Woodstock Rising. Tom Wayman
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“Best estimate I heard was half a million,” Edward corrected him. “Don says the crowd was hard to get a fix on. People were arriving and leaving continually.”
Pump placed the knives on the deck and hauled himself to his feet. “So nobody really knows how many —”
“I heard they had to close the fucking freeway to the area, Eddie, because so many people were trying to get there,” Jay persisted. “More than a million would’ve attended if they hadn’t shut down the roads.”
“I don’t dispute that popular music is popular,” Edward retorted. “But music is something that’s bought and sold. The bands weren’t performing for free. Maybe the audience for rock music is even larger than the people merchandising it knew. That doesn’t make Woodstock any challenge to the establishment.”
CS&N were imploring:
Speak out, you got to speak out
Against the madness.
You got to speak your mind
If you dare.
Pump leaned against the porch rail beside Jay. “It’s about beliefs, man. What you believe in.”
“Values,” Jay seconded.
“Values?” his brother jeered. “When did you pay any attention to values?”
“Look around you,” Jay declared. “We’re spending a pleasant evening breaking the law. What we’re doing isn’t hurting anybody. We fight the power by just doing our thing. They can’t arrest everybody.”
“Can’t they?” Edward said.
“If nobody does what they say, they can pass all the laws they want. They can’t control us anymore.”
I marvelled again how the hash didn’t seem to slow the others’ abilities to function. My mind, buoyed in a cocoon woven of gossamer threads, was finding it hard to concentrate on their argument.
“Everything we’ve been rapping about tonight,” Jay said, “protests and busted heads — the big stuff? If people don’t obey, the bad shit won’t go down. What can the Man do? That’s what Woodstock is about.”
Edward sneered. “‘Suppose they gave a war and nobody came,’ is that it?”
“Something like that,” Pump said.
I felt I should contribute to the discussion, but my brain wouldn’t work properly, couldn’t establish contact with the outside world. I tried to clarify my feelings about Woodstock. The event in upper New York State verified for me, as I had mentioned earlier to Edward, that we had become a significant component of the population rather than a minuscule fringe. The excitement I experienced when I read about or saw pictures of Woodstock was like the rush sparked by the Columbia University strike the spring before last, where SDS played a central role. Or by the determination of the protesters at the Democratic National Convention that summer. Or by the San Francisco State strikers last fall. Or when, this year, the ever-expanding opposition to the war resulted in more and larger peace marches. Or when the Harvard strike erupted in April. When People’s Park was occupied in May. Each of these examples of resistance indicated a swelling momentum for change, yet except for Woodstock they involved comparatively few people. By far, most students on a campus or citizens on a street pursued their customary, short-haired, conformity-restricted lives. Woodstock, in contrast, was massive.
Nevertheless, I agreed with Edward that good vibes weren’t about to affect anything. People could put a daisy into the barrel of a National Guardsman’s rifle, like at the Pentagon demonstrations, all they wanted. If the trigger was ever pulled, they’d discover vegetation is no impediment to a bullet. The war would end only when enough people were in the street saying the war was immoral, when significant numbers of GIs refused to fight, when enough potential draftees split for Canada or Sweden so that the White House understood the war was lost on the home front. Of course, this equation hinged on the NLF not being defeated, but to date the insurgents had proven able to hold their own.
“I can’t believe my own brother would believe a lot of hippie-trippy bullshit,” Edward said in a mock-rueful voice. “I expected better from you.” His comment set off a further exchange between the three.
I inventoried what, if anything, was positive about the freak world. The war, I was convinced, was a symptom of deeply rooted disease, a system that depended on processing its own citizens through the meat grinder of school, jobs, debt, and war for the sake of the Great God Profit. The backing of any brutal dictator — in South Vietnam or anywhere in the world — as long as he claimed to be anti-Communist or pro-U.S. investment was a by-product of the meat grinder, of the worship of the dollar. My liking for the hippies was their refusal to be part of these crimes. Whatever their personal contradictions, inconsistencies, and faults, the freaky people wanted something more life-affirming than a chance to mindlessly consume, or an existence based on the pursuit of personal wealth at any cost.
For all my disparaging of the love-peace-and-flowers types, I believed a monument should be erected to the Unknown Hippie: a statue of a young man and young woman in appropriate attire. It took a lot of courage to be the only hippie in your sis-boom-bah high school, or in your red-white-and-blue small town, or to be out on the road passing through unfriendly territory. When I first arrived on the Gold Coast, plenty of restaurants and other businesses would refuse to serve people with long hair. In Orange County, tires were slashed on cars displaying a peace symbol bumper sticker.
Three years later that symbol was flaunted on earrings, belt buckles, chest medallions. Yet the opportunity to safely wear these was a path others had blazed at considerable risk. Obtaining any sort of job remained difficult if your appearance didn’t conform to how people dressed in the ads in Life magazine. Up the road at Disneyland, “hippie-looking” potential customers — men with beards and long hair, or women who were barefoot, beaded, and wearing too-colourful long dresses — still were routinely refused entrance. Crowd shots of happy Disneyland patrons were a feature on the Disney Company’s TV series, and Disney executives wanted only the image of “normal” Americans to be broadcast.
I surfaced momentarily from my hash-induced ruminations to hear CS&N’s counsel:
It’s been a long time coming
It’s going to be a lo-ong
Time gone.
Despite Woodstock, I didn’t want to exaggerate the hippies’ sartorial influence: most people on the street still looked like the date was 1959. The male ideal was to resemble clean-cut FBI recruits, and the female, to present variations of Doris Day — both sexes were garbed like department store mannequins. But visible amid the crowd now — in small numbers, admittedly — were freewheeling tie-dyed, multihued, unisex costumes. Stores had even opened that specialized in such clothing. Beards and beads and earrings on men were still the exception. Each month, however, a few more were discernible in public, just as more alternatives to the close-cropped businessman’s and bureaucrat’s pencil-thin tie and stiff white shirt were evident.
As outcasts, heads could share camaraderie. Hippiedom at its finest was a brotherhood and sisterhood: freaks giving rides to other freaks hitchhiking, freaks letting other freaks crash at their apartments or communal houses, the sharing of whatever you had — food, shelter, drugs. You recognized each other by how you appeared, by the buttons you wore, and you assumed you both agreed on some basic beliefs: opposition to the war, to the draft, to consumerism, to racism, to what Herbert Marcuse down in San Diego had termed a “one-dimensional” existence. You took for granted both of you wanted each day and every night to be as full of energy, beauty, humour, and raunchiness as our music.
In practice, though head acknowledged head on the street, flashed each other the “V” peace sign or the clenched fist of revolt, a spectrum of freakiness existed. Some suburbanite kids were heads only on weekends, or tourists at be-ins and rock concerts. That was okay: none of us had been heads from birth.
I became aware Jay had teleported