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Redefining America through Rock Music after Woodstock and Altamont: Texts and Contexts of Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty part 3 |
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Redefining America through Rock Music after Woodstock and Altamont: Texts and Contexts of Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty part 3 |
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The idea of organizing a—pardon the word—megafestival suggested
itself as rock music in 1968 was fast becoming a big business, and four young New Yorkers with money to invest took it up. They planned a three-day event, the biggest festival of its kind ever,
to be held
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I said that the organization of the Woodstock Festival was a disaster. Some 200,000 people were expected, but half a million came. Even for 200,000, the sanitary equipment and the basic supplies of food and drink would have been insufficient. After a storm drenched Max Yasgur’s farm during the first night of the festival, the site became a mud hole. The security crew hired for the event was rendered helpless by the unexpected rush of people, and on the second day Woodstock was turned into a free concert. Indeed, it was a miracle that the venue at Bethel NY did not turn into a major catastrophe.
Musically, Woodstock was hardly a highlight. The sound equipment was mediocre at best and could not do the job. Most of the stage acts were routine or worse; few were really memorable like that of Crosby, Still, Nash, & Young (doing only their second concert together), Santana perhaps, and Jimi Hendrix (though when he was on the stage most people were already leaving). The Grateful Dead offered an example of the other extreme: their show was so bad that the band expressly prohibited the use of their material on either the film or the recordings. All told, the music performed was more an Abgesang on an era; it was music of the 60s, yes, but it would be hardly relevant for the 70s. Few of those who were on the stage at Woodstock would play a significant role for the development of rock music in the 70s. Neil Young, one of those few, said it directly in a song he published in 1975. I’m not going back to Woodstock for a while, The musical irrelevance of Woodstock was demonstrated to me here in Vienna by an event announced as Woodstock Memorial Concert in late summer 1979. For the event, a special tent was set up in the Prater, holding about 800 people, but it proved too large. Four acts were billed: Richie Havens, Country Joe McDonald (the one doing "gimme an f—F—gimme a u—U"—and so on), Arlo Guthrie ("Riding on the City of New Orleans"), and Joe Cocker. The whole affair was a pity, nostalgia gone stale and sour. The worst was Joe Cocker, looking older than he does now. His dance style, the spastic movements of the stage at Woodstock, had deteriorated so badly that it could no longer even be mistaken for dancing; and the voice was truly all beer and whiskey. That concert was one of the saddest moments in my life. In retrospect, Woodstock was tragedy narrowly averted; the next large festival, when 300,000 came together at Altamont Speedway near San Francisco, on December 6, 1969, turned into a complete disaster. The Rolling Stones,
who had not been at Woodstock, |
near Woodstock NY. One reason why they selected the particular place was that Bob Dylan had retired to the region following his motorcycle accident in 1966, and other big-name musicians followed him to the idyllic community of artists not too far from New York City. The rumor was spread that Dylan might come on stage unannounced, perhaps with that new band of his, who called themselves
The Band and were billed for the festival. All was done to promote advance ticket sales, though no location had yet been found. Only three weeks before the scheduled event did the organizers succeed in securing a site, on Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel,
some 50 miles west of Woodstock, and preparations for the event were hastily conducted. As it turned out, the organization was a disaster. New York State witnessed the largest traffic jam in history, and a helicopter service had to be chartered to bring in the musicians. Trouble with the transportation of musicians was the reason why Richie Havens on the opening evening of the concert had to drag out his performance unduly, his voice going hoarse as he went on and on, bellowing "Freedom, freedom, freedom / sometimes I feel like a motherless child." Tim Hardin, who was scheduled to appear after Havens, was too stoned to go on stage, and nobody else had yet been able to make it to the site.
wanted to cap their fall 1969 tour of America with an event that was to eclipse Woodstock. It was to be a free concert, for which all the big acts of the time were billed—Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young—all booked to hype up the crowd for the highlight of the show, the Stones, who wanted to record it all on film. But the organization of the event was marred by monstrous ineptitude paired with incredible recklessness, which peaked in the hiring of the Hells Angels as security squad for the festival. The Hells Angels were to be paid $500—in beer—or all the beer they could drink during the concert. The inevitable consequence was an explosion of violence, for which those hired to safeguard the event were chiefly responsible. Of the four deaths that occurred during the concert, one came from the hands of the Hells Angels, who horribly beat and stabbed an 18-year-old African American on the stage, only a few yards away from where Mick Jagger was performing. Jagger may have been oblivious to what was going on around him while he was doing "Sympathy for the Devil," but he should have acknowledged that something terrible had happened when saw the film footage which captured the details. Filmed at Altamont, the movie Gimme Shelter, however, exhibits no trace of remorse or even awareness that the goings-on during that concert had forever changed rock music. The Grateful Dead, conversely, were acutely aware that something irrevocable had happened. They were to enter the stage of Altamont after the Stones but refused to do so because of the deaths. The band’s music and overall presentation underwent a momentous change, and it will be precisely this performative turnaround that will be at the focus of my attention for the remainder of this talk.