[Washington Post, 24 Jly 94, C1,C5]==================================== FROM THE WOODSTOCK STATION By Martha Bayles* LOVE IT or hate it, Woodstock refuses to go away. Next month marks the 25th anniversa- ry of that famous rag-tag rack festival, and even before the tour buses begin pulling into Saugerties, N. Y. for its heavily-hyped successor, Woodstock '94, the myths are flying thick and fast. Many people believe that America changed after Woodstock--that whatever was magical about the 1960s faded with that last summer. And they're right that things changed--but not in the ways that is commonly supposed. The first myth is that Woodstock '69 marked the end of an innocent era when popular music was loving, liberated and (most important) not for profit. According to this myth, corporate America woke up that August morning 25 years ago, beheld the sheer heft -------------------------------------------------- *Martha Bayles is the author of "Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music" (Free Press). --------------------------------------------------- of the "Woodstock Nation," and decided that here was a market ripe for exploitation. So everything disagreeable that followed, from ugly music to ugly behavior, is due to commercialization. Refuting this myth is the simple fact that American popular music has always been commercialized. In the 1800s, Americans of all stripes plunked down hard-earned nickels to see minstrel and vaudeville shows. At the turn of the century, ragtime sold millions of player-piano rolls and gramophones. Then came the jazz and blues crazes of the 1920s, followed by the highly profitable swing era. After World War II, the big record companies peddled pop singers from Patti Page to Frank Sinatra. Then, in the 1950s, upstart entrepreneurs like Sam Phillips in Memphis captured the burgeoning teenage market with a new-old sound called rock-and-roll. Even in the fabled 1960s, commercialization was the rule. Motown was correctly dubbed "the hit factory," and Southern soul thrived on the business acumen of Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. The bad-boy image of the Rolling Stones was a marketing ploy aimed at outselling the good-boy Beatles--themselves an entertainment conglomerate by mid-decade. Yes, Woodstock '69 itself was a shoestring venture that took 15 years to make a profit. But that makes it the exception. This is not to say that things didn't change after Woodstock. In the 1970s, popular music's Age of Aquarius sank into drugged self-indulgence among both disco fans and heavy metal headbangers. The 1970s also saw the rise of punk, a movement that was marginal at the time, but has since become pivotal. Indeed, most of the younger performers slated to appear at Woodstock '94--Nine Inch Nails, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cypress Hill, Alice in Chains, Henry Rollins--take their inspiration not from the "peace and love" communalism of Woodstock '69, but from the in-your-face nihilism of punk. But commercialization is not the main reason for this change. Granted, the tacky excesses of disco and metal fed profits to a bloated and arrogant record industry. But punk rock, which emerged not from the mainstream, but from the fringes of the art world, was (and is) intensely anti-commercial. The British punk [Cont. WOODSTOCK, C5, col. 1] band the Sex Pistols spat in the faces of record company executives. And today, punk-inspired performers such as the late Kurt Cobain proclaim loudly that stardom and riches are death to the true spirit of rock-and-roll. The chief legacy of punk is a drastic change in what we mean by rock-and-roll. To older people, the words still refer to the music of the 1950s: rockabilly, rhythm & blues, doo- wop. In the fine old tradition of commercialized popular music, the original rock-and-roll- ers were out to make a buck, plain and simple. Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley shocked white southerners by blending country music (dominated by whites) with rhythm & blues (dominated by blacks). And the uninhibited body language that they shared with Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard shocked northern guardians of propriety. But, for all their wildness, none of these young men (three of whom were Pentecostal Christians) considered shock an end in itself. And even today, their generation has little use for what the post-post generation means by rock-and-roll: left-wing anarchism, cultural nihilism and arty self-consciousness about the subversive potential of popular culture. Most members of the Woodstock generation are baffled by this change of definition--and by punk rock. On the one hand, they are repelled by the assaultive sounds and abusive lyrics of such punk-inspired musical forms as hard-core rock, grunge rock and gangsta rap. On the other hand, their memories of protest make it hard for them to reject any form of music that fulminates against "the system." In a nutshell, today's fortysomethings are hung up on the second Woodstock myth: That the music of the 1960s drew its power from that generation's political and cultural radicalism. THAT is not the way it worked. To be sure, good music is sometimes about protest. In the labor movement of the 1930s, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, protest songs told stories, rallied the troops and (sometimes) chastened