On Feb. 2, 1959, the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, hosted a "Winter Dance Party," featuring the talents of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens. Early the next morning, their chartered plane crashed east of town, killing everyone. The tragedy lives on in legend as "the day the music died," and a steady stream of visitors from around pays homage at a small memorial outside the Surf.
The visitors come as pilgrims, defined by Webster's as "a person who travels about, a wanderer." But pilgrims are more than tourists. For their enterprise to make sense, there must be a destination, a goal: communion with one's beliefs and aspirations. Muslims must make the Haj to Mecca. Hindus journey to Benares, Jews and Christians to Jerusalem, theosophists to Walden Pond. In Russia, literary pilgrims visit Pushkin's grave on his birthday to hear each other recite his poetry.
But pop culture has taken the pilgrimage and remade it to fit its particular sensibilities. In earlier centuries, pilgrimage was more often than not a solitary experience. These days, pilgrims tend to travel in packs. And Americans have become especially efficient in spiritual questing. Appointments with deeper meaning are scheduled in the summer when school is out and the weather is good, preferably on weekends. Our souls hanker for nourishment within driving distance.
Indeed, as we sputter toward the millennium, some of the most noted pilgrimages seem to be pop culture rituals, a way of coming of age in a post-McLuhan world. Children alarm their parents by announcing they are going to take off sophomore year of college to tour with the Grateful Dead. Lollapalooza, the traveling rock extravaganza, draws stadium-sized crowds from one end of the country to the other as the MTV crowd scrambles to forge a collective identity.
The hunger is for meaning, a sense of place in a land where the wind blows and the radio blares and maybe, just maybe, there is something unimaginably cool over the next hill.
"Are you lonesome tonight?" Elvis Aaron Presley croons, and suddenly we're in Memphis with all the people who miss the King, of whom 40,000 were in town last week to mourn the 17th anniversary of his death. All night long they held candles.
Elsewhere on distant blacktop, a roar builds. It is a pack of Harley-Davidson hogs, the music is "Born to Be Wild," and the destination is Sturgis, S.D., home of America's biggest motorcycle rally. Last Sunday, more than 170,000 bikers wrapped up a week of races and tall tales to end their 54th meeting.
And a couple of generations -- some riding airplanes from the West Coast, some riding their thumbs from wherever -- went to Woodstock last weekend. Most, a quarter of a million strong, paid $135 each to attend an intricately staged musical event near the town of Saugerties, N.Y., and got such modern concert conveniences as automatic teller machines. But the best amenity turned out to be acres of oozing, squirmable mud.
Arguably, though, the real pilgrims went to an improbable party in a cow pasture near Bethel, the site of the original 1969 Woodstock concert. Thousands trudged down a country road in total darkness to a countercultural concert that had been officially canceled a week earlier. Some came because their lives had been touched by magic at the first Woodstock, and some because they had been too young for that.
"I want to be a hippie forever," said a 20-year-old Connecticut woman who would identify herself only as Kellie and aspires to travel with the Dead.
Others came because they come every year, saying they seize a spiritual power from the land itself. They put up teepees and bang Indian drums and build campfires and gather energy for another year in a complicated world. They would be perfectly happy with no star attractions, but what they got this summer was a heavenful.
For the same reasons that graying veterans of the Woodstock Nation come "back to the garden," in the words of a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, so came the minstrels they dance to. For the price of a hike and a smile, such performers as Richie Havens, Arlo Guthrie, David Amram, Country Joe, Melanie, Paul Winter, Sha Na Na, Peter Yarrow and Canned Heat played on very short notice on a pilgrimage of their own.
Mr. Havens, whose rendition of "Freedom" was one of the original festival's jewels, worked mightily to make it happen, working the phones urging musicians to come for free. He vowed that he would play Woodstock, even if that meant sitting in a field by himself with a guitar.
Such a pilgrimage transcended other events that brightened America's summer last week, including the World Championship Mosquito Calling Contest in Walcott, Ark., and the Montana Cowboy Poet Gathering in Lewistown. Serious quests require a deeper faith. As Jack Kerouac wrote in "On the Road," a chronicle of one of history's more frenetic, zig-zaggy pilgrimages: "Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me."
Purity Is Paramount
For Elvis's fans, his spirit is the pearl, and each year they return to Graceland to polish it. Over the week that ended last Tuesday, they got bused to the King's boyhood home in Tupelo, Miss., toured his junior high school, danced a new Elvis line dance, and ran a five-kilometer road race. The candlelight vigil was free.
When it comes to pilgrimages, purity is paramount, or at least its appearance. Carol Schops, 20, a production assistant for a book publisher, said she wanted to believe in Lollapalooza but fears it has become too commercial. "People my age don't feel like it's theirs anymore," said Ms. Schops, who thinks the Grateful Dead, a generation older, may be all that is left in the way of unspoiled seeking.
For some, the Bethel Woodstock resounded with a feeling of mission. Jimmy Mack, who plays bass for Mr. Havens, said he was 17 at the time of the 1969 festival and had arranged to fly there from California with some musician friends. But his parents came home 10 minutes before he was set to leave, and forbade him to go. That was the year he started playing the guitar. "I've been working for this for 25 years," he said shortly before going on stage.
