Woodstock Sells Out (1999)

Woodstock Sells Out
Ithaca Times, August 8, 1999

David B. Schwartz


In 1969 My brother Dan and I went to Woodstock. In July, thirty years later, we went to different music festivals in upstate New York: he to the Woodstock revival in Rome, and me to the Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance in Trumansburg. What we saw this time could not have been more different.

There has been a lot written about the original Woodstock, because something extraordinary happened there. People have various opinions about what it was. I’ll give you my own opinion, forged on the scene. The sixties were a period of time in which there was great estrangement of young people from the prevailing structures of the society. The Vietnam war, the military, police, government, corporations, careers, - all were rejected as false preoccupations with money, power, and “things.”In Dustin Hoffman’s movie [ital] The Graduate, the confused young graduate is advised soberly by an “organization man” that the secret of the future was [ital] plastics. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” we said, and believed it. The old world of organization men was over, and a new world of peace and love were at hand.

This was hopelessly naive, of course. But there was one moment in which the possibility could be glimpsed. The hundreds of thousands of people pouring into Woodstock completely washed away any semblance of structured authority for managing people. Police, overwhelmed, were on their own in the midst of the flood. Although police were widely distrusted - even hated - in the sixties, I remember a scene of a group of kids pushing a stuck police cruiser out of the mud. Without the trappings of power, they accepted the officer as a person - and extended a hand to him. He might as well relax and enjoy the music. He wasn’t going anywhere.

In the sixties there was a popular Rousseauan belief that if people just set aside the moribund world of power and management and money, that community would take care of everything. At Woodstock, for a brief moment, this was true. Everything was free. Abandoned to the care of each other, we took care of each other. The tribal instinct of people surfaced, and community worked. I remembered standing in the rain and mud, looking out over the hillside of people, and thinking “My God, it is true. This does work! Without organizations things [ital]were better! It was a moment in time. But social history did not go forward in that way, not in that way at all. It went back to money and power and organizations as never before.

Thirty years later, the same producers, now in their early fifties and presumably wiser, held another “Woodstock.” This time they ensured that everything was securely under control and that everything made a profit. They held it on an old military base double - fenced with razor wire on the outside so nobody could sneak in without paying. They ran everybody through metal detectors. They forbade anyone to bring supplies in. You had to purchase everything at the prices demanded. This was a moneymaking enterprise. Whether high gate fees, exclusive television access to young women with their shirts off, or 8oz bottles of water for $4, it could hardly escape anyone’s mind what they were ultimately there for - they were there to be a captive audience for people to make money from. The symbolic presence of bank machines helpfully scattered throughout the grounds could not have been more pointed. Take your money out and spend it here! When the riots broke out, the looting of the bank machines could have not been more pointed either. At the original Woodstock, money was of little use. A commune, the Hog Farm, gave out free food. Thirty years later, nobody was giving anything away for free.

While my brother was at Woodstock, my friend Cosmic Bob and I went to the Grassroots festival together, as we do each year. Unlike the one in Rome, this one was so much like the feel of the original Woodstock that it was stepping into a time-warp, even if many in the festive crowd hadn’t been born yet when the original took place. People wandered freely, listened to music, shared their food and their tents, kept an eye on each other’s children. “It’s Woodstock with nose-rings,” I remarked to my friend Bob.

There are those who claim that the riots at the ‘90s Woodstock show that kids are just different nowadays. And different they are, surely. It is a far different time. But the behavior of the same kids at a festival not 100 miles away showed that this is not the point at all. The point is that if people feel that they are citizens, involved in a community-sponsored event like Grassroots, they behave like citizens. If they feel like they are just consumers, being milked like so many cows, then they just may kick over the milking stands. You just cannot manage people for your own economic benefit without running the risk of them exploding, no matter how many security police you employ or how high fences you build. Whether the American Revolution, the French Revolution, prison riots, Columbine High School, or “Moneystock,” as some dubbed it, the managed approach blows up in your face - eventually - every time.

Cosmic Bob and I stopped by a fence to chat with Tommy Mann, who runs the security detail every year for Grassroots. An old hippie, Tommy has the kind of mind that would have made him a chief of detectives in another age. Casually leaning against the fence, his long blond hair brushing against his Tee-shirt, a small radio poking out of his back pocket, Tommy chatted with us, while scanning the crowd and missing nothing. For here and there, there might be somebody who hadn’t heard the news that we all looked out for each other here. When they acted on that belief, a few of Tommy’s orange shirted volunteers would materialize and expel them through the fence. You needed just a little managed security, and Tommy and his folks provided it.

Tommy, and everyone at the Grassroots festival, know that if you try to manage things too much, that you’ll spoil the fun. Besides, what kind of a festival would that much management make? The answer is Woodstock 1999. It’s like what’s happening to the practice of medicine under HMOs - all the caring is being driven out of it. It’s not surprising, I guess, that if some people think that you can produce care through management that you can even produce a music festival in this way. Bob and Tommy and I chatted about the Woodstock festival then taking place concurrently - this was before the ending riots. It hadn’t attracted any of us. “HMO Woodstock,” Cosmic Bob called it. I guess that if an HMO produced a music festival that’s just what it would look like.