Shoe-slurping mud. Bad acid. Jammed-up transportation. Haphazard security. Late sets. True to its legendary trademark, Woodstock '94 was a big mess. But after a few hundred thousand people recover from fatigue and hypothermia, the bigness will loom larger in memory than either the disarray or the corporate aura that hung over the festival from the beginning.
As it turned out, Woodstock '94 was not a larger version of a stadium concert but a generally benign, free-form party. Though some people did stupid things -- the endless announcements about lost children were not gratifying -- the audience didn't riot, and the bands sounded good.
Just as in 1969, though with more self-consciousness and planning on all sides, the crowd took over Woodstock '94. People in their teens and 20's, who greatly outnumbered their elders, were overwhelmingly determined not to live up to their assigned demographic niche as cola-consuming, video-addled slackers. Instead, they wanted and grabbed their symbol of community and cooperation.
At the unprecedented 1969 festival, the response was spontaneous, while the audience at Woodstock '94 had history on its mind. But if it couldn't be first, at least it could follow the famous script and see how it felt.
The children of the baby-boomers came to Woodstock '94 to re-enact a myth retold by movies, television and graying ex-hippies. Through 25 years of oral tradition, the 1969 festival has taken on the symbolism of an initiation ritual, a trial by the elements that had seemed to forge a community and confer bragging rights on a generation.
The ritual had worked, briefly and figuratively, for the baby-boomers. And while most of the music was different at Woodstock '94, it seemed important not to mess with the trappings, however ugly and inconvenient they might seem, any more than someone would reshuffle the order of a Mass. Clear skies might, somehow, have rendered the ritual null and void.
A Few New Touches
Woodstock '94 did have some new elements, like giant video screens, a mosh pit, a live television audience and exhibit areas for computer gadgets and environmental activists. But there were enough similarities to link two events across the quarter-century. When the first announcements were made from the stage about bad acid, the crowd cheered for the deja vu. Ditto for Joe Cocker twitching through "With a Little Help From My Friends" and, more anachronistically, Crosby, Stills and Nash singing " Woodstock" (which, of course, hadn't been written in August 1969).
Jimi Hendrix's famous solo-guitar version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was echoed on harmonica by John Popper of Blues Traveller and on bass by Les Claypool of Primus; Melissa Etheridge sang Janis Joplin material. Bob Dylan, the enigmatic icon who snubbed the festival in 1969, received a welcoming roar, and responded with vivid, rekindled versions of one 1960's masterpiece after another.
At the 1969 Woodstock festival, no one played songs from 1944. The generation that dominated Woodstock '94 shares more of its parents' musical tastes than the baby-boomers did. But Woodstock '94 wasn't exactly a festival of nostalgia. Current groups like the punk-pop band Green Day, the rappers Cypress Hill and the neo-psychedelic rockers Blind Melon played to hyperactive moshers. The festival's major draws were post-1969 bands like Metallica, Nine Inch Nails and Aerosmith, a triple-barreled hard-rock finale on Saturday night, when attendance peaked.
The younger generation likes some of its music aggressive, perhaps a result of material and emotional frustrations, perhaps a reaction to the AIDS crisis, which makes free love dangerous. In the supposedly communal 1960's, people danced the hippie sway alone; in the isolationist 1990's, people mosh in ways that demand large groups, colliding with each other or riding on raised hands. It sometimes seems as if the physical contact of free love has been transferred to the mosh pit.
No More T-Shirts
Capitalism worked better for Woodstock '94 than it did at the original festival; by Sunday night, the $25 souvenir T-shirts were sold out. Through either a brilliant disinformation campaign or a series of last-minute breakdowns, the promoters got people to pay for tickets that were never collected, and probably scared off the most anarchic elements with the prospect of searches for everything from tent stakes to illegal drugs. Yet there were enough gate-crashers to link Woodstock '94 to the original. And when people arrived and found that, no, their joints and metal flashlights hadn't been confiscated, it was like an amnesty. At this Woodstock, people arrived prepared, carrying backpacks and camping equipment; growing up in less abundant times, the younger generation doesn't expect comfort from the outside world, as baby-boomers did.
While stage announcements proudly proclaimed a new Woodstock Nation, that nation won't correspond exactly to the first one. Many of the people who came to Woodstock in 1969 felt like outsiders, "freaks," the only longhaired folks in towns full of uncomprehending or hostile "straights." To see 450,000 like-minded (or at least similarly dressed) people was a shock: look, we're not the only ones. After 25 more years of youth marketing, the next generation doesn't have to visit the Catskills to see its peers. It can tune in MTV 24 hours a day, or watch the Fox network in prime time. Young people may always feel like misfits and outcasts -- particularly in the job market -- but they can find their fashion statements at chain stores.
Music is different now in performance, too. Television exposure and stadium-size audiences have changed the way rock bands act onstage. Outside the alternative-rock underground, few bands shamble around a stage the way hippie bands did in the 1960's; lights, costumes and movement are planned and controlled. The audience joins in the visual spectacle, too. By the end of Peter Gabriel's set on Sunday night, candles were somehow distributed around the vast acreage, and the crowd lighted them up as he sang "Biko," an idealistic song about a South African martyr in the struggle against apartheid. It looked inspiring on the video screens.
Despite promises that Woodstock '94 itself would be a controlled environment, the audience arrived with other plans: a determination to seize for itself the great mythos of the 1960's. Pleasure and peace, freedom and neighborliness, marijuana and music till dawn. If the younger generation can't expect to better their parents' standard of living, at least it can have its own significant weekend. And now, no self-righteous baby-boomers can take it away.
