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The Monsters Take Off Their Masks
It was hell, Passchendaele with a PA system; and above the mud-drenched trenches of miserable, huddled moshers, the music echoed like mortar fire.
"Where's Perry?" howls the kid outside the artists' enclosure.
"Where the fuck's Perry?"
A few people look round, but nobody pays much attention. A quarter of a century ago, it was the brown acid that did everyone's head in. Today it's anything and everything.
Doug Coupland would be proud of him. Lank hair, flannel shirt, a stained Nirvana T-shirt, the kid is Generation X, or at least a very twisted approximation thereof. A tousled dirty goatee gives him a look of disheveled mischief. His eyes: a burned-out television set.
He starts spinning, arms outstretched like a helicopter, and he's still hollering, "Where's Perry?" The weird thing is, Perry's on the North Stage right now, and if the kid would just stop whirling long enough to look in that direction, he'd see him, cavorting topless in mud-spattered denims through a carnival gathering of fishnet-clad fire-eaters.
There's not much chance of that, though. Losing his balance, the kid cartwheels into the small knot of kids who stand watching him, sending them flying as he lurches into the mud, and now he's lying on his back with the slime squelched in his hair, and his lips are still moving in dumb dismay. "Where's Perry?" And, maybe more important, "What the fuck's he doing here anyway?"
Before it even began, Woodstock 1994 was a contradiction in terms. Perry Farrell at Woodstock '94--well), now you're being ridiculous. In the quarter century that had elapsed since Woodstock's mud-spattered shroud first rose from the grave of an official upstate disaster area, Perry Farrell did more to exorcise the lingering ghosts of the festival than anyone else in recent rock history.
Lollapalooza, the traveling circus Perry inaugurated four years before, which was rampaging through the American South during Woodstock weekend itself, was nothing if not the final proof that the age of the corporate festival was over.
No giant Pepsi banners draped the Lollapalooza stage, nobody could claim that theirs was the official sneaker/ sandwich/condom of the Lollapalooza Generation, and when somebody did try to leap aboard the festival bandwagon, slipping its name into a television commercial, Perry was on to them like a shot.
"You're standing on the stage at the Lollapalooza," ran the proposed Ford Escort commercial, "plugging in on your Marshall amps, the fans are going wild ... and that's just second gear."
Perry's lawyer, Eric Greenspan, told Q magazine that while not disparaging Ford, "Lollapalooza had no intention of looking for a commercial tie-in with anybody, and if wewere, I don't think the Escort would be the right car to associate Lollapalooza with."
It wasn't only the conflict of naked commerce and alternative altruism that Lollapalooza resolved. It ended the age of the static festival, too. Nobody needed to haul their cookies halfway across the country any longer. Now the show came to them, and the welter of mini-paloozas that blossomed in the footsteps of the original festival only confirmed the demise of the old ways. Lollapalooza '94 sold 90 percent of its available tickets, most of them weeks in advance. Even as Woodstock '94 got under way, it had yet to pass 60 percent; even as the gates opened on the first morning, Woodstock augered forebodingly.
Michael Lang, John Roberts, and Joel Rosenman, three of the original festival's organizers, spent five years and $30 million on putting the thing together, calling on the cream of modern rock and Woodstock survivors alike to perform.
But still everyone said that it couldn't be done, that trying to rekindle the twenty-five-year-old flames of a sensation that wasn't that sensational to begin with was a pipe dream at best, a perversion at worst, a disaster area waiting to happen. The show's own participants acknowledged that the only thing Woodstock '94 had in common with its historical counterpart was the fact that neither show was actually held in Woodstock. That, and an absolutely stellar lineup.
The team pulled off some sensational coups. They persuaded Bob Dylan to perform at the festival he had so famously snubbed twenty-five years earlier. Peter Gabriel, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blind Melon, Primus, Green Day, the Rollins Band--the list of attractions encompassed the musical spectrum. Joe Cocker, Country Joe McDonald, Aero-smith, the Band ... and Perry Farrell's Porno for Pyros.
Roberts, the Block Drugs pharmaceutical heir who bankrolled the 1969 Woodstock, had worked with Perry in the past, promoting a few Jane's Addiction shows. "He's a nice guy," Perry affirmed. "So we did it."
The first day, Friday, August 12, continued uneventful, unexciting. All across the campsite, there was a stilted sense of overachievement, and in the press tent, you could hear the first murmurings of that most ghastly question, born of sluggish ticket sales but reinforced by the rigors of actually reaching the festival site ... . What if they threw a Woodstock and nobody came? It wouldn't be the first time, after all. Five years earlier, the twentieth anniversary of this venerable granddaddy of American festivals also passed off unnoticed, unremembered.
Would 1994 suffer the same sorry fate, memorialized only in a landfill full of undrunk commemorative Pepsi cans, unsold $135 tickets, unwanted concert recordings and video souvenirs? With Live and James the best-known bands on the first day's bill, and Blues Traveler eclipsing even the Spin Doctors' challenge for the luckless role of the new order's Sha Na Na, what loss would it have been?
Saturday brought the rain, and with it the crowds. Around 190,000 paying customers witnessed the first out-sized droplets of rain which fell, just as Ireland's Cranberries came out onstage. Almost twice that many, most of whom cheerfully bucked the exorbitant ticket prices and simply crashed their way in to the festival grounds, remained to witness Sunday's incandescent conclusion. Throughout it all, wallowing in a mire that clung to hair and clothes with the urgency of a virus, they put their entire lives on hold, as though simply being there, amidst the muck, mud, and music, was enough.
Suddenly Woodstock took on a new meaning for them all, soaring out of the dust of a tired, ancient touchstone, shaking off the shackles of its disreputable hippie past, and dancing anew, celebrating afresh. As the slime caked their bodies, it obscured the memories, too, of the twelve-hour queues and deep-sixed bathrooms, the blanket ban on bringing even the bare essentials of life into the campground, all the petty rules and regulations that were foisted upon the weekend, until all that remained was the music.
The music, the mayhem, and the appalling odor of several hundred thousand very wet, largely unwashed people crammed together into one seething mass.
Woodstock'94 worked for the same reasons Woodstock '69 worked. Because the people who were there made sure it did, and for one weekend spent rolling in mud, they would have a lifetime of memories to keep in their trunk.
Sunday began much as Saturday ended, with the sheets of rain that transformed the air itself into a shimmering haze, barely even breathable without an Aqua-Lung to hand. Saugerties was on the verge of being redefined as a lake. If the audience--already rechristened a bunch of "miserable muddy fuckheads" by a miserable, muddy Trent Reznor--even noticed, only a handful of early departures appeared to show it. They were only leaving because they needed to get to work the next morning, "and it's a helluva...
