music.
I purchased tickets well in advance, only to find they weren't
collected. There was nothing romantic about abandoning one's
car and hiking to the festival site, but with the complete
lack of planning by festival organizers, there was no other
choice. The only nudity I saw was in the film version issued by
Warner Brothers in the 1970s. I brought plenty of food and was
appalled when food drops were made by the National Guard .

I couldn't wait to escape the mud, the heat and the garbage.
In fact, none of the people with whom I went to Woodstock, nor
any I have met since are nostalgic for this festival or ever
thought for a moment that the Woodstockian's "nation", as Ms.
Bayles describes it, "was a viable alternative to 'the system'
...". When the festival was over, we all returned to our jobs on
Monday, glad to be home. In fact, even the music wasn't that good.

Gary Maynes
Arlington, VA