Rock and Hard Places (27 page)

A rock festival also represents, for all its pretensions to equality and brotherhood, a brutally stratified class system. Try the stuff about how we’re all one, man, on the bouncer keeping the riffraff out of the backstage enclosures (where, I can assure you, nobody expects the corporate freeloaders to endure the indignity of non-flushing toilets; those are strictly for paying customers). A person who spends money on festival tickets is contributing their small but infuriating bit towards hauling us back to an age of sun-worship and witch-burning. If you think I exaggerate, read on. Woodstock II was the nearest thing to a post-apocalyptic society I ever wish to visit.

When I try to be charitable about festivals, I wonder if maybe they subconsciously represent a pure, if misguided, attempt to expiate the guilt about the comfort and security that we enjoy on a harsh, chaotic, unforgiving planet. Maybe, much like the Filipino Jesus freaks who volunteer to be nailed to crosses at Easter that they may feel the pain of Christ, millions of privileged citizens of the first world spend money to endure weekends in conditions that, if foisted on ragged-trousered, soggy-socked foreigners, would instead see them buying charity records and/or demanding that the UN send soldiers to do something about it. Perhaps festivals are, at a subliminal level, a message of solidarity and hope to the wretched of the world: to the refugee who may happen across coverage of such an event on his dung-powered satellite dish, and think, “Wow. Well, I also live in a tent, subsist on awful food, suffer oppressive proximity to hordes of malodorous crackpots, and have to crap in a pit. But at least I can’t hear The Stereophonics.”

The simplest explanation that fits the facts, of course, is that every person who voluntarily attends a rock festival is completely off their trolley. On that front, any reader who gets as far as the first paragraph of the ensuing dispatch may find themselves wondering if the author hasn’t a case to answer as regards his own sanity, with specific regard to his apparent bonhomie vis-à-vis The Cranberries. It does require a degree of contextualising. I had followed them to Woodstock at the behest of long-expired British music monthly
Vox
, on the grounds that I’d been faintly partial, at this early stage in their career, to The Cranberries’ pastoral folk-pop noodlings. I had been a quarter of the crowd at their first London show, and once travelled to the Scottish town of Wick to watch them play in front of of 27 people at an arts and poetry festival.

Back then, however, their music possessed a certain winsome charm and Dolores O’Riordan actually sang—which she was very good at—as opposed
to squawking like a territorially aggrieved corncrake, which is what she has largely done in the years since. Granted, by the time of Woodstock ‘94, The Cranberries had released “Zombie”—their ham-fisted, if well-meaning, analysis of the Northern Irish question, with its TANKS and its BOMBS and its BOMBS and its GONNS—but they were still a way off perpetrating the truly fearful
To The Faithful Departed
album, which is without much doubt one of the very worst records ever made. Seriously, look the lyrics up online, after first disabling your browser’s bad rhyme blocker. Scan through “I Just Shot John Lennon,” or any of the songs about Bosnia, and just try to imagine how the earlier drafts must have read.

Anyway. Woodstock II. The horror. The horror.

THE RAIN STARTS gently, pattering on the roof of The Cranberries’ dressing trailer like polite applause. There are a few half-guilty glances and giggles as Dolores O’Riordan and her band realise how perfectly they’ve timed things. They were the first band to play on this ominously overcast Saturday, and now they’re free to make their escape. As they congratulate themselves and commiserate with us, the rain builds to a thunderous ovation.

“Here,” says Fergal Lawler, proferring a leftover bottle of red wine. “You’re going to need it.”

 

THERE HAVE BEEN better-organised car accidents and less self-important Soviet funerals. We’ve only been at Woodstock ’94 a matter of hours when it dawns on us that we may be witnessing—nay, actually participating in—the greatest American fiasco since the Bay of Pigs.

Back down in New York City the previous day, the usually mercilessly cheerful television weather forecasters could not have appeared more grim if they’d delivered their reports dressed in hooded robes and carrying scythes. So apocalyptic were their predictions for the Woodstock weekend that I’d been apprehensive about venturing upstate without several cubits of oak, and manuals on elementary boat construction and animal husbandry.