hostile authorities. But significantly, neither of these movements actually created much music. Some protest songs, such as those written by Woody Guthrie, are original. But the usual approach is to borrow music already well known to the rank and file, and to change the words. Thus, labor activists took country blues and Appalachian ballads, adding lyrics calling for a decent wage (and sometimes victory in the class struggle); and civil rights activists took spirituals and gospel songs, adding lyrics calling for racial justice and freedom. Such borrowing permeated Woodstock. Indeed, most of the performers on that famous roster--Joan Baez, the Band, Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, Santana, Sly & the Family Stone, Johnny Winter and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young--were steeped in older forms such as country blues, talking blues, close-harmony gospel (black and white), bluegrass, rockabilly and even Latin jazz. One of the highlights of Woodstock, Country Joe and the Fish's rousing antiwar anthem, "Feel- Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die," was in the classic protest mold: a borrowed version of the Dixieland standard, "Muskrat Ramble," with topical lyrics added. There's nothing wrong with all this borrowing; new words have been fitted to old songs since time immemorial. But it's important to note that borrowing can produce mismatches. In the case of Woodstock, there was an incipient mismatch between the music the borrowers loved and the protests they led. The music contained a lot of positive, even jubilant, energy--which was fine as long as the protests re- mained positive and idealistic. Or even sardonic, in the manner of Country Joe's seemingly carefree lyric: "Open up the pearly gates/Ain't no time to wonder why/We're all going to die." Today, however, Country Joe isn't remembered for singing a song with a venerable ped- igree, but for exhorting the Woodstock crowd to shout the F-word in unison. It is that spectacle, and not all the rich musicianship on display, that truly marks the year. For by 1969, the political radicalism of the New Left was veering into extremism and the cultural radicalism of 'Flower power" was souring into self-destructive hedonism. Positive, jubilant music was no longer a match for the prevailing mood of the counterculture. Something else was needed. Actually, that something was present at Woodstock. As the Monday morning sun rose on the drug-besotted stragglers, the hard rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix took the stage and played the "Star Spangled Banner" in a way that was neither positive nor jubilant but did, as British writer Charles Murray later described it, perfectly capture the moment: "He begins to play the tune--one which every American has heard several thousand times. Or rather, he tries to play it, but somehow it gets ambushed along the way. That clear, pure tone--somewhere between a trumpet and a high, pealing bell--is continually invaded by ghostly rogue overtones; the stately unreeling of the melody derailed by the sounds of riot and war, sirens and screams, chaos and alarm . . . . Time and again, the rich clean statement of the melody would resurface, a proudly waving flag standing above the melee, and time and again . . . the feedback and distortion ate into the melody like ac- id, corroding everything it did not consume." Hendrix could capture this moment only because he too was steeped in an older form of music. From the blues, he had learned about rhythm, about understatement, and, most important, about disciplining every sound that came out of his instrument, no matter how eerie or harsh. Ironically, these qualities are what made Hendrix's performance unique. The other hard rock acts at Woodstock, the ones considered most "progressive" were those that most prefigured the musical decay of heavy metal: Janis Joplin, with her screeched vocals; the Who, with their sludgy rhythms; and Ten Years After, with their empty guitar virtuosity. A few months after Woodstock, Hendrix declared that he was turning away from hard rock because it was becoming "too heavy, almost to the state of unbearable." It is revealing that when he died of a drug overdose in 1970, no one played hard rock at his funeral. Instead, a friend of the family sang spirituals with a gospel accompaniment; a Baptist choir sang "When the Saints Go Marching In"; and, at the reception after the service, British and American musicians jammed in the spirit of a New Orleans funeral. Perhaps on that occasion, Hendrix found relief from unbearable heaviness. NOT so the heirs of the third Woodstock myth: that the 1960s was an extraordinarily creative time, both in politics and in music. For all those born too late for Woodstock, this myth looms painfully large. So large, in fact, that most younger people can barely conceive that good music could exist prior to, or independent of, the radical political and cultural agenda of the dying 1960s. But it can. And what's more, a lot of America's greatest music was created not for protest, but (dare we say it?) for profit. Since Woodstock, the real damage to our music has been done, not by commercialization, but by the increasingly dysfunctional idea that music cannot be valuable unless it is "dangerous." --------------------- END ---------------------------------------------