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WOODSTOCK NATION Is It Real Or Is It Memorex by Gary Site Having survived last summer's mind-numbing hype of Woodstock '94, it's time to prepare for the fall onslaught, as retail capitalism gears up for a holiday marketing frenzy with a "radical" new twist: For with Woodstock '94, Inc.--and the not coincidental November 8th release date of the CD and who knows what other official memorabilia, timed. precisely for the Christmas rush -- "alternative" capitalism has finally come into its own as a full-fledged partner with its presumably "mainstream" brother. And with that not quite startling development, the remains of the sixties' counter-culture can be said to have met its final degradation and humiliation. Stripped of political content or a social context like that of the sixties which might lend a potentially radical thrust to its subcultural forms of "rebellion"; immersed in childish notions of tribalism and poisoned by the myriad forms of New Age spirituality and superstition -- the detritus of the counterculture that has managed to survive into middle age and even reproduce itself in a younger generation, is not a pretty sight. It is nothing more, now, than another marketing niche: a matter of lifestyle, fashion and personal taste, to be serviced by "alternative" capitalists and retailers in much the same way L. L. Bean services its own would-be "rustic" customers, for the same reasons and by the same means. Indeed, to the very arguable extent that the counterculture ever confronted the dominant society with a radical political challenge, after the summer of 1994 it can be declared politically dead. And it's time to let the dead bury the dead. But first, a view of the boneyard. For if the counterculture is dead, Woodstock '94 was its cemetery. In this "event," we find hype squared. The spectacle unabashedly presented as spectacle. A mirror reflecting a mirror. Far from recreating the dubious "magic" mythically attributed to its legendary progenitor, in this made-for-tv "Woodstock theme-park" we find something worse than nothing: We find a vast spiritual emptiness and cultural vacuity more profound even than the void that exists where meaning should in the inner life of a generation so immersed in capitalism that huge numbers of people apparently can no longer recognize the difference between life and marketing strategy -- and hence, in a pathetic attempt to fill an emptiness that really is "null and void" (as a popular t-shirt slogan puts it), seeks to find "authentic" experience in a grotesquely hypertrophic replay of its parent generation's weekend in the mud and shit. And not just that. One of the more striking aspects of the whole affair is that for many of the pilgrims, Woodstock '94 was a chance to "experience" not the original festival as such but rather the original festival as it was filmed and edited for mass consumption. As pop-critic Jon Pareles of the New York Times put it, "They had seen the movie =D2Woodstock=D3; now they were determined to experience it." In short, they were seeking to relive an experience that no one ever had because literally no one "experienced" the highly edited commodity millions have consumed as a movie. Even some of the musical performances in the movie are probably an illusion, since it is known that at least one of the more famous musical moments -- Crosby, Stills and Nash's debut at the festival -- was rerecorded in the studio prior to release because their live vocals were terribly off key. And needless to say, nowhere in the movie are we shown footage of the rock-and-roll royalty being pampered and feted with extravagant food and drink flown into the "disaster area" by helicopter -- while their fans went without in the rain and mud. Perhaps we should just be grateful that it was not "Apocalypse Now" that so many wished to "experience," but this style of "searching," while doubtless sincere on the parts of many, mostly young people, represents something new: something perilously close to hype experienced as life and life experienced as hype. Ironically -- and this is the nature of hype -- what it does not represent is the thing that is sought. Whatever else may have been experienced at Saugerties last summer, what was not experienced was even the potential for an authentically alternative culture in any meaningful sense of the term, much less of any form of alternative politics, unless we are to use the terms alternative and popular culture as interchangeable synonyms, in which case under capitalism all is decisively lost. Woodstock '94 gives us alternative culture in the way Arm and Hammer gives us an alternative to Pepsodent, Volvo to Chrysler, and "alternative" rock to mainstream rock. Capitalism will create, market and sell as many "alternative" products or "experiences" as there are people to buy them. It will service as many "lifestyles" as there are people t "live" them. It will even sell us "anarchy" -- so long as that supposed "anarchy" remains a "lifestyle" or "personal philosophy," that is, a strictly cultural "statement" or "protest" that one registers with a spraycan or slogan on a jacket, but which poses little if any political threat to the established social order. But it has become banal to point to the "commercialism" of Woodstock '94 or the cultural vacuity it so magnificently displays. This was done for months in every mouthpiece of liberalism from the Village Voice to the New York Times, which featured article after article until one wanted to scream, contrasting Woodstock '69 with its crassly megaprofit-oriented offspring. Yet, while this nostalgic contrast may have provided a ready organizing scheme for more articles than anyone ever cared to read about either Woodstock, it, too, is a lie. The truth is that Woodstock '69 was no less commercial in its intent than Woodstock '94. Both events were organized and promoted by more or less the same well-heeled yuppies with easy access to major banks and multinational corporate sponsors. Both events promised and returned hefty profits to their investors, as intended. (The original Woodstock may have become a "free" concert -- by default, because its promoters couldn't find a way to effectively ticket that many people -- but only a fool would believe that investors lost money on it, what with multimillion record, movie and video sales that have been ongoing now for twenty-five years. More important -- no matter how many lies are told to the contrary -- the truth is that the "original" Woodstock was not a political event either. It was no more political than its mutant offspring, despite the times. Indeed, it is amazing to see how many liberal commentators, who had little if any actual involvement in the social movements of the sixties and seventies, managed to raise this canard in article after article. Take Pareles again: =D2After the overflowing 1969 festival, scattered longhairs, underground music fans and antiwar sympathizers realized they weren't loners anymore: Woodstock certified the extent of Woodstock Nation. In 1994, the younger generation doesn't have an issue as starkly divisive as the Vietnam War, and it already knows it and dress code from MTV .... But people in their teens and 20's flocked to Woodstock '94 anyway, convinced that they had missed something.