I had tried to reason with my travelling companions, Vicki Bruce of Island records and
Vox
photographer Ed Sirrs. I pointed out that we were
comfortably ensconced in a fine hotel on Park Avenue, that Woodstock ’94 was going to be broadcast live on pay-per-view television, that we could cover the event just as thoroughly while staying dry, clean and within walking distance of the bars and restaurants of Manhattan and if they didn’t tell anyone, neither would I. They didn’t listen. They thought I was joking.

And so we join the 300,000 befuddled souls gathered in these New York state paddocks. We are being rained on, pissed about, ripped off, spattered with slime and generally tormented like no other assembly in human history, with the arguable exception of General Haig’s 4th Army, and at least the footsoldiers freezing in the trenches of the Somme had been able to get a drink, and hadn’t had to listen to Del Amitri.

For no, we cannot get a drink. There is no alcohol available on site. Indeed, in the backstage press tent, we cannot even get a cup of coffee. Americans, while admittedly useful to have around if you’re trying to liberate a continent, are the last people you should call if you’re trying to organise a party. I’ve had more fun in Sweden. It would take a leaky press tent full of mutinously muddy, bored, annoyed and sober journalists three days to list everything that is wrong with Woodstock ’94, and speaking as one of those journalists, I can report that our deliberations are exhaustive. In fact, the only area in which Woodstock ’94 lives up to its declared ambitions of, like, bringing people together as one, man, is the manner in which scores of personal and professional British media rivalries are forgotten in the cause of a good self-pitying whinge. “This is hell, isn’t it?” announces one damp British writer to the assembled hackery, huddled in the press tent, our chairs sinking slowly but inexorably into the mud. “Utter fucking hell.”

There are jails which permit their inmates to get away with more than organisers allow the punters at this crazy, zany homage to the anarchic, devil-may-care, do-what-thou-wilt spirit of the original Woodstock. We are not allowed take our own food onto the site (well, the concession-holders jacking their prices a hundred percent and more over the odds are only trying to make a living). We may not spend US dollars (greenbacks have to be converted for festival scrip, the reason for which is a mystery to everyone). We are strictly forbidden tent pegs. At a festival at which tens of thousands have arrived expecting to camp out, this last edict verges on genius.

It’s only Saturday afternoon. It’s going to get so much worse. We can tell. The rain is now hammering against the tent with all the ferocity of a vengeful God and, it has to be said, he’d have every excuse. Out in the fields in front of the stages, humanity is returning, literally and spiritually, to the primeval ooze.

 

THE MUSIC ON the Saturday commences with a set by Joe Cocker, a veteran of the original Woodstock. He’s touting the same act that he has been for thirty years, which is to say he still looks and sounds like he’s shat himself and it’s running down one leg. The crowd go mad, but Americans will clap at anything. Baseball, for example. As Cocker delivers “With A Little Help From My Friends” like it’s being forced out of him with thumbscrews, I traverse the swamp to Woodstock’s other stage.

Things here are, if anything, worse. I hadn’t been expecting great things from Woodstock on a musical level, but nothing had prepared me for the horror of Zucchero in full flight. Zucchero is Italy’s idea of a pop star, which explains why Italy, over the years, has been to rock’n’roll roughly what Rwanda has to package holidays. Zucchero resembles nothing so much as a drunk Albanian taxi driver in the process of emptying a karaoke bar. He is followed by Youssou N’Dour, today’s token world music artiste, who is something of a stranger to Mr. Tune, and then The Band, or part thereof. They play for a week, then bring on someone from The Grateful Dead, and play for another month.

With blood beginning to collect on my palms and visions of St. Francis dancing in my eyes, I strike out for the press tent, hoping to reach sanctuary before night falls and jackals begin emerging from their lairs to pick off the fallen and unwary. By now, the walk from the South Stage to the backstage area is at best ankle deep, and at worst capable of swallowing troops, horses and cannons. On the liquefying hills and slopes along the way, those who have surrendered to the conditions hold mud toboggan races on stretchers stolen from the medical tents. Gangs of mud-covered vigilantes roam the site looking for clean newcomers to haul forcibly into the slime.

