Spare me the peace and love mythology of Woodstock – there’s nothing more phony than a festival Julie Burchill *****
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/17/spare-peace-love-mythology-woodstock-nothing-phoney-festival/
It was fifty years ago this week that Woodstock stopped the Vietnam War and ushered in a new era of peace, love and understanding – sorry, that should read when 400,000 hippies sat in mud sharing one toilet for every 800 people like a bunch of huge overgrown toddlers staging a dirty protest. They had turned their backs on conventional society but when it turned out that they couldn’t even feed themselves, the ladies of the local Jewish community centre prepared 30,000 sandwiches which were handed out by local nuns.
Despite their railing against authority, more than 300 off-duty policemen were drafted in to keep order along with several hundred State Troopers and personnel from a nearby airport base to airlift the precious performers. One hopes they were being paid more than the onsite workers who were on a miserable $1.60 per hour minimum wage compared to, say, Santana, who were getting $2,000 per hour.
But at least none of them were amongst the three deaths that occurred including a man run over in his sleeping bag by a never-identified tractor driver and an 18-year-old Marine who had survived Vietnam but overdosed on some of the nasty drugs circulating, many of which were laced with rat poison.
As Jon Snow famously observed of a Brexit rally, you’ve “never seen so many white people in one place”. Clever Joni Mitchell wasn’t among them, despite having been one of only three female acts booked. Put off by both the mud and the fear that she wouldn’t make it back to Manhattan in time to promote herself on a primetime chat show, she sensibly gave it a miss and wrote the soppy song Woodstock in her manager’s cosy apartment instead. Not so much “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” as “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the Green Room”.
I myself have swerved as many festivals as humanly possible; in fact the last time I attended one as a punter rather than a performer was as a teenager when I was sent to the Reading Festival by my then-employers, the New Musical Express, as a punishment for being cheeky to my elders and wetters around the office.
I was no sooner inside the shabby parameters than one of my vintage stiletto shoes sank into the mud and was totally ruined; taking this as A Sign, I turned around, took the train back to London and made the entire review up. How I hugged myself when a credulous colleague told me that my write-up was so atmospheric he could smell the crowd! So could I, the dirty beggars, and I’d only been there for ten minutes.
Ever since then the word festival has always had the same effect on me as the idea of getting drunk at weekends; here’s a few crumbs of hedonism to see you through another dreary week, suckers! As I’m not by any means high maintenance and was never averse to drug-taking in my youth, I think the real reason I loathe festivals is that they’re phoney.
That seems an odd word to use about sleeping in a field with a load of strangers but as Oscar said, “Being natural is the biggest pose of all.” Like love bites and Maoism, unwashed and dishevelled and dazed and confused can be a charming look on youngsters; for those over 30, it can make you look like you came off your meds too quickly.
I’ve noticed that Remainers now like to drag Brexit into totally unconnected events – pasties, weather, Jade Goody – so I’d like to observe that in Woodstock I genuinely see a metaphor for the EU. A bunch of brainwashed zombies who see themselves as superior beings convincing themselves that they’re making the world a more civilised place when they actually couldn’t survive a long weekend without real people giving them sustenance and security.
Poor Mr Yasgur, the farmer who facilitated this foolishness, was subsequently sued for a great deal of money by his neighbours over damage caused by the festival – but the damage to his own property was far worse, and a year later he was awarded a $50,000 settlement for the near-destruction of his dairy farm. Let this be a warning to us that good fences make good neighbours – and that Utopian enterprises always end up in vulgar wrangles over dirty money.
Comments are closed.