=D3 This breathtaking mouthful is a near-perfect example of the mythicisms that have grown up around Woodstock, mainly thanks to commentary like this, which amazingly ignores almost everything that happened in the sixties in order to create a memory that fits the desired myth and legend. First, it ignores the rather obvious fact that 1969 was the last year of "the sixties," not the first. Hence, to the arguable extent that there was a "Woodstock Nation" in fact as well as fancy, it had already seen itself in many events nearly as large and much more political than Woodstock. Where in this mythology are half a decade worth of antiwar demonstrations, for instance, many of which were quite large? What has happened to 1968's demonstrations and police riots at the infamous Chicago convention of the Democratic Party -- a much more seminal event for the political members of the sixties generation in America than Woodstock would ever be? Indeed, how, in this mythology, do we account for the huge "funeral of the hippy" in San Francisco, where thousands of the more politically conscious "freaks" symbolically buried their own counterculture, even as the media and other capitalist sharks were discovering and exploiting its huge financial rewards -- indeed, because these rewards were already known to such an extent that long before Woodstock the counterculture had become nea Where the hypemakers gave us the "Summer of Love," the more conscious members of the counterculture itself were giving us the "Funeral of the Hippy." Go figure. In any case, by 1969 many more "scattered longhairs" had probably met while hitchhiking on an ramp than ever would meet at Woodstock. Indeed, by 1969 the counterculture was well into its fade into mere fashion and lifestyleism. "Underground music fans?" Pareles will have to go a long way to show precisely how many of the most wildly successful, popular and wealthy performers in history somehow make the grade as "underground music." Woodstock's lineup in 1969 was about as "underground" as Madonna was in the eighties. But what irks most of all is the dragging in of Vietnam, the antiwar movement, and the political overtones these subjects generate, to all of these Woodstock reminiscences. Woodstock had nothing to do with Vietnam, or with the political activity of the time, apart from some inevitable overlap in the crowd, since most of the opposition to the war was conducted by young people and, needless to say, most of those young people enjoyed the rock music of the time. But Woodstock was hardly an expression of antiwar fervor. To the contrary, every attempt to politicize the gathering and turn its attention to the war and other political issues of the time was met with boredom at best and outright hostility at worst. For a great example of the boredom, listen to Country Joe McDonald's "Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" on the original soundtrack: McDonald, one of the very few movement activists, perhaps the only leftist, and definitely the only Vietnam veteran to perform at Woodstock, has to chide and cajole the audience into singing along on his most famous antiwar anthem. And, of course, the best example of antipolitical hostility doesn't appear in the film, although it became an apocryphal aspect of Woodstock for movement people: Peter Townshend of the Who whacking Abbie Hoffman in the head with his guitar, to put an end to Hoffman's attempt to speak to the crowd about the war. (I've never known quite what to say about poor Joan Baez's plodding version of "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night." Perhaps some memories are best suppressed.) And, yes, Jimi Hendrix played a magnificent "Star Spangled Banner" which perfectly captured the intense, nerve-jangled feel of the time. So what. Let's face it: Woodstock '69 was hyped as three days of love and peace, whatever that was supposed to mean. But what Woodstock was, was a "good time." It was a chance to do one's thing and enjoy a huge party in the mud with lots of drugs, sex and the best rock and roll money could buy. What it was not, was a demonstration. No one went to Woodstock because they opposed the war in Vietnam. Indeed, probably many people went to Woodstock who did not oppose the war, and many more went to the festival without giving the war or the radical movements of the time a single sustained thought. Perhaps the most accurate measure of the type of "political" mind at work at Woodstock '69 -- and in much of the counterculture, too, it must be said -- is revealed by a quote from Woodstock Vision, a recent book of photographs by Elliot Landy. Landy, who was asked by Woodstock promoter, Mike Lang, to photograph the original festival, opens his book with photos of some streetfighting between police and demonstrators. "You could be the policeman or the demonstrator," Landy says, "but either way, you were still part of the fighting." In short, whether you were a resister or a repressor of resistance, you were somehow equally culpable for the violence of the time -- an attitude, the logic of which inevitably leads to the apolitical passive-receptiveness that has come to characterize the remains of the counterculture, and which also necessarily translates into passive support of the dominant social order. So much for Woodstock's politics, as articulated by one of its "official" participants. Even as a party, in retrospect Woodstock can be seen less as a beginning of anything than as something of a last hurrah. Soon the counterculture would have a more concrete suicide at Altamont, to answer the earlier symbolic funeral of the hippies. Soon, too, the New Left and the antiwar movement wo have its last days in the sun: SDS exploded into various Maoist fragments and other sectarian absurdities that summer, at its last convention. The following year, 1970, saw the antiwar movement take to the streets for its last major demonstrations, which met with gunfire and military force at Kent State, Jackson State, Buffalo, Albuquerque and other cities around the country. The war would continue for another five years, virtually without opposition apart from the May Day demonstrations of 1972. It all seems so long ago. And, while "Woodstock '94: The Video" will be available any moment -- the perfect stocking-stuffer for all the hypesters on your list -- the challenge of creating a new left for our time still hangs in the historical air like a great question mark.