One forlorn form, naked but for a pair of shorts and an all-over suit of steaming slime, totters around in the downpour clutching a smudging, hand-written sign that reads “I Want Drugs.” Alone in the middle of
a vast mud lake, a drenched youth sits in a half-submerged deckchair, cradling a sodden hardback book, having clearly plumbed Colonel Kurtz-like depths of dementia. Woodstock now looks like the set of one of those nuclear armageddon films that were so big in the 80s, and I am walking through a crowd scene from the day after the bomb.

In the press tent, the atmosphere is souring further. Two distinct, mutually hostile camps have formed: i) the British media; ii) everyone else. The festival organisers think we’re being a bit hard to please. “You have things like this in England, don’t you?” asks one. “Yes,” replies the journalist, without lifting his head out of his hands. “But with the one crucial difference that ours are, in some respects, any fun at all.” The American media, meanwhile, charge around us foreign types, waving television cameras and tape recorders, asking us What We Think It All Means. “It’s a bunch of bands playing in a field, it happens all the time in Europe, it doesn’t mean anything,” is one common response. “Piss off,” is another.

Almost excitingly, from an Australian perspective, among the visiting press is Ian “Molly” Meldrum. Meldrum spent the 70s and 80s hosting a television rock programme called
Countdown
, on which he mumbled a great deal, crawled like a millipede cowering from sniper fire to anybody foreign or famous who deigned to turn up, and promoted a succession of desperately witless local acts.
Countdown
is often recalled with fondness by people who grew up in Australia during this time, in much the same way that people will, a few years down the road, laugh about a night in the cells. Call me humourless, but I don’t think the man who delivered fame, however fleeting and local, to (for example) Kids In The Kitchen, Pseudo Echo, The Uncanny X-Men and Indecent Obsession at the expense of (say) The Go-Betweens, The Triffids, Ed Kuepper and The Hummingbirds should get off quite so lightly. The thought of seizing his trademark cowboy hat and tramping it into the mud occurs to me, as does the idea of kicking away the crutches with which he’s walking today. But no. He’s here, and he’s him, and between them that’s punishment enough.

Outside, the music is degenerating as fast as the weather. The North Stage hosts tedious crusties Blind Melon, tedious weightlifter Henry Rollins and tedious nobody Melissa Etheridge. These acts are introduced by a ridiculous bullshitter in a tie-dyed t-shirt who
spouts interminable cosmic drivel about how we’re all “beautiful” and “making history, man.” History is what he’ll be if he comes within chair-throwing range of the press tent. I realise that, all things considered, I’m quite looking forward to Crosby, Stills & Nash, which is a new experience.

The only act to properly sum up the squalor of the weekend are Nine Inch Nails, who address the crowd, with commendable accuracy, as “miserable, muddy fuckheads.” Reznor and company are plastered from head to foot in brown goo after a pre-show punch-up, and are a welcome torrent of cleansing venom. Their triumphantly misanthropic set ends with “Head Like A Hole” and a comprehensive demolition of their equipment. After that, Metallica’s gruff barking, pointless widdly-widdly soloing and dim macho posing is only ever going to look a bit daft, and does. We beat a retreat to the strains of redoubtable heavy metal pantomime queens Aerosmith. How we chuckle at “Walk This Way” as we blunder through the dark, damp undergrowth in search of our car.

 

IT RAINS ALL night. The swimming pool in the middle of Pollace’s Crystal Palace Resort in Catskill bursts its banks at about two. Me, Ed and Vicki sit on the porch behind one of our villas and drink too much. Pollace’s Crystal Palace Resort is a kind of Italian-American Butlin’s, a couple of dozen white weatherboard villas clustered around a tatty mermaid’s grotto constructed of theatrical maché rocks and artificial waterfalls. The clientele, aside from us, consists of Italian-American families who each have a dozen wheelchair-bound grandparents and a thousand screaming children. The decor of the reception area resembles the plunder of inept archaeologists who’ve excavated a Bulgarian discotheque.